Good Ol' Charlie Zarzour

Charlie's actual city job was code enforcement officer, driving around town checking for code violations and making sure that people had pulled the required permits. He hobbled around on crutches but he didn't let that slow him down. He also was the guy who set up the table, the coffee pot, and the cake or cookies for the break during city council meetings or at Miss North Miami Pageant rehersals.

When my daughter Elena was little she'd "help" Charlie put out the plates, forks, napkins, etc. and then help him clean up afterwards. Her reward was mostly having a knee to sit on and some interesting stories to listen to, and he was always "Charlie, not "Mr. Zarzor".

Dang! I'm Feeling Light Headed! Who Stole My Hair?

Rabbi Lang was there for the swearing in of the new mayor, city clerk, and the one out of two coucilmen who could prove that he was actually a city resident. Several clergy of various faiths said prayers, but as I looked at the rabbi I thought "Al, if you ever do decide to put on a yarmulke you'll need two dozen hair clips to keep it in place and a couple of ounces of lead sinkers to hold it down!" Time for a hair cut! The last one was the end of October, just before I got the photo for my new eight year drivers license.

Vivette gave me a great haircut. There sure was a lot of hair on that floor! On the way home I noticed that a couple of the council candidates in the recent election had yet to clear the city of their campaign signs. I think the law says that they have something like two weeks to do it before code enforcement is supposed to cite them. I'll have to check that out tomorrow...LOL

Look What Monkette Found ~ WILD BANANAS!

We had about half an hour to kill before Monkette and I would head over to city hall and listen to the mayoral and council candidates tell us about all the things that they thought we wanted to hear. It would be mostly a litany of self-agrandisement as one after the another would get cut off in mid-sentence by the moderator as they exceeded the alloted two minutes to respond to questions from the audience.

We decided to check out the back yard. Janis had told Monkette that she'd spotted a couple of stalks of bananas in the jungle that passes for our back yard. Code Enforcement hates my back yard, but I keep pointing out that it really looks pretty much the same as the Enchanted Forest park a couple of blocks away. They don't have much of a "lawn" either. One time they tried to cite me for over height "weeds" in the front yard but I made the officer kneel down and identify exactly what kind of "weeds" they were. He agreed with me that they were live oak seedlings, a protected species, and that getting permits at $25 each for a few hundred live oaks would be a major imposition on our banana budget. A week later I mowed the lawn anyway. The fine print exempted newly sprouted acorns.

These banana plants were already growning here when I bought the house back in '67. Some years there are a few stalks, some none. The soil isn't really conducive to raising bananas. There's pretty much solid coral rock just a few inches below the surface and bananas like deep thick rich soil. That's why we can't get a full stalk of fruit. Too little water and not enough nutrients.

These bananas are a small thin skinned variety called "apple bananas", and they have a smell and taste very much like apples. I like them sliced up on a bowl of corn flakes. Monkette just plain likes them! And I suppose we'll share them with Janis. That's probably why we got blessed with two stalks this year.

Elena Kaplan Got Politics In Her Blood At This Refreshment Table

I was telling Monkette about Charlie Zarzour and how my daughter, her older sister Elena Kaplan, used to love to go to city council meetings. At the age of three, four, or five it wasn't politics that fascinated her. I'm not sure if it was the cake and cookies on this table or if it was Charlie Zarzour that was the bigger atraction.

Charlie's main city job was a code enforcement officer but he earned a few extra bucks setting up the table and the coffee pot, just one, no decaf back then, and laying out the tray of cookies, cutting the cake, and HANDING you a plate of cake and pouring the coffee for you. And he managed to get around, drive a car, set up the refreshments, and so on with one leg and crutches.

Elena was only too glad to help him put out the napkins and paper plates. Then she'd get to sit on Charlie's lap. He insisted that she call him Charlie. Then he'd want to know all about what was happening in her life, how nursery school was going, and so on.

Now Charlie has gone off to that place in the sky. Elena has completed law school and is an associate for a big national law firm's Atlanta office

Robin reminded me the other night about that it's been seven years since I was getting ready to drive up to visit Elena again. I'd just broken up with my long time girlfriend Vivette, a dozen year relationship down the tubes, and was very depressed. I was very much in love with Vivette. The last thing I expected was for her to tell me that it was over. Finished!

I was really looking forward to spending a week with Elena. She always managed to cheer me up. We spoke every week on the phone. She'd come down to Miami to visit. I'd go up and visit her. A really ideal father daughter relationship. Then about two weeks before I was planning on making the trip I got The Letter! Essentially it said "I never want to see or hear from you again!" She blamed me for being the cause of everthing wrong with her life. I tried calling her. She didn't want to talk about it. I called her mother. "Oh, give her a few months. She'll get over it."

I went into a major funk. My doctor put me on an anti-depressant. I had a major reaction to it. It became a matter of just gritting my teeth and getting past it. I suppose I have, although every morning I get up and think of her and wonder "why?".

A few years ago she ran for office, Georgia state legislature. Her campaign literature told about her getting interested in politics when she was a little girl and her daddy used to take her to city council meetings. She lost. She needs to realize that bad karma begets bad karma. And that's what I think about every time I see this table with the coffee pot and the plate cookies

The Best Bread In Town!

I stopped by Ness Konditori ~ most people just call it "the German Bakery" ~ and after chatting with Helga and her son Ray for a few minutes I bought six turnovers. Helga makes the lightest most flakey crust you can imagine! I was a little dissapointed that all she had left was guava and cheese, and two apple. I like cherry best, and next plain guava. It might seem odd that a German bakery makes turnovers with a tropical fruit filling, and guava is tropical for sure. The guava and cheese combo is a Latino favorite.

Helga was astute enough to realize that as the neighborhood changes so should she. It's a little patch of unincorporated county sanwiched between the Town of Miami Shores on the south and across the Biscayne Canal just to the north is the Village of Biscayne Park. They're both a bit more upscale than the small area of county where thre bakery is located and it shows. Code enforcement is more lax and there are a lot more unkempt weeds than bushes in the "landscaping" around the parking lot.

Still the people drive there from both north and south and you'll find everybody from teens in baggy jeans with their caps on backwards to elderly ladies in short heels and dresses, their grey hair neatly coiffed every week at the beauty shop. These kids wanted to know about my "film camera". I explained why I prefer film and gave them a card. As an after thought I bought a bag of day old rolls that were by the cash register at half price, and headed up to Starbucks to pig out on turnovers with my morning coffee.

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