Above, looking west at Hollywood City Hall, where Tuesday night's very important Hollywood CRA meeting will be held at 6 p.m. September 20, 2011 photo by South Beach Hoosier. © 2012 Hallandale Beach Blog, All Rights Reserved.
re Margaritaville Hollywood Beach Resort - Sara Case of Hollywood's Balance Sheet Blog weighs in on the plausible merits of the City of Hollywood CRA's plan to increase their stake in the project on Johnson Street from $10 million to $23 million; Starwood Capital jumps on board, but why now?
Over the weekend, well-informed Hollywood civic activist and blogger Sara Case posted some thought from her point-of-view on the city's new proposal to stanch the bleeding in the Johnson Street project known as Margaritaville Hollywood Beach Resort and mentions why she, rather counter-intuitively, supports it, despite the large number of CRA dollars involved.
I urge you to read it before Tuesday night's meeting, which I will be at.
September 1, 2012, 4:08 PM
Hollywood residents in need of tax and fee reductions and City employees in need of salary increases …Time to Pay Attention!
As we all know by now, the Margaritaville project has been unable to secure funding from foreign investors as the original plan required. So now we have a new proposal in which the CRA is to give the developer $23 million for construction financing. When I learned of this plan, I initially opposed it as one more boondoggle — a massive developer subsidy like Radius, Hollywood Station, WSG, Great Southern, and Block 55, to name a few.
Read the rest of the post at:
My post on this topic from Friday, August 31st, was titled, Important public forum on the proposed Margaritaville Hollywood Beach Resort is scheduled for Tuesday Sept. 4th at 6 p.m. Chief among topics will be whether the Hollywood CRA should increase their investment in the Lon Tabatchnick project on Johnson Street and the Broadwalk from $10 million to $23 million
Saturday also brought forth this news, which is interesting in ways that I can't get into the details of now, but which I may be able to get into after Tuesday night, depending upon what gets said.
Hollywood’s Margaritaville project gets new funding source
Margaritaville — the $130 million beach resort Hollywood city leaders have been dreaming about for years — has a new funding source: Starwood Capital, the investment group which once financed high-end hotels such as the St. Regis, W, Westin and Sheratons around the globe.
“We now have the necessary funds to complete the project,” developer Lon Tabatchnik said Thursday. “This is what we were waiting for.”
Read the rest of the article at:
After reading the above, you're more than reasonable if you ask whether or not anyone from Starwood Capital Group will be making themselves available for some serious questioning by Hollywood taxpayers at Tuesday night's meeting -besides City Manager Cathy Swanson-Rivenbark, some city staffers and developer Lon Tabatchnick or one of his reps, and, most likely, every single candidate challenging a City Hall incumbent.
Like, well... were they interested in the project much earlier and turn it down because of concerns about some aspect of the overall plan, marketing concept or the strength of the financing, or were they always biding their time in the bushes waiting for Tabatchnick and Company to get desperate enough to finally agree to meet their demands for whatever concession it was they weren't given originally?
It would also be great if someone asked Mr. Tabatchnick, given how over-confident he has appeared to many observers to be, when was the last time that he and his group actually met two of his promises, guarantees or legal deadlines (to the city and its taxpayers) in a row regarding this project?
Isn't that sort of history animating at least some of the opposition in Hollywood to this project getting more CRA funds now?
Yes, it is.
March 21, 2012 CNBC video: Maria Bartiromo interviews Starwood Capital's CEO Barry Sternlicht.
The South Florida I Grew Up In
Excerpts from Joan Didion's Miami, 1987,
Simon & Schuster:
In the continuing opera still called, even by Cubans who have now lived the largest part of their lives in this country,
el exilo, the exile, meetings at private homes in
Miami Beach are seen to have consequences. The actions of individuals are seen to affect events directly. Revolutions and counter-revolutions are framed in the private sector, and the state security apparatus exists exclusively to be enlisted by one or another private player. That this particular political style, indigenous to the Caribbean and to Central America, has now been naturalized in the United States is one reason why, on the flat coastal swamps of
South Florida, where the palmettos once blew over the detritus of a dozen failed booms and the hotels were boarded up six months a year, there has evolved since the early New Year's morning in 1959 when
Fulgencio Batista flew for the last time out of Havana a settlement of considerable interest, not exactly an American city as American cities have until recently been understood but a tropical capital: long on rumor, short on memory, overbuilt on the chimera of runaway money and referring not to New York or Boston or Los Angeles or Atlanta but to Caracas and Mexico, to Havana and to Bogota and to Paris and Madrid. Of American cities
Miami has since 1959 connected only to Washington, which is the peculiarity of both places, and increasingly the warp...
"The general wildness, the eternal labyrinths of waters and marshes, interlocked and apparently neverending; the whole surrounded by interminable swamps... Here I am then in the
Floridas, thought I,"
John James Audobon wrote to the editor of
The Monthly American Journal of Geology and Natural Science during the course of an 1831 foray in the territory then still called the
Floridas. The place came first, and to touch down there is to begin to understand why at least six administations now have found
South Florida so fecund a colony. I never passed through security for a flight to
Miami without experiencing a certain weightlessness, the heightened wariness of having left the developed world for a more fluid atmosphere, one in which the native distrust of extreme possibilities that tended to ground the temperate United States in an obeisance to democratic institutions seemed rooted, if at all, only shallowly.
At the gate for such flights the preferred language was already Spanish. Delays were explained by weather in Panama. The very names of the scheduled destinations suggested a world in which many evangelical inclinations had historically been accomodated, many yearnings toward empire indulged...
In this mood Miami seemed not a city at all but a tale, a romance of the tropics, a kind of waking dream in which any possibility could and would be accomodated...
Hallandale Beach Blog
http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
Hallandale Beach Blog is where I try to inject or otherwise superimpose a degree of accountability, transparency and much-needed insight onto local Broward County government and public policy issues, which I feel is sorely lacking in local media now, despite all the technological advances that have taken place since I grew-up in South Florida in the 1970's. On this blog, I concentrate my energy, enthusiasm, anger, disdain and laser-like attention primarily on the coastal cities of Aventura, Hollywood and Hallandale Beach.
IF you lived in this part of South Florida, you'd ALREADY be in stultifying traffic, be paying higher-than-necessary taxes, and be continually musing about the chronic lack of any real accountability or transparency among not only elected govt. officials, but also of City, County and State employees as well. Collectively, with a few rare exceptions, they couldn't be farther from the sort of strong results-oriented, work-ethic mentality that citizens here deserve and are paying for.
This is particularly true in the town I live in, the City of Hallandale Beach, just north of Aventura and south of Hollywood. There, the Perfect Storm of years of apathy, incompetency and cronyism are all too readily apparent. Sadly for its residents, Hallandale Beach is where even the easily-solved or entirely predictable quality-of-life problems are left to fester for YEARS on end, because of myopia, lack of common sense and the unsatisfactory management and coordination of resources and personnel.
It's a city with tremendous potential because of its terrific location and weather, yet its citizens have become numb to its outrages and screw-ups after years of the worst kind of chronic mismanagement and lack of foresight. On a daily basis, they wake up and see the same old problems again that have never being adequately resolved by the city in a logical and responsible fashion. Instead the city government either closes their eyes and hopes you'll forget the problem, or kicks them -once again- further down the road.
I used to ask myself, and not at all rhetorically, "Where are all the enterprising young reporters who want to show through their own hard work and enterprise, what REAL investigative reporting can produce?"
Hearing no response, I decided to start a blog that could do some of these things, taking the p.o.v. of a reasonable-but-skeptical person seeing the situation for the first time.
Someone who wanted questions answered in a honest and forthright fashion that citizens have the right to expect.
Of cheerleaders past and present
Given South Florida's unique version of the melting pot -con salsa- demographics and mindset, these women in the photo above are surely what most South Floridians would consider attractive women. But for this observer, who's spent hours & hours at IU cheerleader tryouts and who has known dozens of cheerleaders -and wannabes- in North Miami Beach, Bloomington, Evanston and Washington, D.C., the whole time I was watching these members of the Dolphins' squad perform, I couldn't help but compare them and their routines to those of some IU friends of mine who ALWAYS showed true Hoosier spirit & enthusiasm.
Sitting at my table right near the stage and still later, while watching the long lines of Dolphin fans of all ages waiting to snap photos of themselves with the cheerleaders, I couldn't help but think about those friends who always left me and other Hoosier fans feeling positive & optimistic.
Was there anyone I saw in Davie who possessed these valuable intangibles: the dancing precision of IU Red Stepper -and Captain- Gail Amster, my talented and spirited Phi Beta Kappa pal from Deerfield (IL), who always sat next to me in our Telecom. classes as we took turns entertaining the other; the ebullient spirit & energy of two Hoosier cheerleaders -and captains- from Bloomington, Wendy (Mulholland) Moyle & Sara Cox; the hypnotic, Midwestern, girl-next-door sexiness of Hoosier cheerleader Julie Bymaster, from Brownsburg; or, the adorable Southern girl-next-door appeal of former Hoosier Pom squader Jennifer Grimes, of Louisville, always such a clear distraction while sitting underneath the basket?
Nope, not that I could see. But then they were VERY tough acts to follow!!!
And that's not to mention my talented & spirited friends like Denise Andrews of Portage, Jody Kosanovich of Hammond & Linda Ahlbrand of Chesterton, all of whom were dynamic cheerleaders -and captains- at very large Hoosier high schools that were always in the championship mix, with Denise's team winning the Ind. football championship her senior year when she was captain -just like in a movie. That Denise, Jody & Linda all lived on the same dorm floor, just three stories above me at Briscoe Quad our freshman year, was one of the greatest coincidences -and strokes of luck for me!- that I could've ever hoped for.
You could hardly ask for better ambassadors of IU than THESE very smart, sweet and talented women. In a future SBH post, I'll tell the story of one of the greatest Hoosiers I ever met, the aforementioned Wendy Mulholland, the Bloomington-born captain and emotional heart of the great early '80's IU cheerleading squads, and the daughter of Jack Mulholland, IU's former longtime Treasurer. The acorn doesn't fall far from a tree built on a foundation of integrity & community service!
(After he retired, Mr. Mulholland was the first executive director of the Community Foundation of Bloomington and Monroe County. I used to joke with Wendy that her dad's name was the one that was permanently affixed to the bottom of my work-study checks for years, while I worked at the Dept. of Political Science's Library, first, at the Student Building in the old part of campus, and then later, after it was refurbished, in magnificent Woodburn Hall, my favorite building on campus.)
In that future post, I'll share some reflections on Wendy's great strength of character and personality; my intentions of returning to Bloomington a few weeks before Fall '82 classes started, so I could help Wendy train and work-out to rehab her knee, so she'd feel confident in trying-out for the squad again, following a bad knee injury that'd left her physically-unable to try-out for the squad the previous spring, a big disappointment to those of us who cared about both Wendy and the team; my incredulity at, quite literally, running into Wendy while walking down a sidewalk one afternoon a few years later in Evanston, IL, when we were astonished to discover we were both living there, with me trying to hook on with a Windy City advertising agency, and Wendy then-attending Kellogg (KGSM) at Northwestern, right when the WSJ had named Kellogg the #1 Business School in the country.
I'll also share a story about Wendy performing a true act of kindness towards me in 1982, when I was having a real emergency, and she went above-and-beyond what I had any logical reason to expect. Yet, Wendy, along with her very helpful dad, Jack, came through for me when I was in a very bad time crunch. I've never forgotten Wendy's kindness towards me, and her true Hoosier spirit.
There's NOTHING I wouldn't do for Wendy Mulholland.
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