Delray Beach – City Commission Keeps CRA Independent

With a 15-minute soliloquy, Delray Beach’s mayor cast the deciding vote to keep the Community Redevelopment Agency board independent from the City Commission.
“The hasty manner in which we got here does not produce an environment in which cooler heads prevail,” Mayor Cary Glickstein said.
Glickstein said he regretted not hitting the pause button two weeks ago, and that he and his commission colleagues had spent the intervening 14 days talking to residents on both sides of the issue and many in the middle.
But his support was conditional.
“Things must change,” he said, starting with the City Commission’s appointment of four members this month to the seven-member CRA board.
His other conditions include: The CRA will pay for all city-identified projects in its district; the CRA will circulate documents for public land sales over 1 acre to the City Commission and city attorney before developers can submit bids; and the CRA staff will communicate better with city staff and commissioners.
Glickstein also wants to see the CRA end “the backdoor funding game.” At times, he said, when a project was denied money by the city, the developer went to the CRA. The agency was seen “as an off-the-balance sheet, out-of-public-scrutiny source with a seemingly magical money pot that has been for far too long viewed as  something other than what it is: taxpayer dollars.”
The mayor followed up a week later with a memo to the CRA leadership detailing the conditions for his support of an independent CRA board.
At the May 16 commission meeting, nearly 40 people spoke on the CRA. The speakers included downtown business owners, former city staffers, a former mayor, current and former CRA board members and longtime residents. Four current CRA board members, including Chairman Reggie Cox, sat in the front row of the packed commission chambers.
Vice Mayor Jim Chard, who agreed May 2 to discuss the CRA takeover, supported keeping the independent board two weeks later. Chard pointed out the agency’s many accomplishments, including trees along 12th Street and the Atlantic Grove development on West Atlantic.
“The issue is communications,” he said. “Better communications will be easier to do than the nuclear option.”
Deputy Vice Mayor Shirley Johnson also voted to keep the board independent.

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