North Miami Advisory Board Members On Food Stamps?

My son Jonathan was visiting and playing the "good son", doing my taxes for the year. I'm in a position where I don't need a huge income. The boat and the truck are long ago paid for, as is my photo gear. No rent, no mortgage, no car payments. Real estate tax exemptions because I live in my house and I'm over 65.

"Hey Dad, do you realize that you qualify for food stamps?" He submitted the paperwork. A few days later I got this card in the mail! $55 a month in free food! Now maybe I can afford to live on the lousy twenty bucks I get most months from the City of North Miami for serving on the Board of Adjustment.

(I whited out the account number on the card.)

A Time For Prayer ~ The City Of North Miami Must Be Broke

This is a series of emails, funny as hell but all too pathetic, a great example of the caliber of people who staff our government offices. It started out when I didn't get my check for attending the January Board of Adjustment meeting (I'm on the board), and they only recently increased our stipend to $20 from the $10 they instituted way back in 1961 (Yes indeed, that's NINETEEN SIXTY ONE!!!). At least it (barely) covers gas for my truck when I drive around town looking at the properties seeking zoning variances.

A bunch of emails got me noplace, then the February meeting rolled around. Still no check! I was getting a bit miffed, and involved Councilman Scott Galvin, the councilman who had appointed me to the board. Still no check. Lots of excuses but no check. I was quickly getting a bit more than just miffed.

This series of emails between me, the councilman, and the woman, Jacqueline Y. Gonzalez, director of Building and Zoning, who should have taken care of this back in January but didn't. Actually the series starts several emails before this exchange, but this should give you the gist of the problem. This rediculous debacle probably cost the city's tax payers at least $1,000 in wasted staff time and wasted at least 4 hours of my time. The check did arrive though. Thanks (I think) Jackie. It's safely in the bank now. MY bank, NOT the city's.

Scroll down to the bottom of the emails to read the first one first. I was too lazy (and PISSED) to change their order. Please forgive me.
*******************************************
I certainly understand..and am so sorry about the mess up…glad I will not see you panhandling at City Hall! Take care and I am certain to see you soon.

Jackie G

Jacqueline Y. Gonzalez, Director
Department of Building and Zoning
City of North Miami
(305) 895-9820 ext. 12253
(305) 895-9822 (fax)

"Be the change you want to see in the world"
Ghandi


From: preacherpop42@aol.com [mailto:preacherpop42@aol.com?] Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2009 4:22 PMTo: Gonzalez, Jacqueline Y.Subject: Re: Al Kaplan - Check

Good timing! I was just heading out!Us poor retirees scraping and scrimping on Social Security need every penny we can get. At least now I won't be having to panhandle at City Hall before board and council meetings.Cheers,Al -----Original Message-----From: Gonzalez, Jacqueline Y. <jygonzalez@northmiamifl.gov>To: preacherpop42@aol.com; scott@scott-galvin.comSent: Wed, 4 Mar 2009 4:11 pmSubject: RE: Al Kaplan - Check
Thanks Al. Guarantee that it wont happen again. Have a lovely evening.

Jackie G

Jacqueline Y. Gonzalez, Director
Department of Building and Zoning
City of North Miami
(305) 895-9820 ext. 12253
(305) 895-9822 (fax)

"Be the change you want to see in the world"
Ghandi


From: preacherpop42@aol.com [mailto:preacherpop42@aol.com?] Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2009 3:17 PMTo: Gonzalez, Jacqueline Y.; scott@scott-galvin.comSubject: Re: Al Kaplan - Check

Thanx. Got it. Hope you guys get your house in order.~ Al-----Original Message-----From: Gonzalez, Jacqueline Y. <jygonzalez@northmiamifl.gov>To: scott@scott-galvin.com; Hansraj, Maureen <mhansraj@northmiamifl.gov>; preacherpop42@aol.comCc: Patterson, Clarance <cpatterson@northmiamifl.gov>; Loperena, Anne <aloperena@northmiamifl.gov>Sent: Wed, 4 Mar 2009 12:03 pmSubject: RE: Al Kaplan - Check
My assistant Anne Loperena will deliver the check today.

Jacqueline Y. Gonzalez, Director
Department of Building and Zoning
City of North Miami
(305) 895-9820 ext. 12253
(305) 895-9822 (fax)

"Be the change you want to see in the world"
Ghandi


From: Scott Galvin [mailto:scott@scott-galvin.com?] Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2009 10:37 AMTo: Hansraj, Maureen; preacherpop42@aol.comCc: Gonzalez, Jacqueline Y.; Patterson, ClaranceSubject: Al Kaplan - Check

Hi, Clarance and Jackie,
Will you kindly let me know when you expect to be able to deliver the check to Mr. Kaplan today?

Thanks,
scott--- On Wed, 3/4/09, preacherpop42@aol.com <preacherpop42@aol.com> wrote:
From: preacherpop42@aol.com <preacherpop42@aol.com>Subject: CHECKTo: mhansraj@northmiamifl.gov, scott@scott-galvin.com, preacherpop42@aol.comDate: Wednesday, March 4, 2009, 10:20 AM
Oh yeah! Drop the check in my mail slot by noon today. No more screw-ups please. I'm growing weary of dealing with inept city "employees".Al

Al Kaplan For North Miami Mayor

It's odd but the little strip mall has a Starbucks at its southern end, which is within the city limits of North Miami. A few store north and across a narrow alley is the City of North Miami Beach. One itty bitty strip mall, two cities. Just about everybody at Starbucks knows me and I'll talk with just about anybody and everybody. So I'm talking. To anybody and everybody! It's probably well past the time for just talking. Yup, time has run out for sure. The 13th hour has arrived!

For the past few years I've also been talking with everybody and anybody around city hall about "The Fence Issue" and getting nowhere. Today the deputy city manager, Dennis Kelley, came by my house. He agreed that the neighbor's fence was taller than he is. It's taller than his six feet for sure. Six feet maximum is what the code allows, and my contention is that at the time the fence was constructed the code said five feet. Even if the code was changed afterwards the fence should have been made to conform when I first complained. I'm also contending that it should have come in front of the Board of Adjustment for a variance, even if it was after the code was changed, bacause it's still overheight and it was constructed before the change.

Well, it seems that Clarence Patterson, our city manager, thinks that the fence is just fine as it is. That's great. An appointed official gets to make law? That's not the way I read the city charter. We have an elected council and an elected mayor. THEY make the rules and THEY hire and fire the city manager. For at least two years now people have been encouraging me to run for mayor. I still have that photograph of my bruised, cut, and bloody face courtesy of my neighbor's contractor. Well the cuts and bruising are courtesy of the contractor. My son Jonathan took the photo. What folks are telling me is that picture would make for a fantastic campaign poster. It would make for a great T-shirt. It would grab attention as the cover of a campaign brochure. It would probably get coverage in the Miami Herald and on TV as well. I'll even insist on using it as my official portrait to hang in city hall along with all the other portraits of North Miami mayors.

Yesterday I had lunch with the guy who made up the last "Al Kaplan T-shirt" a couple of years ago. Stay tuned...

A Variety Of Variances And The Futility Of Denying Them

Deputy City Manager Dennis Kelley and I had a little confab a day or two ago in his office. I'd tried to get him to meet at Starbucks and put the coffee on his expense account but he came up with the double excuse that he didn't drink coffee and had no expense account. I'm easy to get along with so I agreed to meet him in his office.

The subject of our discussion was my next door neighbor's fence again, a situation that's been dragging on over two years now. His position is that the fence meets current code requirements and the guy paid a double permit fee because it was constructed without a permit. My position is that it really doesn't meet current code requirements because the thing was measured from the wrong place, and furthermore, besides the fact that no variance was ever sought, it certainly didn't meet the more stringent requirements at the time it was installed

What I'm saying is that if the code said a five foot fence was allowed at the time the fence was built but a six foot fence was constructed without a permit or a variance, maybe you can accept the double permit fee for an after the fact building permit but the fence would still have to get a variance if it was six feet tall whether or not the code was later changed to allow six foot fences. It would have to conform to the code as it existed at the time it was constructed.

So after all this arguing back and forth, all the tap dancing around the issue, and never really coming close to refuting any of my points of argument, he decides that the city attorney should research it. This little Fence Problem has dragged on more than long enough and probably has already cost the taxpayers in excess of $10,000 in wasted staff time. After I agreed that yes, the city attorney should research it, Dennis drops the bombshell! He tells me that North Miami is the laughing stock of all the surrounding towns and cities because of the way we don't enforce our own codes, and give out "hardship" variances like candy simply for the asking. Even if the Board of Adjustment turns down the request the City Council will most likely approve it.

My interest here? Well, that's me on the right, a member of the board, six years now, and that follows a few years on the Charter Review Board and a decade or more as vice-chair of the Planning Commission. My other interest? That the fence was put up by my next door neighbor, and the city attorney told me a few years ago that as the holder of a "quasi-judicial office" it was incumbant on me to report my neighbor to the code enforcement people. I did. Going on three years later the fence is still there. Hence the meeting with Dennis. I take my board appointment seriously! I probably know the city code better than he does, as well as knowing about when and why it's been modified over the years.

And what about me being the only one there wearing a suit, white dress shirt, and that cool looking Jerry Garcia neck tie while sporting a beard and a carefully arranged mess of curls on my head? Hey, it's fun being the best attired dude in the room one time while the next time I have holes in the knees of faded jeans and look like I just came back from a day's fishing, sporting two days worth of stubble on my face and messy unkempt hair. Best of all, I like showing off my hair when most all of the guys twenty years younger than I am are half bald at best.

What's Wrong With North Miami Code Enforcement? Everything!

The Next Installment:

I've been awake since shortly after 3 AM seething with anger about that fence and the special treatment my neighbor gets.

When we were under one-day-a-week strict mandatory water restrictions during the recent drought he was watering every day. I kept complaining. Nothing was done or "we issued him a warning" at worst. It was only after I screamed that fines were the law and that they escalate with the number of offenses, and nobody seemed to know how many of these friendly warnings had been issued because nobody bothered to log them, nobody kept a record, nobody seemed to care how many warnings he got. He just kept watering. In fact he flooded the street so the puddle would sometimes have thirty feet of my swale under water and I'd get my feet wet getting to and from my truck.

He's an arogant person who thinks he can get away with anything, and thanks to North Miami's "selective code enforcemet" and their bumbling inept employees the city employs he seems to do just that. Of course there are plenty of people who figure that corruption is involved, money changing hands, and why not when the Miami Herald is constantly doing stories about corruption and pay offs in other cities and town all over Miami-Dade and Broward Counties. But I'll give them the benifit of the doubt. I'd like to think that our emplyees are honest. Of course those are Big Buck major scanals, not "minor" problems like 1375 N.E. 133 Street where the owner frequently parks his vehicles straight across the sidewalk rather than parking them on his pristine swale or pulling them all the way into his driveway.

Isn't that a violation of the federal Americans With Disabiities Act? Isn't that a violation of North Miami's own ordinances? Why isn't he cited?

From N.E. 14th Ave. to N.E. 11th Ave. yesterday I counted at least seventeen houses on 133rd St. with overgrown lawns and swales. I guess today I'll check another street.

Let some people get away with an illegal fence and they think they own the world, have the right to dump their trash in their neighbors' yards, park wherever and however they please, and let their contactors beat the crap out of anybody they want for excecising their constitutional right to stand on public property, the middle of the street, and photograph a code violation in progress. Since that day I was left lying in the swale bruised and battered and half concious I've suffered dizzy spells and there are times I'm unsteady on my feet. I can no longer fill in and cover a wedding for a sick photographer. It's affected my income. I can no longer do much if any of my own yard work. It's affected my expenses.

I'd like to thank North Miami's finest, the North Miami Police Department for a fairly prompt response to my cell phone call made while I was being punched and kicked. The guy had stopped by the time the cops actually arrived though, and "we can't make an arrest unless we actually see it happening", like I pummeled my own face? I gave myself the black eye? Maybe I put those fresh bleeding cuts in my face?

So instead the cops asked the guy for the standard "License, registration, and insurance card please". He had NONE OF THEM with him. NO I.D. but they they let him go, not even a ticket. They did that while I was barely able to stand up. THEY LET HIM GO, NO TICKET! Remember that? No wonder my neighbor thinks he's made of Teflon. And the ILLEGAL FENCE is still there nearly OVER THREE YEARS LATER. The city attorney tells me that as a member of the Board of Adjustment it is incumbant upon me to report code violations. I asked. Part of my job. Part of my responsibilties.

I'm supposed to risk getting killed but the City of North Miami won't back me up? Won't enforce their own codes on selected special people? Nit pick others to death, and in this case it might result in exactly that. Death!

I want that fence brought into conformance. I want that ficus hedge trimmed so it isn't intruding into MY YARD. I'm tired of trash in my yard. I want to enjoy my property. I'd like to be able to go out in my own yard with my friends, grill some burgers, have a good time, and not have to look at that ILLEGAL FENCE to remind me of getting beat up like I did because the city wouldn't enforce it's own fence ordinance.

If Dennis Kelly DKelly@northmiamifl.gov "can be reached on my cell phone at 786/402-3019" he can just as easily reach me on my cell phone. Plenty of people at North Miami City Hall have my cell number. It's no secret.

Finally, I'd like to thank all of you who read The Price of Silver and called or sent emails about this situation. Stay tuned. I'm not giving up until it's resolved.

I'm MAD AS HELL! No Time For a Haircut Today!

The illegal fence issue from last year is still unresolved. The fence is still there. The neighbor has been...well you can read the details in this email I'm sending to Councilman Scott Galvin.

Hi Scott,

I got cited this morning by North Miami Code Enforcement Officer Gary Beswick for "overgrown alleyway or easement". I think this was triggered by the fact that the rain a couple of days ago made the kid mowing my lawn have to stop before he finished the side (14th Ave.) swale. It will be finished. The alleyway is no more "overgrown" than it's been for the last few years and looks mowed to me except in the area where my next door neighbor likes to deposit his landscaping rubble, and you can't mow there.

But in my poking around my yard today I notice some other rock/concrete/whatever rubble that had been deposited over my back fence into my yard near the southern end, closest to my neighbor, and some other rocky debris further south that could only have been put their by tossing it OVER that ILLEGAL wooden fence.

Regardless of whatever handshake agreement I made with City Manager Clarence Patterson to "drop the issue" of the illegal fence I've decided that in good conscience I can't continue to lead a double life of serving on the Board of Adjustment while allowing the flagrant disregard of the city code with that ILLEGAL fence. It didn't go through the proper variance process, and had it been cited and brought in front of the Code Enforcement Board, as a number of the members of that board fully expected, they would not have allowed it to remain as is. Nor was it likely that the Board of Adjustment would have aproved a variance.

In addition that next door neighbor has planted a ficus hedge right up against the chain link fence between our front yards. It's grown several feet through the fence, which is entirely ON MY PROPERTY, not on the property line. I don't feel like trimming my side or paying somebody to do it for me. If it's allowed to continue growing there it will destroy my fence as the branches get larger and thicker, plus depriving me of the use of a substantial part of my front yard. The only solution that I can see, and it will still cost me money, is to spray the branches extending into my yard and drench the soil on my side of the propery line with a defoliant/weed killer.

The neighbor has already caused me to avoid using my backyard because I get so distraught and upset everytime that I see that ILLEGAL fence. I don't want to hear any dumb excuses that he received an after the fact permit by paying a double permit fee. He still never came in front of the Board of Adjustment for a proper variance and I don't believe that construction of that magnitude qualifies for an adminstrative variance.

Yes, I'm MAD. I'm STEAMING PISSED OFF BIG TIME. I want that damned fence to conform to the city code. If Gary is too chicken to cite my neighbor then have Clarence fire him. I never did get reimbursed for the $125 I was charged a couple of years ago for "mowing" that narrow strip behind my rear fence. It really WAS NOT mowed because of the concrete rubble and tailings from digging all those post holes put there by the guy hext door.

I hate to say this but on the surface it looks like somebody is getting paid off to overlook one resident's violations while nitpicking another. I'm not the only one who thinks that.

I feel really bad for that neighbor. The nerve of the city telling him that he had to get rid of his ILLEGAL ROOSTERS that he was hiding behind that ILLEGAL FENCE, the ones that were waking the entire neighborhood every morning at first light. The ones that the code enforcement guy couldn't see because he's not allowed to look over the ILLEGAL FENCE.

I feel bad for him because he overpaid for that house at the peek of the real estate bubble, put a bunch of money into fixing it up, and now he probably has a mortgage that's $50,000 or more money than he could get from selling the house. He's stuck. I DON"T WANT TO BE STUCK with all this agravation.

I want that fence brought into conformity with the code. I don't want him treating my property as a convenient place to discard rubble. I don't want his ficus hedge destroying my fence. Tell Gary to cite that fence. I want that "overgrown" ficus hedge cited also.

Also, I'm not so sure how valid that citation is because Gary listed the exact same date (08/04/08) for both today's date and the re-inspection date. I have no idea when the re-inspection is. Maybe somebody should call and ask him?

Cheers,

Al

And within five minutes I received this:

Hi, Mike

Al Kaplan writes with essentially two complaints:

1. In regard to a citation he was written today
2. In regard to a fence apparently erected illegally by his neighbor to the west.

Will you kindly investigate both and let me know what options we have?

Thanks,
scott