Dateline Palm Beach: The more things change … | Pat Beall
So: New?
Trick question! I roused from a months-long, news-free nap to find everything barreling to Hades in a handbasket, as my Texas grandaddy used to say of FDR, Harry, Ike, Lyndon and beyond.
Lord knows what he would have made of the goings-on in my little slice of South Florida paradise.
Over in Boynton Beach, annexation fever struck, and city officials are lusting after 38 municipalities, many of them wealthy and not all of them open to courtship. Undaunted, the city has dusted off years-old agreements, tying the communities’ tap water to forced annexation. Can a shotgun wedding be far behind?
To the north in Lake Worth Beach, where “Keep Lake Worth Weird” was a campaign slogan this March and an election flyer featured people who appeared to be publicly overdosing, there seems to be an emerging sentiment that with enough Palm Beach County deputies, the city can arrest its way out of its drug problem.
(Pro tip, Lake Worth: That did not work in 2016 for Palm Beach County. It’s not going to work now. But Lake Worth’s gonna Lake Worth.)
Speaking of drugs, which no one in Palm Beach County is doing nearly enough of given our continuing pole position among all other Florida counties in deaths tied to heroin, cocaine, morphine, fentanyl analogs and oxycodone, the next bad thing has put in a local appearance at South Bay Correctional.
Medical examiner records show a 27-year-old inmate died in November after taking N,N-dimethylpentylone, a drug so new it doesn’t even have a street name. At the time, sporadic anecdotal reports indicated the drug might be confined to Jacksonville nightclubs and a Lee County jail. Now it’s here.
On the money front, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s nearly $1 billion budget was once again blessed by county commissioners, though once again, the budget summary doesn’t have nearly the kind of detailed explanatory footnotes a taxpayer might want to see in, say, any other governmental budget anywhere from anyone in any agency.
Or maybe that’s just me.
As for the local crime that the sheriff’s cash will fight; well, the numbers are so glitchy I suppose it depends on who you ask, but in an industrial park abutting pastureland across the Atlantic in England, some overseas techies have been ginning up scary email listicles warning that West Palm Beach is one of the most dangerous cities in Florida.
They used sketchy numbers, but sad math is all the rage in our newly state-tuition-supported private schools, including this morsel: A total of 66 Palm Beach County private schools accepting state money reported no accreditation to the Florida Department of Education, according to DOE records. But then, two offering elementary school classes reported no students.
No worries: “You don’t even have to let us know what curriculum you are following,” one school website advised local parents.
It’s enough to make a girl want to roll over and go back to sleep.
On the other hand, Town Hall in Cloud Lake (population 135) has a shiny new tin roof, nudging it ahead of neighboring Glen Ridge (population 215) in the competition for coolest municipality among Palm Beach County tiny towns.
True, Glen Ridgians have a fountain.
But we Cloudsters have an alligator.
Vanderbilt University is considering a West Palm campus. The search for an FAU president is back on, and it only took nine months, the resignation of the chair of FAU’s Board of Trustees, an investigation by the attorney general and unexpected fireworks between shadow candidate Randy Fine and the governor.
Palm Beach mega-author James Patterson, who has been throwing cash at independent bookstores, this month published an ode to those on the front lines of this year’s war on thinking: “The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians.”
And an insurance agent didn’t slam the phone on me last week when I inquired about homeowners’ insurance.
How bad can things possibly be?
Pat Beall is a Sun Sentinel columnist. Her column appears on Wednesdays.