The Lighthouse Point Library is now accepting applications for a six-week vocal and music training program.

The six-week course is for children ages 10 and up who aspire to perform music. Auditions are ongoing and there is a limited amount of space for the program. The course lasts from 6 to 7:30 p.m. beginning Oct. 19 at the library, 2200 NE 38th St.

For more information, call 954-946-6398.

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The nation’s fifth annual Million Father March was just another first day of school to most of the men trooping toward Quiet Waters Elementary School. With Dora The Explorer and Transformer backpacks draped over one shoulder, they passed crossing guards, paraded up the walkway and threaded their way through nearby parking lots, gripping their most precious cargo by a very small hand.

“Since I don’t have time to spend with the kids after school, until I get home at 6 p.m., I wanted to share the experience of dropping them off,” said Ronald Martinez, 37, flanked by 5-year old Michelle, headed for kindergarten, and Danielle, 8, a third-grader. “Since the first day the third-grader started school, I usually try to be the one to drop them off.”

Martinez may be in good company in Deerfield Beach, but such involvement is not so common nationwide. The Million Father March was designed to address that issue. The march was created five years ago of a perceived need to link fathers and father figures who have children to committed fatherhood. Organizers asked businesses to give men two hours off on the first day of school to take children to school. The men, for their part, were asked to look on it as a longer-term commitment, a first step to participation in a child’s school life through volunteering and through participating in school activities.

Locally, school officials point to research showing that children with fathers who are active in their educational lives score higher on tests, make better grades and are more likely to graduate from high school and attend college. This year, Broward County Public Schools asked community groups such as Boys & Girls Clubs of Broward County, 100 Black Men of Greater Fort Lauderdale, the Urban League and Broward Health and Friends of Children to emphasize the importance of parental involvement.

The dads on duty Aug. 24, however, seemed to be there because it is a special time they can share with their kids, not because they were under orders.
“We have always done this, since first grade,” said Daniel Marques, of the trip he and son Gabriel make daily from the parking lot at the shopping mall to the entryway of the school. “I’m the one to take him to school every day and we talk. Today I asked him about his expectation about the first day. I asked him if he was eager to meet his classmates and friends. He woke up very excited and I told him to be focused, to pay attention.”

With a wife who is a flight attendant, and out of town routinely, Dennis Murphy says walking son Dennis Murphy III and his 4-year-old daughter into the school is just one way he stays involved in their lives.”
“I coach all their sports — golf, bowling, baseball, football and soccer. I just do it,” he said. “I’m it, like 98 percent of the time.”

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The ever-vigilant activists at the Deerfield Beach commission meeting Aug. 18 were dubious. One vote and the casual restaurant serving up eggs and ice cream at the Deerfield Beach International Fishing Pier would go from the mom-and-pop operation to JB’s on the Beach.

One of four restaurateurs bidding for the contract, JB’s was the only one running a restaurant adjacent to the pier, and that restaurant was hardly beach-friendly.
“Will it still be like Kelly’s?” asked resident Rita Masi, referring to the most recent operator. “Will hamburgers still be $5?”

They were rightly wary for the wrong reasons.
The even-more-vigilant Chaz Stevens recently filed a complaint with City Attorney Andrew Maurodis charging JB’s on the Beach with violating the city charter by failing to comply with “disclosure and behavior requirements of applicants and person/entity seeking a city contract or currently doing business with the city.”

City contract seekers must list four years of campaign contributions to sitting city commissioners with their application. JB’s included no report, so Stevens sent along campaign treasurer reports showing that on Jan.19, JB’s on the Beach gave District 1 Commissioner Joe Miller $500. On Jan. 11, it gave the same amount to Mayor Peggy Noland, a beach district resident.

Maurodis said he was aware of the complaint. But, he said, “It is a new file which is now active and [it is] not my practice to comment.”
Later that day, he issued a memo to City Manager Mike Mahaney and city staff advising that the validity of the vote was in doubt.

“The code states violation of the disclosure requirement ‘shall be grounds for the City Commission to void or rescind any approval or contract,’?” he stated in the memo, leaving three options: start over, award the bid to the runner-up or, after disclosure by the applicant, decide not to void the contract.

With the current contract ending Aug. 31, he wrote, “I believe the commission needs to address these issues at a commission meeting.”

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How bad was the news?
Bad enough that commissioners couldn’t bring themselves to vote on an inevitable beach replenishment — even with water lapping at the very foundations of the town.
Instead, faced with a consultant’s delineation of four painful ways to assess the 2,234 residents for a project weighing in at between $5.7 and $7.8 million, the Hillsboro Beach Commission tabled the issue until its Sept. 8 meeting.
And that was after consultant Phil Gonot sweetened the pot.

Gonot, the principal in the economics consulting firm PMG Associates in Coconut Creek, was retained by the commission to assess the options facing the town and make a recommendation. He began by pointing out that he had managed to reduce the original cost of $7.8 million for 375 cubic yards of sand in several ways.

The town could save $1 million by sharing installation charges with Boca Raton and Deerfield Beach, he said.
By negotiating construction costs from $12 per cubic yard to between $8 and $10, he reduced the price by another $1.125 million.

With an expected grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency accounting for $2.1 million, that would leave $5.7 million to be borrowed for one year, he said, while the town awaited grants. Permanent refinancing after the grants, he said, would be about $3.575 million.

“If any of these factors do not occur,” he said, “the resulting impact on the property owners will increase.”

Gonot won the town’s contract to determine the most equitable way to divide the pain between the owners of single-family homes valued in the millions and owners of condominiums costing much less. And there is more than enough pain to go around. In making his recommendation, Gonot weighed parcel size; the direct benefit to residents on the ocean side of the town; taxable value and ERU, (Equivalent Residential Unit), a method that assumes everyone in town benefits equally from the beachfront.

His recommendation? A hybrid method of assessing property that is half Equivalent Residential Unit and half front footage – and still hard to swallow. The discussion is set to resume Sept. 8.

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Eagle Scouts have improved their communities in ways large and small, and the group that made Deerfield Beach history earlier this month was no exception. When members of Troop 119 turned out in dress uniform to be recognized by Mayor Peggy Noland, it was the first time in the 50 years since the Deerfield Beach troop was established that so many scouts had been so honored simultaneously.

Aug. 4, the youth who began as boys with Troop 119, Lighthouse District, South Florida Council in elementary school gathered in the city commission chambers on the cusp of their graduation from high school and from scouting. Together, six of them had earned a collective 217 merit badges, allowing them move on to the highest Boy Scout award, earned by developing, planning and executing a project benefiting the community.

Because of their individual and collective efforts, Deerfield Beach is shade in a public park and at a Catholic church. There are benches and an aesthetic bamboo fence at the city’s arboretum. The Humane Society has a utility trailer that has been renovated inside and out and the commemorative bricks paid for by city residents to underwrite construction of a play structure that immortalized tributes, and love have found a new place, surrounding a 30-foot flagpole at Pioneer Park.

“We are very fortunate to have these young gentlemen in our city,” Noland said, then acknowledging the six leaders in the audience. “Thank you for your time in helping these kids,” she said.

It wasn’t all work, of course. Collectively, the troop logged 637 nights of camping, 242 miles of canoing, 836 miles of hikes, 339 miles of biking and 874 hours of meetings. But in between, some serious construction took place, and and Deerfield Beach will enjoy the fruits of their labors for years to come.

Credit Robert 'Bobby' Chalker who spent several weekends building a bamboo fence at Constitution park, separating the Japanese Garden exhibit from the rain forest.
Michael J. Metzger is the one who built the trellis at St. Ambrose Catholic Church.
Thanks to Nicholas Morley, there are two covered benches, one next to the playground and one next to the water feature at Constitution Park.
Christopher Nunes is the one who renovated a trailer for the humane society in Parkland, while Kevin Woodmansee of Lighthouse Point built a trellis near the tennis courts at Constitution Park.

Scout master Sal Biviano said some projects took on a life of their own—his son Andrew’s flagpole, for example, which morphed from a flag pole into a commemorative plaza.
“That’s OK. We just work with it and keep going and the boys do what they have to do to finish,” he said. “They learn so much from the whole experience.”

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In a retail climate so grim that every cent counts, Ali Mohamed wants to ensure his restaurants stay in the red.
Literally.
Currently, zoning codes in various cities have turned the familiar red, black and white restaurants to turquoise, coral, and white, for example. As he rebuilds a restaurant operation he bought 18 months ago, the district manager of Tampa-based Checkers Drive-In Restaurants was in Deerfield Beach City Hall Aug. 4, making a now-familiar case.

What he would appreciate, he told town commissioners, is permission to change from approved pink and teal to the usual Checker’s colors: red, black and white.

“I know when that shopping center was down two or three stores it looked awful then,” said Sylvia Poitier, the commissioner from the adjacent District 2. “But I go to Publix [nearby] every other day and I never noticed it wasn't red.”

Even with the city’s 4-1 approval, however, there are no guarantees. Mohamed now must get permission from the Trail Plaza Shopping Center – and that is just one front in a crusade that has taken him from Coral Springs to Boynton Beach to Lake Worth.

Coral Springs approved changing to the traditional colors on Aug. 3 and, Mohamed said, Boynton Beach and Lake Worth seem on the verge of falling in behind.
“We are trying to get the logo back. It’s a matter of branding,“ he said.

Gary Bitner’s 30-year-old public relations and marketing firm, Bitner Goodman, claims clients like the Seminole Tribe and Hard Rock Café, as well as Winn-Dixie stores. He said Mohammed has a point.
“Colors are an important part of a brand,” he said. “If it were my restaurant, I’d be very nervous about changing from red-and-white to turquoise and pink.”

Ultimately, Bitner said, Mohammed holds all the cards.
“There are communities with very rigid appearance codes that do force some operators to modify their standard presentation,” Bitner said. “In the end, I guess it depends on how badly he wants to be in those locations.”

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Faced with a one-two punch of declining revenues and spiraling police and fire expenses, Deerfield Beach’s City Manager Mike Mahaney presented a proposed 2010 budget that holds the line on expenses, suggests pioneering revenue sources like red-light cameras and borrows from the city savings account, among other things.

But Mahaney cautioned in his presentation Aug. 4 that the same approach probably won’t be sustainable next year.

“If you add up all the real estate revenues, it produces $34 million in ad valorem taxes,” he said at the outset of his presentation. “Police and fire alone next year will cost the city more than $39 million.”

It will cost even more next year if firefighters hold sway. At a negotiation session July 31, negotiators for the firefighters union presented Assistant City Manager Macon Sammons with a wish list for a new contract that included raises and buyouts of accrued overtime. Mahaney said anticipated declines in property tax revenue, declining gas tax, crashing real estate values, record foreclosures and high unemployment in 2010 promise an even tighter budget – and he predicted the demise of the city-run public-safety sector, probably in 2011.

“I do not think we will be able to sustain public safety expenses as they are,” he said.
In this budget, Mahaney recommended eliminating all raises, saving $810,000; cutting merit increases for one year, saving $370,000; reducing union contracts from three years to one; cutting a $1.7 million from unspecified departmental capital requests.
On the revenue side, he recommended adopting the rollback rate, the tax rate that would raise the same revenue as the year before. For most homeowners, that would mean paying a property tax that is more per $1,000 of assessed value.
But it also would mean paying less tax overall since the value of the property being taxed has declined.

He supports increasing the fire assessment from $99 to $149, producing $3 million in revenue and installing red-light cameras at key intersections to generate $500,000. Even then, revenue falls short and Mahaney recommended taking $8.7 million from the $18 million in the city’s savings account. Next year, he said, privatization of fire and police services may be the only solution.

Robert Wolfe of the Broward County Property Appraiser’s office said that office is in the process of determining the average assessed value for single family homes and condos in the area. The only thing that is certain, until those figures are released, in a few weeks, is that the proposed operating millage rate of 5.4 (5.8 with debt service) is 11.06 percent higher than last year’s 4.2456.

“It’s an increase, but the tax is more difficult to calculate in a down market,” he said. “The tax amount per person varies.”

BUDGET WORKSHOPS AND PUBLIC HEARINGS
-The city has set the following public workshops on the proposed budget and fire assessment fee: Aug. 10, 11, 17 and 24.
-A public hearing is set on the tentative budget and proposed millage rate on Sept. 8.
-A public hearing to adopt a final fire assessment fee is set for Sept. 14.
-A public hearing to adopt a final millage rate and finalize the budget is set for Sept. 15.
Call 954-480-4200.

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In the quiet of the city manager’s conference room, their requests sounded almost modest.

Deerfield Beach’s firefighters hope their new contract will bring:
-Three years of 4 percent cost-of-living increases, bringing them into parity with surrounding departments;
-A buyout of 480 hours of overtime. That pending bill of $800,000 to $1 million was accrued because the department is too short-staffed to allow compensatory time off, and even the city acknowledges it would be good to get the bill off the books.
-They want promotions with a net cost of $60,000.

They want other things as well, but all of them seemed impossible after Deerfield Beach City Manager Mike Mahaney presented a proposed budget four days later.
If it is approved without any changes, that budget would increase the fire assessment fee 50 percent, from $99 to $149. Even with the increase, however, the city’s financial prospects are so modest that something as innocuous as the contract’s proposed three-year term looked like wishful thinking.

Sean Crofutt, president of the 140-member Deerfield Beach Firefighters and Paramedics Association Local 1673, pointed out after Mahaney’s budget presentation Aug. 4 that the union demands had developed without the benefit of the current budget information.

“We kept asking what the financial status of the city was and the city refused to tell us,” he said. “We did the financial analysis that we got back in September 2008 and back then, the city had $21 million in reserve.”

No longer. The city has just $18 million saved. It faces a budget shortfall of at least $8.7 million this year and things look even worse for next year, according to Mahaney. Crofutt said he had no indication funding was so tight, and that his group would proceed accordingly.

“We had no idea how much cash carryover the city had from the current budget, but obviously, after hearing the presentation last night and reviewing the budget, we will proceed accordingly,” Crofutt said.

“It’s a $142 million budget. The merit raises are $300,000. We should be able to find something somewhere to cut so all junior employees, not just fire fighters, get their anticipated raises,” he said.

The union presented its proposal for a three-year contract on July 31. The city’s counteroffer is due Aug. 14

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Two weeks after Mayor Carmen McGarry castigated her publicly for being slow to execute her duties, unresponsive to directives of town commissioners and helping the finance director with his job, Hillsboro Beach’s eighth town clerk in two years resigned.
Until her last day Aug. 21, however, she plans to continue the herculean task that has occupied her desk and her time since she stepped into the office with the revolving door last November.

“I did some record management,” she said, pointing to stacks of regulation-sized file boxes once crammed with legal documents. “Please don’t think that I am anywhere near complete.”

When she took the $75,000-a-year job Jan. 6, Dana Williams became the eighth clerk/town manager in two years to take on the tiny town’s powerful commission and pledge to document the proceedings. Since moving into the office, the Deerfield Beach resident has devoted herself to what each of her predecessors conceded was a monumental task: helping the town make the transition to the 21st century.

In two years, the town has moved from a computer with a DOS-based operating system to on-line minutes from town commission meetings, and converted paper files to computer. But catching up with years of backlog has been an all-consuming task for Williams.

Step into the cramped office in town hall and Williams can point to 29 banker’s boxes once filled with miscellaneous papers. Each one was filled with legal documents that had to be individually evaluated under the state’s retention and destruction schedule. That schedule requires that bid documents of non-capital improvements, for example, be retained for five fiscal years after a bid is awarded – providing that audits have been released. As for documents pertaining to successful bids, on the other hand, like the one involving the water plant? Those must be kept 10 anniversary years a after the contract was awarded.

Consider that Williams has sorted through 43.5 cubic feet of such records, classifying each, pegging some for destruction, refilling the ones that are legally necessary. She has turned the contents of 29 file boxes over to a company that specializes in shredding such documents and certifying their destruction.

One of the tasks she leaves behind: completing the task of codification, updating the town code to reflect changes in ordinances. The last time the code was updated in print was 2001, she said, and to ensure the process continues, she has drafted an agenda item for the commission to consider in September.

For now, Williams’ duties will be assumed by the deputy town clerk, Irene George.
The next town meeting is at 9 a.m. Sept. 8 at Town Hall, 1210 Hillsboro Mile, Hillsboro Beach.

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Rachel Stephens is a rare child indeed. Some kids might have spent a week at a computer camp, honing computer skills or a month at sleepover camp, learning Kumbaya. Stephens spent the entire summer doing what most kids spend the summer avoiding: getting ready for school.

Her Kindergarten year at Park Ridge Elementary found her scoring below her personal best on the standardized test, says Faith Stephens, her mother. So Faith transferred Rachel to an A-rated school for first grade and to insure her daughter has the best possible start at Quiet Waters Elementary School., Faith organized a summer that was more rigorous than some children’s school years.

In addition to time she spent reading with her grandfather in Pompano Beach, the 6-year-old was a fixture every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at the Century Plaza branch of the Broward County Library. Tuesdays and Thursdays? On those days Rachel settled in at the Percy White library. And don’t think for a moment that the loquacious Dr. Seuss enthusiast was playing endless computer games. No, Stephens were there to get a leg up on first grade.

A grandmother in the library’s grandmother reading program, Margaret Mosley, read to Rachel, read with Rachel, and worked with Rachel on instructional books her mother bought at an educational supply store. Rachel’s favorites? The bright-eyed little girl rattles them off like a breakfast order in a Seuss-themed diner: “Green Eggs and Ham," "Hop on Pop," and "Cat in the Hat.
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“Her Dad and I did not want her to spend the summer sitting in front of the T.V. watching Sponge Bob Square Pants. That’s what she did last year,” explained Stephens. “We wanted to get her in the habit of reading and developing good study habits.”

Rachel Stephens may be the most dedicated of summer scholars but she isn’t alone. From Lighthouse Point to Coral Springs, students young and younger looked at the long shadow of a challenging school year and did something to keep current.

Since Skylar Smith’s school year is structured by the demands of dance class, the 9-year-old Zion Lutheran fourth grader takes summer a little easier. She stays up a little later. She trades dance for drama camp. But school? The Lighthouse Point resident thought about that state-mandated reading list enough to read two books, she says, How to Eat Fried worms and the Missing Gator at Gumbo Limbo.

Pedro Velazquez prepared to enter seventh grade at Deerfield Beach Middle School by spending 15 days in Ecuador, swimming and playing outside – and by reading two recommended books.

That’s one more than read by Alexandria Alonso. The 12-year-old Coral Springs Middle School eighth grader spent the summer buried in book with Vampires in the titles, reading just one book recommended by her teacher. “it’s preparing me to take a final test,” she said. “It was about what the expect and what to study.”

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Madison Pelkey had a great summer by any kid’s definition. She played on the computer. She swam.
She went to Disney World, and to a sleepover – where she learned the meaning of misnomer.
“We usually don’t sleep,” she confessed.
On Aug. 24, however, third grade starts and mom Sari Pelkey recently went shopping for school supplies and clothes. Already she is reciting the family mantra that will govern the after-school hours of Madison and sister Ally, a second grader at Deerfield Beach Elementary.
“Get it done and have some fun,” Sari says of homework.
Highlands Christian Academy tenth grader Keenan Smith reports tongue firmly in cheek that he “Sat at home and did mathematical equations all day.” If he did, he is a rare student indeed. Most returning students report Michael Phelps-like lapses in routines and, with the rigors of the school year days away, some parents see wisdom in giving conflicting work and school schedules a dress rehearsal.

Dawn Selvanik began the drill before school ended. That’s right, before the summer began, she and daughter Kiely, 10, a fifth grader who is serving on safety patrol this year at Deerfield Beach Elementary School, practiced reporting to school early. With Selvanik’s data processing job taking her to Davie, getting Kiely and son Mason, who is eight, into a routine meant practicing everything from taking a shower the night before, to grabbing a half-bagel with cream cheese after the alarm and driving to Deerfield Beach Elementary and then to Davie.

“We practiced and trained and learned the routine,” Dawn Selvanik said, adding that in July, “We began cutting bedtime back, from 11 p.m . to closer to 8 p.m.”
Kawanis Randley said easier than beginning a back-to-school routine early is keeping Jasmin on a year-round routine. As a result, the petite first grader is perennially ready for Deerfield Park Elementary School. “I’m sick, and I can’t take all that,” Kawanis explained of her aversion to spontaneity. “But in a week or two, we are going to a Back to School Bash with family in Miami, and all the kids will get goodie bags of school supplies.”

For students like Lighthouse Point resident Jennifer Fishman, a junior at St. Thomas Aquinas High school, and Kaleb Hunt, in seventh grade at Lyons Creek Middle School in Coconut Creek, routine is a way of life. Fishman practices gymnastics at American Twisters Gynastics in Coconut Creek for nearly eight hours a day on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and for half-days on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Down time caught the Lighthouse Point resident completing her required 20 community service hours at the Lighthouse Point library. Her family won’t take a vacation this year, in part because of the economy, she said, but the larger reason is that she is committed to working out.

With his parents devoted to the family business, it’s up to Kaleb to develop and stick to a routine. He sets up everything he needs the night before. As a result, he said, in almost every way, heading back to school is hardly different from right now.
So where is the reward In a young life so disciplined? Check out Kaleb’s report card.
“Straight As,” he reports – and that’s the take-home lesson for all.

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When Pedro Velazquez learned of that budget cuts included plans to close the Century Plaza branch of the Broward County library, he joined hundreds of others in expressing his distress.

“I’m disappointed,” the 12-year-old Crystal Lake resident. “I usually go there for all my homework and sometimes Internet use.”

So many people felt similarly that formal protests were mounted both outside the library and at the county commission chambers. Legislators heard that call. On July 27, library Director Robert Cannon mentioned in his weekly message pending layoffs – and announced that the library will remain open.

For Carol Lerner and mother Miriam, that was good news indeed. Miriam Lerner, now 86, had volunteered at the library, teaching English, until she lost her eyesight. Carol realized her mother wasn’t the only one for who the library was a vital link: that there were 17,000 elderly people living at the adjacent Century Village, many of whom walked to the library.

Lerner organized a petition drive. She mustered more than 15 pages of signatures to be delivered to the county commission. Her group was in the process of organizing a bus to take their plea to the commission in person when word came the library had been saved.
“I forgot to mention [...] that even though we are yet again facing significant budget and personnel cuts,” Cannon said, “no BCL [Broward County Libraries] will close as was previously under consideration.”

That news likely made the more than 600 petitioners and Century Village residents happy.

Legislators can add to that group one student transferring this year from Lyons Creek Middle School in Coconut Creek to Deerfield Beach Middle School’s International Baccalaureate Program: Velazquez.

Last year, he said, for a project for Black History Month, he scoured the library for books about Louis Armstrong. He listened to Armstrong’s music on the Internet. And the project was a piece of cake.
“If the library had closed? I couldn’t have had the biographies,” Pedro said. “It would have been a lot more hard.”

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