The City Commission unanimously approved last month the hiring of part time Aides for the Commissioners and Mayor. The position will greatly assist your elected officials in researching, responding, organizing events, among numerous other tasks assign to them. Some Aides may be attending events on behalf of an elected official when the inevitable conflicts within a schedule occur.
Most of the Commissioners have already hired their Aide, and recently Mayor Richard J. Kaplan, hired Clark Stephens as the Mayor's Aide. Clark is working towards his Masters Degree in Urban and Regional Planning from FAU, and holds a 3.79 GPA. He is also working as a Research Assistant with the Collins Research Center, handling numerous tasks, including assisting in creating a list of Community Development Centers to assist people with affordable housing initiatives, and performing analysis of the housing market in South Florida.
The Mayor is expecting to assign to Clark several projects, including two year end special events, working on developing a Community Land Trust, and a long range plan to secure an international festival to be headquartered at the new Central Lauderhill Regional Park.
For now, communications will be through Mayor Kaplan, though eventually, residents will be in direct communication with Clark on their issues when assigned by the Mayor to help expedite matters.
4 comments:
This young man looks a bit like a youthful John F. Kennedy and brings back memories. We hope and trust that he will be an asset to those he assists and will learn much which is not taught in classrooms.
Perhaps City Hall Department of Building Permits could use a few aides. We are told that engineers, Hollee and her assistant, Greg, of the Rolyns Corporation of Rockville, Maryland, visited City Hall on May 24, 2006 to ascertain why permits allowing reconstruction of Stonebridge Gardens on 55 Avenue have not been issued to them. No answers were given other than the "Duh?" variety and, of course, no promises made as to when, after nearly eight months of mouldering, these buildings will be given a green light for restoration.
Second nomination for hiring an intelligent aide would be those housing officials of Lauderhill who have ordered Stonebridge Gardens to kick squatters out of Stonebridge units. Yeh, they shouldn't be living in such a place under such conditions. The problem is that no one, they tell me, knows who these squatters ARE or exactly what units they inhabit. It is the concensus of opinion that, if it was the Lauderhill Fire Department which red tagged all buildings last Halloween and ordered inhabitants out, that the Fire Department take charge of enforcing it's own order rather than requesting civilians or vigilanties to so for authorities. A very interesting story, this business, and getting better by the month....
Malcolm
I feel that my Aide will be a great help, and has already been assigned several project to work on. As far as permits, I am still be told that permitting is with 3 to 10 days (most under 7), once applications are filed. If longer you are being advised longer than that I would like to know who is telling you that.
The resident's are expressing frustration and anger with the length of time it seems to be taking to pull the permits with the City of Lauderhill. In my phone conversation with Roberta Schwartz, I explained to her that all of the applications for both roofing and interiors were submitted accordingly and that we received a response back from the City outlining specific items that are being required to receive our permits, such as engineering drawings, etc. I also told her that we were working with the appropriate entities (engineering firms, asbestos abatement firms, etc.) to get the required documentation as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, I am not able to give Roberta and the residents a firm timeline on when we anticipate having all of our documentation but that it is forthcoming and that workers would be onsite as soon as we receive our permits. It is the resident's perception that we are taking our time and not hurrying through the documentation process. I explained to Roberta that was not true and that we were working diligently to provide any and all documentation so that we could move forward with construction.
H., saw the post and I'm not blaming you for anything. I know, from personal
observation, how you and Gregg have been running around trying to get
things together. My beef is with the City; in my view, they have been
giving us the run-around. They could have, at the outset, given you a
complete set of the requirements, instead of repeatedly coming up with
new ones, as it seems to me that they have been doing. Whenever I hear
a complaint from a unit owner at Stonebridge Gardens (I hesitate to call them residents), I
remind them that they re-elected Kaplan.
Stephen
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