Yesterday I received a tip to listen to the final 45 minutes or so of last Wednesday night’s North Miami Beach Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) Special Meeting specifically to hear Councilwoman Phyllis Smith bloviate in her very special way.

As an aside, FYI, when sitting on the board of the CRA, the City Council members get to take off their council hat and become CRA Commissioners.  You might need to know this if the question ever pops up in a game of Trivial Pursuit.  I’m just saying.

On the agenda was the discussion of a piece of property for sale on NE 19th Avenue, which the sellers want to sell to the City for the purpose of building a hotel.  I’m not quite sure what the deal is, but it appears that the city will buy this land from the owners, give them CRA money to build a hotel so that they can run it.

Isn’t that special?

Okay, so here’s the deal.  Say I own a piece of property and I want to build, oh I don’t know, a pet store.  I could simply go to a bank and take out a small business loan and build my pet store and invest in an inventory of four legged critters and go into business.

Or, I could go before the CRA Board of the City of North Miami Beach with hat in hand and say, “I want you to buy my property and then give me the money to build my pet store, get my inventory and set up shop.”

So now the City owns my property.  I don’t have to pay the real estate taxes on it.  That’s the City’s problem.  What’s in it for me?  All I have to worry about is selling my critters, paying my rent to the City, maybe an employee or two, and pay my sales tax.  What’s in it for the City?  Dunno.  If any of you figure it out please fill me in on the deal.

Okay so now where was I?  Oh, yeah, the meeting.

As suggested, I tuned in just as Phyllis was about to make one of her now famous speeches consisting of non-sequiturs and run on sentences.  It was painful to have to constantly stop and start the video, but it was worth the agony to be able to bring to you a practically verbatim account of her words of wisdom.

Without further ado, I present the Grand Bloviator of North Miami Beach addressing the sellers’ attorney Alan Rosenthal.  Here she is in the flesh!  Phyllis SMIIIIIITH!

“In my almost five year career as a politician they always told me there would be some really tough times in my career.  And this is one of them.  Your clients are very hard working honorable and generous to the community people.  But there has been changes to that contract.  I’m doing real estate 34 years.   We as a buyer have an out and we don’t have the money.  By the time we had the original contract, the original contract we were downtown with Sally Heyman trying to get the board to approve last year’s CRA budget and they didn’t.  We have a list of people waiting, not this client, but a list of people waiting for the money that we don’t have because it wasn’t approved.  We have no TIF money left, the way this was the link to our vision in this area with the pool to make this a complex.  Then we found out we can only buy land.  Here we sit now, nobody’s fault, nobody on this commission, because since I’ve been on this commission all we wanted to do is build this hotel subject to, subject to, the economy from six months to today is changing and it’s changing right before our eyes.  So what I’m hearing now that’s what turned me around that’s what’s making my chair the most difficult thing that I’ve done, not THE most but it’s close to it, in this board because if we don’t have the money we can’t agree to pay.  I’ve been selling real estate too long.  If you don’t have the money you can’t agree to pay.  No matter how you clear up the liens and no matter how you come before us and get everything straightened out because I know you thirty, forty years, probably thirty five for sure.  No matter how readily you get this all straightened out if we don’t have the money we can’t pay.”

I swear Phyllis said this all in practically one breath.  I’m pretty sure she was trying to say that the city can’t afford the property.  But, I could be wrong about that.  Can someone please enlighten me?  Does anyone out there speak Phyllis?

There was some back and forth discussion about tax rolls that I barely caught because I was waiting for the next burst of Phyllis to come.  She didn’t disappoint!

Phyllis continued, “So you take it off the tax rolls of twenty one thousand dollars, we had a deal, that’s not the point.  The point is that it’s not anybody’s fault.  The county has not approved us.  We’re sitting up here.  It’s nice that the manager has us back every evening but he stopped serving.  So what we have is that we’re here for no purpose.  We don’t have an approved budget from laaaaaast year.  Forget this year.  So how could we sit up here as a board and vote on anything?”

While the other people in the room are discussing the issue, it occurred to me that it would really be helpful if someone out there has a Phyllis to English dictionary.  Anyone?  Oh, wait, she’s about to speak!

“You know this deal unfortunately was never the intention of this city to buy it subject to the road.  It was the intention of this commission as my every meeting that I sat on to take somebody that wanted money to participate in the making of bettering of North Miami Beach in the CRA district and to get that money to do the project and unfortunately that wasn’t allowed the way we have it written so we hired the attorney to go and get that changed and we still didn’t get that changed.”

Mr. Rosenthal managed to speak just at the rare moment that Phyllis took a breath.  He stated that if his clients has known the money couldn’t be used the way originally intended they would have walked away a long time ago.

Shhhh.  Phyllis again…

“How could we have known?  We didn’t even have a clerk to tell us how many months the vice mayor sits.  Our handle wasn’t on it the way it should have been.”

Commissioner Spiegel was finally given the chance to speak (is that also called The Chair?), and she said, “Mr. Rosenthal, we don’t even have last year’s budget approved.  We have a finite amount of TIF money, and that money is basically gone.  Until the budget gets approved, the other TIF money can’t be spent.”

WOW!  Ms. Spiegel said in two sentences what it took Phyllis almost a half hour to spit out in fits and starts.

OMIGOD!  Now I freaking get it!  They don’t have the freaking money.  Hey, Phyllis!  Why didn’t you just say that?

Mr. Rosenthal made the mistake of saying to Ms. Spiegel that he didn’t think she was correct.

But, not to be upstaged, Phyllis jumped right in and blurted out, “That’s the key that’s very important.  That’s in my chair!  For me!  Because that, uh, we don’t have a budget that’s approved from laaaaast year.”

Unlike Phyllis’ constant need to interject her unasked for opinions, Commissioner Martel politely asked to speak and stated, “The problem is that if we don’t have the budget approved and we have to pay back the money, we don’t have the money and we can’t afford to lose more employees.”

Even though it took three people to say the same exact thing, it finally dawned on Mr. Rosenthal that last year’s budget was never approved and they don’t have the money.  I swear I could see a light bulb going on over his head right at that moment.

Commissioner Derose now had his turn to weigh in, and he stated, “Mr. Bonner just said we have a five million dollar line of credit.  The money is there.  It’s not an issue of whether we can spend it or not.  This money been sitting there for many years.”

The CRA attorney responded by stating something like it’s not a question of whether we can afford to buy the property, but is this an investment that we should make at this time?  There are problems with the property (environmental, asbestos, etc.).  We have a right to terminate the contract and that is what should be the focus.

Of course, this was just the perfect opening for Phyllis to opine, “If the people who own this property currently would have the patience to come back with a different plan because I think that they’ve been put throught the mud and back, and I think that they have really gone beyond what patience should be and they have come to more meetings than most of us and they’re still nowhere.”

Yeah, Phyllis, I certainly feel their pain right about now.

Phyllis went on, “But I think circumstances the whole way around with this transaction sometimes they always say in the business if it’s bad in the beginning it usually is a bad situation and it’s nobody’s fault.  I mean I don’t think that there is anybody you could put a finger on and said that they should have or they shouldn’t have except that the advice to the sellers was from the beginning not something that we as a commission even understood.  Maybe we had the wrong attorney at that time I don’t know.  But I just want to say to you a thousand percent that, um, hopefully we can still be a partnership with these with that property with these people in some respect.”

The Chairman (Mayor) attempted to call the question for a vote, when Phyllis just had to bloviate at the very end of the meeting about something that is “on my mind” and “as far as I’m concerned you’re a thousand percent right” and “if everything is cleared up you can come back to the table” and “there’s been a lot revealed here and it’s down to the nitty gritty”…and some other shit that I’m just not going to listen to and type anymore because it’s just too freaking painful.

The Board FINALLY voted, with five of them agreeing to cancel the contract.

As usual Pierre and Derose voted against the canceling of the contract because the sellers are Haitian.

The Chairman moved to adjourn and the motion was quickly passed before Phyllis had a chance to talk again.

However, it was not to be.  Phyllis stated that she wanted to personally apologize for everything because she just HAD to have the last word even though the meeting was officially over.

Just as the camera was fading, you could hear the City Manager’s voice say, “Why don’t we get together tomorrow night just to practice?”

Yeah, Mr. Bonner.  Let’s.

Stephanie Kienzle
“Spreading the Wealth”