When Helen Kaye retired from her volunteer job at the Percy White Branch Library on Monday, this small community library lost the glue that has held the volunteer program together for nearly two decades.

Kaye is the one who has always kept the calendar. Each month, the more than 20 volunteers call in with their availability and it is up to Kaye to insure the schedule runs smoothly. That includes volunteers for the library and its bookstore, which is no easy task given the limitations of the volunteers.

It is a job Kaye says she felt called to after her husband died 20 years ago. A lifelong library user, she started her time their after stopping by the library on her way home. At the time, she was a volunteer at a local hospital.

“I said to the girl at the front desk, ‘Could you use a volunteer?’ She said, ‘Can you start yesterday.’”

Kaye said her first task was shelving books before taking on the job of updating the library’s stock. It wasn’t long after the library’s bookstore opened in 1991 that a friend asked if she would work there as well.

Kaye said the library was forced to shorten the bookstore’s hours after county budget cuts. All the customers were nice, she said, and she began to notice that many were regulars.

“There [was] a man who came in on Mondays … with a cell phone. He checks the books and sometimes buys a lot and sometimes two or three,” Kaye said.

Her last day in the bookstore, it was running a special: buy two books and get a third free. On July 19, Kaye was surrounded by her volunteer friends in the library’s community room, enjoying a sheet cake, and preparing for the next phase of her life.

“I am 88 years old and I used to play a lot of bridge. But it’s a lost art,” she said. “So I’m going to read.”

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After local blogger Chaz Stevens filed a formal complaint with the city against Deerfield Beach City Commissioner Sylvia Poitier for violating its city ethics code, City Attorney Andrew Maurodis has decided to retain an outside attorney to review the merits of the charges.

“It’s an automatic referral,” Maurodis said of the attorney request. “This was filed without commenting on the seriousness. It was an ethics complaint made pursuant to the city’s ethics code and I am required to send it to outside counsel.”

In a four-point complaint filed July 4 by Stevens, he charges that Poitier violated the section of the city’s ethics code that prohibits a commissioner from using their position to benefit an entity not considered a constituent.

Stevens cites in the complaint minutes of City Commission meetings at which Poitier said she had worked to secure sponsors to underwrite Mango Festival, and that she had “asked Sheriff Al Lamberti for manpower at the Mango Festival.”

“I submit that Poitier represented the Mango Festival before the city, an entity that is not considered her constituent; therefore Poitier willingly and intentionally violated … our city charter … ,” according to the complaint.

Maurodis said last week that the referral to outside counsel Robert White in Coral Springs was made because, while White is not connected with the city, he has experience with local government. White will review the complaint to determine if it would constitute a violation, if all the facts included in the complaint are true, Maurodis said.

In his filed complaint with the city, Stevens said he plans to file a similar complaint with the Florida Commission on Ethics.

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Special agents from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development arrived last month at Deerfield Beach City Hall to interview residents of the financially-troubled Deerfield Palms Condominiums, according to Armando Fana, the Miami Field Office Director for HUD.

For hours, agents questioned residents about their purchase of units in the community, according to one of the residents that was questioned, Hernan Casanova.

“They were talking to individual owners about their mortgages,” said City Commissioner Sylvia Poitier, in whose district the 168-unit condo community is located.

Poitier also said that agents had arrived in response to a request she had made.
“I went to HUD in the beginning, two years ago, and explained to them what is happening,” Poitier said.

More specifically, HUD agents wanted to know how the Deerfield Palms residents came to purchase a unit in the complex on Dixie Highway.

Casanova said he first saw an ad for the complex in February 2007, which offered units for sale with just $500 down.

“At that time, I could afford it,” Casanova said. “I was making $525 a week and the mortgage was $1,075 with association dues of $128 per month,” he said. Casanova closed on his unit in March 2007.

The struggling complex also made headlines in February 2009, when the city threatened to shutoff water to the community after the complex fell behind $92,000 in back-due water payments. By then, just 28 out of the 168 unit owners were current with their maintenance fees. Homeowners eventually avoided shutoff with a payment plan.

Today, with just 23 of the units still occupied, Poitier said HUD now is looking into how buyers were initially lured in.

“They are investigating it and if they find fraud there,” she said, “they will be going after the bank and not the developer. “

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