Former town manager Bill Vance’s firing will cost the city $85,829.53 in severance and taxes.

During the town commission meeting Tuesday night, city staff presented its calculations for the amount. Vance, who earned $171,200 per year, was fired without cause in an emergency town commission meeting on Jan. 8. 

He was hired in February 2019, replacing Bud Bentley upon his retirement.

The severance package owed to Vance is 20 weeks of pay [$65,848], his unused vacation time [$11,492.12], medical insurance [$2,572.89] and FICA [$5,916.52]. The amount given to him will have federal income tax, social security and Medicare taxes removed.

In the interim, Linda Connors has been tasked with running the town until a new town manager is hired. She has been with the city since 2011 as its development services director.

During the Jan. 8 meeting, Mayor Chris Vincent said that he was concerned with Vance’s communication, his handling of the budget, his management abilities, and his understanding of the town and its needs.

Vincent also noted that Vance had approached him about adding a clause in his contract to have guaranteed raises. Commissioner Elliot Sokolow was the lone “no” vote in firing Vance, saying he needed more time to think about it and proposed waiting until the commission’s meeting the following week to take a vote.

In March 2020, at Vance’s one-year performance review, the commission voted to give him a seven percent raise. He also received a 4.19 out of 5 score from the commission at that time. 

In 2010, Lauderdale-By-The-Sea fired its town manager and interim town manager in the space of a week. Connie Hoffman stepped up as a second interim town manager, then stayed on permanently until 2016. As the town now searches for a new town manager, she has volunteered her time to help with the transition, Commissioner Edmund Malkoon said.

“We’ve learned in the past when we had a prior separation,” Mayor Chris Vincent said during the meeting. “I think we did our best to avoid what we experienced then and did a phenomenal job and I think we’re going to move forward through this without any issue or concerns.”

After unanimously approving the severance package, the town commission lauded Connors and town staff for stepping up during the sudden staffing change.

“She takes her time. She wants to make the right decision and she’s being very thorough in the recommendations that she brings back to this commission,” Malkoon said of Connors. “Every time I have a question there is an answer.”

Connors responded, saying, “Thank you so much for your faith and I want to mention that it’s not just me – the entire staff has been phenomenal in helping us get through this process.”

Originally published in The New Pelican

Farmers have always given back, but when the COVID-19 pandemic hit Florida in March of 2020, they went the extra mile to serve their communities.

Foodery Farms

After spending eight years developing greenhouses around the U.S., Angela TenBroeck settled on building an urban farm in Jacksonville. She had planned for 2020 to be the year to expand into a hub-and-spoke model for small and medium farms to collaborate. She also won a Florida Blue grant for produce vending machines.

Then COVID-19 hit Florida. And while it stalled her expansion plans, it also created a new opportunity to give back. Talking to her contact at Florida Blue, TenBroeck learned that local food banks and others were in need of fresh produce.

TenBroeck reached out to her farmer network, and soon there were 53 trucks loaded with produce. Volunteers dropped off bags of produce to seniors who were unable to leave their homes, as well as families reliant on school lunches to feed their children. Months later, the “Florida Blue, Farmers and You” program has served more than 120,000 pounds of food to people in seven counties, supplied by local and regional farmers.

“People are getting, for the first time, high-quality, Fresh From Florida, amazing produce right from their neighbors,” TenBroeck says. “It’s given me an opportunity to tell a story about us as farmers and the fact that we want to serve our neighbors.”

TenBroeck isn’t slowing down, though – she’s still working on building her farm, with plans to hire reemerging women, such as those recently released from prison, overcoming addiction or who are part of the LGBTQ community. While she’s not as far along as she originally planned, she’s excited to say they’re still moving along. In fact, they just turned on the power in one of the buildings.

Sam Accursio & Sons Farms

When the pandemic first shut down the state, orders from grocery stores suddenly stopped and pickup dates were pushed. Meanwhile, workers at Sam Accursio’s family farm continued to pick green beans, zucchini and squash. With more than 1 million pounds of produce at risk of going to waste, Accursio had a late-night epiphany.

“I woke up and I said, ‘Let’s just give this produce away at cost. Let’s put it out on Facebook,’ and it was a huge success,” he says. “We never realized how hungry people were for local, safe, fresh, affordable food.”

Folks drove up from the Keys for fresh produce. Some even brought trucks to load up with vegetables to bring back to their neighbors. Accursio estimates he’s given away about 750,000 pounds of vegetables at cost. Additionally, when President Trump visited North Carolina in August, Accursio was able to speak to the president about the needs of farmers.

However, as he’s lauded alongside other farmers who have given back to the community when they needed it most, he feels that they helped him too.

“We haven’t forgotten those consumers that are local that bailed us out of thousands and thousands of pounds of produce that I had already harvested,” he says. “The community really stepped up, and I met a bunch of nice people I never knew existed in my own town.”

R.C. Hatton Farms

In farming, there are ups and downs. But for Paul Allen, he’d never seen a complete shutdown before.

“When we farm and produce food to the scale that we do, we plant every day, cultivate every day, we harvest every day, we ship every day,” the Pahokee farmer explains. “We had nowhere to go with our produce.”

With 12,000 acres of cabbage, green beans, sweet corn and sugar cane, Allen was forced to destroy more than 1 million pounds. It hurt to see so much go to waste. So, he used his voice to speak for farmers via the media. Allen appeared on CNN, NBC, BBC and Fox News, talking about the struggles farmers were facing and how they wanted to help.

“There was a lot of prayer that went into it, I’ll say that, but we had to get the word out to the administration about what was going on because we needed help,” Allen says.

And the outreach worked – people began to buy more produce and the government found a way to connect farmers with groups in need. Florida farmers were even able to help people beyond the region, sending truckloads of produce to the Bahamas and major food banks up the East Coast.

Originally published in Fresh From Florida.

After a lengthy discussion and almost two hours of public comments, the Lauderdale-By-The-Sea Commission voted Tuesday to revisit the future of El Mar Drive in October.

Should a design plan be voted on at that time, construction on the historic street would not begin until April 2023.

“What we heard tonight is . . . the majority, 95 percent of these people don’t understand the project,” said Mayor Chris Vincent. “How we as elected officials can vote to move something that no one understands is like turning deaf ears.”

During the Wednesday night meeting, the commission listened to pre-recorded comments from the public as well as emailed comments that were read aloud, with most wanting the town to “leave El Mar Drive alone” to varying degrees. The street was called everything from “the Champs Elysees of Lauderdale-By-The-Sea” to an “eye sore.”

Vincent, Vice Mayor Buz Oldaker and Commissioner Edmiund Malkoon voted to put off making a decision until the first meeting of October. They felt that officials needed to educate the town further on the design options and that there was no rush to make a decision. However, commissioners Eliott Sokolow and Randy Strauss felt differently, voting to move ahead with a design plan. 

“There appear to be very few advocates – and certainly activist advocates – in favor of anything other than doing nothing and kicking the can down the road,” said Sokolow. “There are a couple, two that I know of, very strong advocates who I believe have been misleading people, have cast aspersions on this commission, have cast aspersions on our design professionals,” he said. “I think it’s time for a lot of us to wake up and make a decision and I think the decision should be to proceed with the design of option one and not kick the can down the road.”

Alex Fenech, the vice president of EDSA, the design firm hired to work on the El Mar project, noted that when those seemingly minor changes of fixing the sidewalks, drainage and lighting are done, it would “trigger a need for a code compliant design,” which the street currently does not abide by. In a presentation, he noted the street has issues such as tripping hazards, deteriorating sidewalks, signage too close to travel lanes, “alligator cracking” in the street, standing water and poor lighting. 

EDSA has provided three designs and recommends option one, which would expand the median from 20 to 22 feet wide while installing 19 truck pull offs. In some areas, the median would have to be deceased to a 16 foot width.The firm created the website lbtselmar.com for the public to see updates on the project, the three design proposals, as well as participate in surveys.

“We don’t want to take away the median, we don’t want to remove the median, that’s not even on the table,” Fenech said.

However, the “Save the Median” movement has taken hold on El Mar Drive, with advocates calling for a fourth option, to simply leave the street alone. They’ve created t-shirts and been vocal opponents of any of the three design options.

Strauss addressed the dozens of comments presented to the commission, saying that while it seems an overwhelming majority don’t want anything done, “there was a ‘but’ following that and the ‘but’ was ‘but fix the sidewalk, but fix the lighting, but do something about the drainage.’”

Added Strauss, “In fact, that’s what this plan is. That’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re not getting rid of the median by proposing this plan. We’re not changing El Mar. El Mar will always be there. We are planning on fixing the sidewalks. We are proposing to add proper lighting. We are proposing to add drainage and that’s what this is about. We’re not changing El Mar, we’re improving what needs to be improved and in improving it it will benefit the town and make it a safer place.”

With the vote, the earliest construction would begin on El Mar Drive is April 2023. Those in favor of revisiting the project this fall noted concerns of what construction would do for businesses struggling during COVID, as well as the fact that the town just fired its town manager last week.

“I still think the community needs a little more time to digest this,” Oldaker said. “I don’t think there’s a full understanding of every aspect of this, why we have to do certain things a certain way if we do them at all.”

Originally published in The New Pelican

January is Human Trafficking Awareness Month, an issue that advocates are working to spread the word about, especially in South Florida.

Broward County ranks second in the state for cases of forced labor and sex work, and Florida is third in the nation for cases.

“People think that this is reserved for a certain type of person, a certain race of person. They think this is reserved for people in a certain socioeconomic situation,” said Jumorrow Johnson, the human trafficking coordinator for the Office of the State Attorney for the 17th Judicial Circuit and president of the Broward Human Trafficking Coalition. 

“People will discriminate, but they don’t understand trafficking doesn’t discriminate,” she said.

In 2019, the Florida Abuse Hotline received 201 calls of suspected sex and labor trafficking of children. After being investigated, 60 were confirmed to be trafficking cases. Most of the suspected cases were “community children” – children living with a parent or guardian.

“We have a lot of community children that are being trafficked, being groomed for trafficking, more so than children in dependent care,” Johnson said.

However, homeless youth who are desperate for stability, food and money do fall into the hands of traffickers. Some of them wind up at Covenant House Florida’s Fort Lauderdale shelter. Since August, 39 cases involved teens who were exposed to exploitation, said Nelson Bogren, the director of compliance and training.

“Youth on the street are particularly vulnerable because they have a lack of protective factors in terms of a stable living environment, adults looking out after them or worrying about them — they are not getting their basic needs met,” he said.

When a trafficker offers financial and emotional stability, as well as shelter, food and the promise of love and affection, it can be very tempting. 

Drugs are also used to make them more compliant and create dependence. LGBTQ youth are especially vulnerable, particularly transgender youth. Parents sometimes kick their children out of the home when they come out and reveal their sexual orientation or gender identity, leaving them to fend for themselves.

From what Bogren has seen, social media has been an effective tool for traffickers. Online, they can pretend to be whoever they want and spend months grooming a teen.

“What’s really happening in Broward County is it’s happening in everybody’s own backyard,” Bogren said. “Most people who are exploited are exploited by somebody they know.”

He encourages parents to look out for drastic changes in their children’s peer groups, unusual secrecy, and owning expensive phones, clothes and accessories that they can’t explain. Parents should be able to access their children’s electronics, while still allowing them to have a sense of independence they need to grow.

While parents are concerned about the safety of their children, adults are also likely to be trafficked. Somy Ali, the founder of No More Tears, a South Florida nonprofit that assists survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking, says almost half of their rescues last year was trafficking victims, mostly adults – and they’re also preyed on through social media. In a recent case, a man met his date in person after chatting for a while on Grindr. However, at their date, he was beat up, drugged and trafficked.

“Meet the person in a public place and feel them out,” Ali suggested for those dating online. “Do a background check. You can pay $20 or $30 and do background checks on people. Look them up, look up their arrest records, you have access to all of that.”

Johnson notes that the number of adults being trafficked is harder to track. There isn’t a streamlined way to count trafficked adults, and since they are of age, law enforcement has to prove coercion and fraud. Meanwhile, sex with a child is always rape.

A hurdle that advocates face when prosecuting traffickers is that the court system is stacked against victims, said Broward Sheriff’s Office Det. Michael Joo of the Strategic Investigations Division. 

Some survivors don’t want to testify against their traffickers who they have trauma-bonded with. 

In one case, they had cell phone records and photos proving a 35-year-old man was trafficking his son’s ex-girlfriend, but because she was in love with him, she would not testify. 

Some survivors are also too traumatized to face their traffickers in court, or they don’t want to relive their story in front of loved ones and face the stigma. Legislation is currently in the works to protect survivors.

“They don’t want to testify in front of their new fiancé, talking about how many times they were forced to have sex with strangers for money in the past,” Joo explained. 

“We’re trying to fight for survivors’ rights in terms of protecting their identity, trying to make it easier for them to be able to testify and empower them. 

Said Joo, “They’ve been victimized enough; there’s no reason why they need to be victimized again.”

Originally published in The New Pelican.

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Organizations to follow

Broward Human Trafficking Coalition 

The organization brings awareness, education and action to Broward County through training, speakers and community events. bhtc.us

Covenant House

A shelter and nonprofit that provides assistance to homeless youth, including survivors of human trafficking. covenanthouse.org

No More Tears

A nonprofit that rescues and helps gets survivors of human trafficking and domestic violence back on their feet. nomoretearsusa.org

South Florida Human Trafficking Task Force

A coalition that rescues and protects victims of human trafficking, prosecutes traffickers, and educates the community. sfhumantraffickingtaskforce.org

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Anti-human trafficking events

Anti-Human Trafficking Virtual Youth Summit on Jan. 9 from 12 to 2:30 p.m. Youth are invite to this summit with keynote speaker and survivor Cyntoia Brown Long, jam session by Stichiz of 103.5 The Beat, and a spoken word performance by Rebecca “Butterfly” Vaughn. Must be younger than 18 and have parental consent to participate. Free. Register at yhts.eventbrite.com.

Protecting Children From Human Trafficking and Child Exploitation Webinar on Jan. 11 from 6 to 7 p.m. Broward County Public Schools presents a webinar to educate parents on the warning signs, myths and stereotypes of human trafficking victims. Join via Microsoft Teams at bit.ly/3nlDCzV or call 754-216-1864, conference ID 967 903 89#.

Survivor Stories on Jan. 14 at 6:30 p.m. No More Tears is hosting a conversation with a survivor of human trafficking to educate the public about the myths and realities of the problem. Visit facebook.com/nomoretearsusa.org for the Facebook Live event.

2nd Annual Interfaith Leaders Human Trafficking Virtual Training on Jan. 26 from 5 to 7 p.m. The training by the South Florida Human Trafficking Task Force will provide information on human trafficking awareness, education, prevention, and resources for survivors. Visit bit.ly/3bf71JG.

Town officials have extended the days residents can record their comments on the El Mar Drive project. On Jan. 12, commissioners will receive the input and make a decision on how the road will be reconfigured.

So far, a handful of people have signed-up to speak at Jarvis Hall on Jan. 4, 1 to 4 p.m.; Jan. 5, 5 to 8 p.m. and Jan. 6, 9 a.m. to noon. Residents who want to give input on Jan. 7, 8 and 11 must make an appointment.

“We’ll do whatever we can to accommodate people who want to make their comments on video,” said Steve d’Oliveira, the town’s public information officer.

Those interested in booking a comment slot should email d’Oliveira at steved@lbts-fl.gov or call 954-640-4209. The recordings are limited to three minutes. Comments can also be emailed to the town clerk at public_comments@lbts-fl.gov and residents can also request to join the Jan. 12 meeting on Zoom.

EDSA, the design firm charged with the project, has made three proposals: converting the road to one lane in each direction with the median ranging from 16 to 22 feet; one lane in each direction and reducing the median to 18 feet; and two lanes in each direction with an eight-foot-wide median. Visit lauderdalebythesea-fl.gov/490/el-mar-drive-streetscape-exhibit for more information on the options.

The firm also has a website, lbtselmar.com, where it regularly posts updates, detailed proposals and results from surveys that went out to the public.

When the firm surveyed the street, it found that the sidewalk needed work and in some areas it didn’t meet the Florida Department of Transportation’s width requirements.

The topic has been a contentious one over the last year.

While all proposals will keep the median, some residents, like Cristie Furth, want a fourth option: leave the median alone and just fix the sidewalk. She has led a “Save the Median” campaign, with t-shirts and video comments which have been viewed at previous meetings.

“We are not crazy about them making a decision until we can get Jarvis Hall open again,” she said of the Jan. 12 meeting. “We’re just asking them to postpone it until we can once again get the residents in Jarvis Hall to do it right.”

Even so, she is encouraging residents to book a time and record their thoughts on the project. That, she said, makes a bigger impact than sending in comments to be read aloud by the town clerk. 

Originally published in The New Pelican