It's Your Money

It was interesting to watch a well known community activist rail on at the June 16 th School Board meeting against the Superintendent spending $15,000 next year televising those meetings. This individual consumes a great deal of his time monitoring County governments and is usually first in line to speak at any televised meeting. The $15,000 needed is less than .0001 of the District’s $150,000,000+ budget, not including the tens of millions in capital funds and reserves they manage. It should also be pointed out that a major portion of this relatively minor expenditure is for government mandated captioning for hearing impaired viewers.

Your Taxpayers’ Association, along with other civic organizations, lobbied for, and when stonewalled by previous Boards, contributed the start up funds to begin this Comcast/MCTV coverage. However, charitable/civic organizations should not have to provide the relatively small amount required to continue this service. Residents and taxpayer’s from the entire County should be able to monitor the spending of nearly half of their local tax revenue by the largest employer in Martin County – and they should be able to do so without having to travel to and spend an entire evening at District Headquarters in downtown Stuart. Also, we believe the benefits from televising the numerous awards and honors earned by our students and staff are alone worth the money.

It was ironic that this School Board meeting could not have provided a better example of why TV coverage is needed. By the time you read this the meeting may be off the channel 20 schedule, but it should be available on the internet at: http://www.martin.fl.us. look under Organizations – MCTV. Reading the minutes of this meeting could never properly convey the problem readily evident in this video. Basically, it boils down to the acrimonious relationship between the Superintendent, her staff and the School Board. We have reported on this before and chided both sides to get over the personal issues that obviously exist. These problems appear to go back to the Superintendent’s former role as a member of the School Board and last year’s election she won against a candidate supported by the retiring Superintendent and some Board members.

Whatever the reasons, the Board seems determined to seize more operational control of the District from the Superintendent. They reduced the dollar amount of the contracts that can be approved by the Superintendent to $10,000 from the long standing $25,000. After the election they renewed the contract of the Assistant Superintendent for three years (normally year-to-year), over her objections, but before she took control. They failed to approve her top financial officer nominee and publicly humiliated the candidate over a problem irrelevant to the discussion of his qualifications. He might or might not have been the best possible candidate, but he was the Superintendent’s choice and, if disapproval was really indicated, given a more appropriate hearing. Also, this was after the previous administration limited the number of available candidates by reducing the salary allowed for the position.

One of the easiest ways to assure failure of any type organization is internal dissention and diverse management objectives. It is certainly possible that the new Superintendent made mistakes that exacerbated the situation(s), or could have done more to prevent confrontation. We do not want to seem prejudiced and DO NOT CARE WHAT PERCENTAGE OF THE FAULT IS WITH THE BOARD OR THE SUPERINTENDENT. However, we cannot stand quietly and let our excellent school system be eroded by internal sniping of those elected to provide the best, most efficient education possible for our children. Again, our message to all: GET OVER IT.

We noticed some good news tucked away on the back pages of the newspaper this week. A Federal Judge has ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers may proceed with the raising of the Tamiami Trail. Why is this good news? Because, without raising the Trail, water cannot flow south from Lake Okeechobee. This in turn requires the damaging discharges of fresh water that is ruining Martin County estuaries.

This news also reminds us of one of the reasons why Everglade’s restoration is so expensive and has taken so long: law suits. Even in this case we read that the Miccosukee Indians will now appeal this ruling because they don’t like it. It seems that more and more of our governments find themselves repeatedly defending against suits in order to accomplish anything. It becomes even more frustrating when one government body sues another since we, the taxpayer, are funding both sides. We see this in the case of the City of Stuart (with Martin County possibly joining) in a suit against the South Florida Water Management Dist and the US Army Corps of Engineers. Some observers say this is like planting a money tree in the lawyers’ back yard.

Politicians and concerned activists should not repeatedly lead, or allow their attorneys to lead them into these lengthy and costly suits. While suing to defend a position is a basic right that cannot be abridged, there are some that repeatedly abuse the process. It occurs to us that those that habitually lose frivolous or baseless lawsuits should be forced to repay the legal costs to the taxpayer. We would hope the local Bar Association could deal with these individuals, but, if not, every effort should be made to find a way to recover the taxpayers’ money.