Why was the Lake Worth Sister City Board eliminated? The answer is easy.

Most people agree the City of Lake Worth needs a Sister City program. But for reasons you’ll read about below, few will trust a City board to administer this properly. The way to go now is to have the CRA (LULA Lake Worth Arts) run the Sister City program or maybe even the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County. Why?

Once a City board loses the confidence and
trust of the community, it’s all over.

Before we look at what happened to the Sister City Board let’s go back to 2011: the City of Lake Worth’s “Community Relations Board” (CRB). I knew several members of that board and they were proud of what they were accomplishing. The operative word is “were”. The board was created to address crime in the City and act as way for PBSO and the City Commission to get community and neighborhood input.

But then the board’s mission became something very different: to get PBSO out of the City of Lake Worth.

A man named Panagiotis Evangellos Nasios Tsolkas became the Chair of the CRB and when that happened the only option left was for the City Commission to eliminate the CRB. It all began when a treatise was delivered to all of us from Greece:

“As I write this from the olive-laden
hills of Kalamata. . .”

Mr. Panagioti had quite the résumé:

• Sierra Club, Loxahatchee, ExCom member
• Earth First! Journal, editorial collective
• Everglades Earth First!, agitator
• PBC Environmental Coalition, co-chair
• Night Heron, steering committee member

The Lake Worth Sister City Board.

Back in 2012 another man named Ryan Maier became a member of a City volunteer board: the Sister City Board. He used this experience to later run for commissioner and he did win, becoming the District 4 commissioner in 2013.

The only problem is, none of this was true.

Ryan Maier never attended a Sister City Board meeting.

When former-Commissioner Ryan Maier was appointed the City Commission liaison to the Sister City Board hardly any of the other members would show up and rarely had a quorum. And few from the community would show up either.

Why was the Sister City Board eliminated? Now you know the reason why.