While the beauty salon is still there, the Town Hall has replaced the food store at the south end of town.  1954 File photo courtesy Joan Nichols

By Tim O’Meilia
    
    Briny Breezes celebrated its 50th anniversary as a town with a banner and a slide show of 800-plus old photos shown on the mayor’s flat screen television at somebody else’s picnic.  
    The anniversary was March 19. The picnic was March 23.
    “Low-key” is how Mayor Roger Bennett described it.
    Which is just the way Brinyites, as they call themselves, like it.
    Marking the 50th was almost an afterthought by the Town Council. The aldermen decided against extravagantly spending $420 in town money on anniversary lanyards or commemorative refrigerator magnets.
    Instead, handouts on homestead exemptions and water conservation were available at a table in the beach clubhouse. The town piggy-backed on the annual season-ending mobile home park picnic and beach party, the last major event before snowbirds head back north after Easter.
    After all, the important 50th anniversary was five years ago when residents marked Briny’s birth as a resident-owned corporation. Fearing the mobile home park would be sold, the residents banded together in 1958 and bought the park from founder Ward Miller’s family for $1.5 million.
    Three years later they held a mortgage-burning party when the note was paid off. Word is,  that was a real celebration.
    But, if creating the corporation was an act of self-protection, then founding the town in 1963 was an act of self-preservation.
    In the early 1960s, Palm Beach County had enacted new zoning regulations discouraging mobile-home parks on the barrier island. Getting a minor permit for a cabana took 14 months, Hugh David, the town’s first mayor, told Briny historian Joan Nicholls in a 1995 interview.
    “We would have lost Briny,” said Marilyn David, the late mayor’s 90-year-old widow. “We were afraid the county would vote the trailers out and we’d be left with nothing.”
    Then there was the fear that covetous neighbors were eager to annex more valuable oceanfront property. “Ocean Ridge would have gotten rid of the trailers and we were here before Ocean Ridge. What the heck? They thought we were trailer trash and we were much more than that,” David said.

Former Mayor Hugh David announced the new town logo after the town incorporated. 1963 File Photo courtesy of Marilyn David

    David, a well-connected real estate agent, quickly discovered that local legislators were unlikely to sponsor a bill creating a 38th municipality in the county. But David found a loophole in old Florida statutes, gathered 151 “freeholders” together in the old oceanfront clubhouse March 19, 1963, and voted the 43-acre mobile-home park into existence as a town, the county’s second smallest municipality.
    Former Mayor Carol Conkey spelled it out in A Simplified Guide to Our Town, a pamphlet available in the town’s library.  The town was founded:
    “— to avoid interference from and annexation by other local governments.
    “— to provide municipal services modified to meet Briny’s unique needs (these services, as provided by Palm Beach County, were slow, cumbersome and inadequate).
    “— for the financial rewards extended to municipal governments by such means as revenue sharing and control of local taxation.”
    Hugh David was elected mayor at that first meeting and kept the position, unchallenged, for 34 years until his death in 1997. Alderman Pete Fingerhut, a longtime resident, dubbed him “our George Washington.”
    “He was totally instrumental in our becoming a town; and because he was president so long, there was consistency between the town and corporation,” said Nicholls, Briny’s unofficial historian who collected the aging photographs shown at the picnic.
    Hugh David was a fierce advocate for Briny and its unique intertwining of town, corporation and trailer park. As corporation head, he got a sewage treatment system installed — unusual for beachfront communities. He supervised the construction of the swimming pool.
    As mayor, he secured a federal grant to connect Briny to the regional sewage treatment plant. He negotiated for the first traffic light in town.
    David persuaded Rinker Materials to dump discarded concrete on a wooden jetty and help create a groin that is still credited with preserving the town’s 600 feet of beachfront.
    His oft-repeated mantra was, “There’s no place like Briny,” a phase he adopted from 12-year Alderman Paul Folsom.
    Folsom was the state’s oldest elected official when he died in 1991 at the age of 99. A few months earlier he told The Palm Beach Post, “I expect to run again if my friends and the cremators don’t get me first.”
    In the early years, the town marshal, required by state law, was a handyman who patrolled at night in his truck. “But he was on call 24 hours a day,” said Rita Taylor, who was the town’s volunteer clerk for 34 years and an alderwoman for 36 years. The Fire Department was five volunteers from the corporation’s maintenance staff.
    When the marshal moved away early one summer, Briny had no way to replace him until November when elected officials returned. Taylor recruited temporary help from Ocean Ridge, where she was the paid town clerk, eventually leading to a contract with the town for police protection.
    At first the town had no town hall and no money to build or rent one. The council met in a room in the park’s oceanside clubhouse.
“We often met in the card room. When it was time for card players to have their game, we had to stop our meetings,” Taylor said.
    Taylor kept the town records in her mobile home. “When the meetings were over, I’d just take the records home. You have to keep records for so long, by state law, so after a few years, I ran out of space,” she said with a laugh.
    For a while, the town used file cabinets in the corporation office, but Taylor ended that after employees confused the records. The corporation offered to remodel an abandoned restaurant on the beach for a town hall, but the building was too dilapidated to be repaired.
    Eventually, Taylor and her records moved into a storefront next to the beauty shop, where Gustus Food Store and an awning shop had been.

Town Clerk pro tem Nancy Boczon and Mayor Roger Bennett share a light moment with Rita Taylor during a broadcast about the town’s history on Briny’s closed-circuit TV station. Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star

    Aside from Hugh David, Taylor is widely credited with keeping the town in step for decades. If David was the chairman, Taylor was the CEO. She was clerk in Ocean Ridge for more than 18 years and has been Gulf Stream’s clerk for 23.
    “It was five guys and Rita,” said Mayor Bennett. “It was ‘Rita, can we do this?’ She had all the (government) connections. She ran the town for 30 years.”
    The town hall today — or more accurately, the town office and council room — remains in the same storefront.
    Meeting notices are taped to the window, there is no audio system and the phone sometimes rings during meetings. Official hours are 10 a.m. to noon Tuesdays and Thursdays.  The town is just now computerizing its records.
    No one minds. “It’s a little bit of Old Florida that’s still here,” said Dorothy McNiece, 85, who recently published Looking Back in Time, a memoir that focuses mostly on her life in Briny and her parents, Glen and Ellene Mann, one of the park’s founding families.
    The town didn’t levy taxes until it became a requirement in order to receive state revenue sharing. Now the town charges the maximum state law allows, and that has to be supplemented by the corporation’s contribution to police, fire and sewage treatment costs.
    Except for the turbulent 2005-’07 period when residents clashed over the Ocean Land sale that collapsed, the town seldom holds elections. It’s more a matter of recruiting aldermen than voting for them.
    Said Marilyn David: “I’m three minutes from Delray Beach, a few miles from West Palm Beach. I have a large two-bedroom home on the Intracoastal Waterway. I’m a block from the ocean. You can’t beat that.”                                 

At 94, Bob Welstein has no intention of slowing down. He still personally oversees the lecture program he started in South Palm Beach that now bears his name. Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star

By Ron Hayes

    Robert Welstein had a heart attack at 49.
    The doctor gave him five years to live.
    That was in 1968.
    Now Robert Welstein is 94.
    And the doctor?
    Welstein shrugs. “He died.”
    Bob Welstein is still very much alive, still driving, still ready to give an opinion on just about anything, and still on a quest for knowledge.
    On Feb. 26, the town of South Palm Beach officially renamed its Quest For Knowledge lecture series the Robert Welstein Quest For Knowledge in honor of the man who founded it 15 years ago.
    The framed proclamation was prominently displayed in Town Hall on a recent Monday morning as about 25 men and women moseyed in, helped themselves to cookies and found a seat.
    The speakers change weekly, but there are always cookies, and Welstein always appears in a coat and tie.
    “One thing I’ve learned,” he says, “if you want the respect of the crowd and the speaker, you dress in a jacket and tie. If you want respect, you have to show respect.”
    The speaker that morning was supposed to be George Feirstein, discussing Broadway musicals, but a bad back had forced him to cancel. With little warning, Welstein drafted Herbert Haber, a retired CPA who once taught tax law.
    This was not a major crisis for Welstein.
    “One time I scheduled a doctor who was supposed to discuss dementia,” Welstein said, “and he forgot to show up.”
    The 10-lecture series runs from January to March, but Welstein begins scheduling speakers in July.
    “I have two concerns,” he explains about the subjects. “They have to be informative, and they have to be entertaining. I refuse anyone who wants to read something they found on a computer. And I want controversy.”
    He’s welcomed Sid Dinerstein, head of the county GOP, and liberal Democrat Lois Frankel. TV weathermen and newspaper columnists, lawyers and educators.
    “Whatever Bob wants to do, I tell him, do it,” says Mayor Donald Clayman. “I trust him totally. He gets speakers who normally charge pretty good fees, and he’s getting them for free. People just enjoy being with him.”
    A Chicago native, he’s owned the same Chateau Royale condo since 1979 and been a permanent resident since 1997. As a president of the Center for Lifetime Learning at Palm Beach State College, he organized a lecture bureau there, then transferred the concept to South Palm Beach.
    He and his late wife, Eleanor, were married for 62 years.
    He has two children — a son and daughter — and four grandchildren, about whom he promises not to bore you.
    “I’m responsible for the kids I brought into the world, and they’re responsible for their kids,” he says. “People who say, ‘Let me tell you about my grandchildren,’ I want to hit them in the head.”
    His children want him to retire.
    “Nuts to them,” he says. “When I die, I’ll quit.”          

Bulldozers give a sense of the width and depth of the renourishment project.
Photos by Michelle Quigley/ Special to The Coastal Star            

More photos from the beach renourishment project  

By Cheryl Blackerby
    
A 355-foot dredge, the most powerful in the country, is pumping sand onto 1.9 miles of Delray Beach’s hurricane-ravaged shore, restoring 1,000 feet of beach at a time.
    Dredging started the first week in March, and even with a nine-day work stoppage due to high seas, the project is scheduled to be finished by mid-April.
    The $9.2 million project is part of a 10-year renourishment plan, which happened to coincide with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy’s surges that took away sand and carved out chunks of beach, forming escarpments up to 5 feet high.
    By the end of the project, the beaches beginning 1,000 feet north of Atlantic Avenue and running south to several hundred feet beyond Atlantic Dunes Park — will be fortified with more than 1.6 million tons (1.2 million cubic yards) of sand.

Avoiding reef damage
    While there have been no reported problems with the Delray Beach project, state officials say they found damage to a reef 17 miles to the north. When the dredge was towed from Palm Beach Inlet to Delray Beach, tugboat cables dropped and were dragged across Flower Garden Reef, a popular dive site a mile off Palm Beach, according to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
    Two dive vessels and one local researcher reported the damage March 3 and the FDEP’s Coral Reef Conservation Program surveyed the damaged area March 6, said Mara Burger, FDEP spokeswoman. Jena Sansgaard, the agency’s reef injury prevention and response coordinator, is inspecting the damage.
    “The assessment of this injury is ongoing, therefore we do not know how much reef was damaged,” Burger said. “This is a long-term process and can take between six months to a year, or in some cases longer.”
    Barrel sponges were damaged, soft corals were displaced and some hard corals have abrasions, according to Jeanmarie Ferrara, spokeswoman for Great Lakes Dredge & Dock, the company that owns the dredge. The company has hired marine biologist Bruce Graham to give an assessment of damage and oversee repairs.
    The Army Corps of Engineers notified the company of  “pockets of reef injury within a three-mile area,” Ferrara said. The company and the FDEP began an “accelerated assessment recovery and remediation program on March 8 that involves collecting and attaching the sponges in a secure location on the reef and reattaching the barrel sponges to a suitable substrate so they can reestablish themselves.”
    Reef damage is unlikely in the Delray Beach project because the dredge and tow boats must pass through a gap in the limestone reefs, and not over the reefs, said Richard Spadoni, executive director of Coastal Planning and Engineering in Boca Raton, the company that is administering the project.
    CPE representatives have been on the dredge each time it was moved into the project area through the reef gap, he said.
    “We monitor the dredge tracking screen as movement occurs to see that the dredge stays within the designated corridor through the reef gap and also never goes over any of our reefs. In fact, we have a significant buffer zone around the reefs so that the equipment stays hundreds of feet away from the reefs,” Spadoni said.
    The sand for Delray Beach is pumped from “borrow areas,” between the limestone reefs and the beach, about 2,500 feet from shore. Project managers say they chose the areas after an intensive geotechnical investigation including surveys and analysis of sand extracted in “sediment cores,” taken up to 20 feet deep to show layers of sediment.
    The idea is to match the beach sand as closely as possible. It comes out gray but bleaches out over time and mixes with other sand. The FDEP has to approve the sand in the borrow areas.
    Some borrow areas have been previously dredged; the last major dredge was in 2002, though more sand was taken in 2005 in response to hurricanes. The deepest excavation is 57 feet from the ocean surface. There are buffered areas near the reefs and borrow holes that can’t be dredged because of scattered metallic objects — modern debris or metal from the S.S. Inchulva, a 386-foot British steel-hulled steamship that wrecked near the beach in 1903. The metal bits are buried in deep sand and can’t be identified.

Dunes best option so far
    Delray Beach is lucky to have abundant sand just offshore.
    “Miami doesn’t have our plentiful reserves of sand,” Spadoni said. “Miami may have to borrow from the Bahamas at some point. They are close to depletion.”
    But Delray’s sand reserves won’t last forever, he said. “Sand does not come back into the borrow holes, and we are depleting the sand. But Delray will be OK for the next 40 or 50 years.”
    Sand can’t be dredged east of the reefs because of the deep water.
    At a recent Delray Beach City Council meeting, Commissioner Al Jacquet asked Matt Jack, project manager for Great Lakes Dredge and Dock Company, if he knew of a permanent solution to the beach erosion problem.
    Jack didn’t have an alternative solution, and wasn’t expected to since he’s in the dredging business; but what Jack and his company are doing is as close as Delray Beach can get to a permanent solution.         

Other options were tried and failed. In the 1960s, Delray Beach had no beach, and the water often lapped the pavement of A1A. In desperation, the city installed “waffle revetment,” interlocking concrete blocks on the beach, which effectively kept people off the beach, didn’t help with erosion, and eventually collapsed after water undermined the structure.
    In late 1973, the city started pumping sand onto the beach, building dunes and planting sea oats and other vegetation. The beach grew wider because the dunes effectively captured sand. During Sandy’s surge, the dunes protected the beach and homes.
    “Delray Beach has one of the largest dune systems in South Florida,” Spadoni said.
    Calculating for regular dune and beach renourishment is the closest anyone has come to a permanent solution, he said. 

Mayor-elect Cary Glickstein’s family friend, retired Judge William Gladstone (center), shares a story before administering the oath of office in the Delray Beach City Commission chambers March 28. Pictured: Commissioner Al Jacquet, Commissioner-elect Shelly Petrolia’s sons, Scott, 10, Alex, 13, Zachary, 13, Anthony, 9, Petrolia, Gladstone, Glickstein and his youngest children Jack, 12, and Lily, 14. Kurtis Boggs/The Coastal Star

By Tim Pallesen
    
Delray Beach’s newly elected mayor and city commissioner say density incentives are no longer necessary to attract developers to much of the downtown.
    “Our focus needs to be on quality, not quantity now,” Cary Glickstein said after winning the March 12 mayoral race.
    “The days are long gone when we need to incentivize development in many parts of our downtown,” Glickstein said. “Waterfront development adjacent to Atlantic Avenue is not an area that requires development incentives for economic viability.”
    Glickstein defeated Tom Carney in the mayor’s race while another newcomer, Shelley Petrolia, easily beat two opponents for an open commission seat.
    “I don’t think there’s a need for incentives any longer. We’re a popular destination,” Petrolia said. “We need to make sure development conforms to the feeling that we’re a little village by the sea.”
    Density incentives became a campaign issue after residents fought the Atlantic Crossing project on Atlantic Avenue east of Federal Highway last year.
    “I definitely was not in support of what passed,” Petrolia said. “It’s too intense for that corner.”
    The Beach Property Owners Association called for the city to review its downtown master plan to identify where incentives are no longer necessary.
    “Incentives were needed 20 years ago,” association president Andy Katz said. “Those incentives have worked. We don’t need incentives on East Atlantic Avenue anymore, although they still make sense on West Atlantic Avenue.”
    Glickstein and Petrolia both say they support a downtown master plan review.
    “Good planning is a proactive, forward-thinking process,” Glickstein said. “Lately, we have had far too much reacting and too little community dialog, which explains why our town is lurching from one controversial project to the next.”
    On another issue of concern to coastal residents, Glickstein wants more code enforcement and community policing officers to get tough with sober-house owners who cause problems.
    “A significant portion of nonviolent crime in our town relates to transient housing,” the new mayor said. “We need far more feet on the street to enforce our landlord-tenant regulations and Building Department violations, to make it harder for opportunists to survive the economic burden of complying with our codes.”
    Glickstein narrowly beat Carney by a 254-vote margin to win the mayor’s job. Petrolia got 56 percent of the vote in a three-way race against Kurt Lehmann and Alexander Christopher.
    Voters also approved charter changes on the March 12 ballot.
    Commissioners who previously served two-year terms now will serve for three years. Unchanged is the maximum of six years that a commissioner can serve. The time served will no longer count against a commissioner who is elected mayor for another six years.                    

By Margie Plunkett
    
In an attempt to ease downtown traffic, Delray Beach commissioners agreed to changes for the Southeast Second Avenue valet parking queue, including providing it more spaces and prohibiting left-hand turns at the intersection.
    The commissioners, separately, were also in consensus about adding smart metered parking spaces at Old School Square Garage.
    During a review of downtown valet parking at a March 14 workshop meeting, commissioners discussed allowing the Southeast Second Avenue valet parking queue licensed to Prime Steakhouse to have two additional spaces on the west side, to take out a landscape nodule at a price of $6,000 and to use spaces across the street to return patrons’ cars.
    The additional spaces and new configuration would shift the queue further south off Atlantic Avenue and allow more cars to line up without backing up traffic as they await valet parking.
Traffic specialist Scott Aaronson wrote in a staff memo that while the queue was not a problem in its initial years, the recent opening of Salt 7, Park Tavern and Racks restaurants in the immediate area has increased parking congestion. “The dedicated two-space queue is insufficient to accommodate traffic demand,” he said.
    Since the valet changes would also mean patrons crossing the street as their cars are returned, a downtown police spokesman said it would be helpful for someone at the valet to walk people across.
    The removal of the landscaping would be at the valet parking owners’ expense rather than taxpayers’. Commissioners also asked the town engineer for no left turns in the vicinity of Atlantic and Swinton to keep traffic from backing up.
    Commissioner Christina Morrison suggested eliminating all the left-hand turns at the intersection of Atlantic and Second, where the queue is located, but City Engineer Randall Krejcarek said, “Take baby steps. Let’s do one and see what happens.”
    While commissioners were in agreement on the plan, they could not take action at a workshop meeting.
    Separately, Delray Beach staff recommended that commissioners add multispace parking meters at Old School Square garage. In addition to providing paid parking management after 4 p.m. from Thursday through Saturday, the city is working on a program that will identify employee autos and permit them to park in specified spaces only.
    One pay station would be provided at each elevator landing, for a total cost of $104,774, according to a memo from Scott Aaronson, the parking facilities manager. The Community Redevelopment Agency would pay $75,000 of the cost, with the balance from the in-lieu parking fund.
    The pay stations accept credit card and paper money, with text message communication with customers to inform them of expiring meter time, as well as allowing parking to be extended with credit card payment. Patrons also can pay meters by phone.           

By Betty Wells

Delray Beach would get about $1.1 million a year in extra tax money under a proposal that would lop off the property east of the Intracoastal Waterway — and the taxes that come from it — now assigned to the city’s redevelopment agency.
Community Redevelopment Agency staffers computed that number after comparing 1985 property values with the 2012 values of more than 2,000 acres east of the Intracoastal assigned to the CRA. The comparison showed increases for some parcels as high as 200 percent.
“We were looking at a difference of nearly 30 years, so the increase in valuation was no surprise,” said Diane Colonna, CRA executive director.
The plan to change CRA boundaries, the valuation analysis and a discussion of shifting the money to the general fund were to be discussed at a workshop on March 6. It was canceled March 5 when the city decided to wait until a new city manager was on staff. Louie Chapman started work April 1.
The CRA was established by the city in 1985, long before the downtown transformed into a bustling hub of glitzy restaurants and trendy shops. The goal was to get rid of “blight”: fix streets and other infrastructure, renovate buildings, build parks — anything that helps the area targeted in the agency’s district. Its boundaries generally include the central business district, adjacent neighborhoods east of I-95 between Lake Ida Road and Southwest 10th Street, and much of the area north of downtown between Swinton Avenue and the Intracoastal Waterway to Boynton Beach.
The formula used to determine funding for the CRA is based on a percentage of current value of district property, less than what it was valued at in 1985, when the agency was formed. Colonna said that because CRA financing is based on the value of the total property in the district, each parcel needed to be researched.
City Commissioner Angeleta Gray asked in November that the city research cutting from the district the area east of the Intracoastal Waterway. Gray said the city needs the money to provide services, and that there are a number of areas in the CRA that are not slum or blighted.
The state law that created CRAs defines slum generally as “an area that has physical or economic conditions leading to poverty, or crime because there is a predominance of buildings that need rehabilitation,” and blight is defined as the area where buildings, streets and other structures are deteriorating, causing unsafe conditions, whether due to poverty or not.
“Of course, changing the boundaries — either removing an area or adding an area — is the decision of the City Commission,” said Colonna. “Should we have to deal with cuts to revenue, though, we’d have to look at cutting a number of programs that we fund.”
The CRA prepared detailed revenue and program-funding information, along with the analysis of the property valuations, in advance of the postponed meeting.
Colonna said that because the tax increment financing is calculated each year on properties in the entire district, all property records had to be included to estimate the TIF generated by just one area — the area east of the Intracoastal, proposed to be cut. If the area were cut from the district, CRA funds would be reduced by about $1.7 million — $1,082,736 would revert to the city’s general fund, and $683,165 would go to the county’s general fund. Palm Beach County Commissioner Hal Valeche said he hadn’t followed the proposal or the possible impact on the county’s budget.
Colonna said that not only does the CRA provide infrastructure improvements, but also money goes toward city programs and some staff positions. That includes more than $1 million for the “Clean and Safe” program of policing, landscape and code enforcement; $91,750 for a project engineer position for environmental services; and more than $600,000 for tennis tournaments sponsorship.
To change the boundaries, the City Commission would have to pass an amendment to the CRA plan.
Changing the boundaries of a CRA in Florida is not unusual, said Carol Westmoreland, executive director of the Florida Redevelopment Association, a nonprofit for the state’s more than 200 CRAs.
“It’s critical that CRAs stay fluid, actually,” she said. “If a city is progressing and making improvements for the quality of life of its citizens, then a natural shift will occur.”
Former Mayor Tom Carney and commissioners Gray, Adam Frankel and Al Jacquet, and former commissioner Christina Morrison, did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the proposal.
Doug Smith, who was serving as Delray Beach interim city manager through March, said that though the proposal was not on any official meeting agenda, the issue was expected to be addressed in April. A new mayor and a new commissioner took office March 28, in addition to the new manager beginning his job in early April.
“I would say that it’s definitely a proposal that’s still out there,” Smith said. “It just made sense to delay it.” The CRA has addressed criticism in recent months for its support of the Art Garage, a nonprofit entertainment venue.            

By Tim Pallesen

    Money given to nonprofits by the Delray Beach Community Redevelopment Agency will be examined in an audit by the Florida Auditor General’s Office.
    The Legislature’s Joint Audit Committee ordered the audit April 1 at the request of Sen. Jeff Clemens, D-Lake Worth, after questions were raised last month.
    “It was an issue that was discussed throughout the election season,” committee Chairman Sen. Joseph Abruzzo, D-Wellington, said. “I believe it is in the best interests to at least check.”
    Abruzzo said the auditor general will also examine possible conflicts of interests between CRA board members and contractors who do work for the agency.
    A city planning and zoning board member, Gerry Franciosa, wrote city officials last month saying it was illegal for the CRA to financially support the Arts Garage, a popular music and arts venue.
    “The CRA has run amuck and gotten way out of bounds,” Franciosa said again early this month. “This is the perfect example.”
    The CRA spent $304,795 on the Arts Garage last year, a legislative staff report said.
    CRA Executive Director Diane Colonna said expenditures to nonprofits that benefit downtown development are proper.
    “Our attorneys have looked at it and advised that everything we’re doing is allowed by state statutes,” Colonna said. “I hope the audit confirms what we believe is correct.”
    “The Arts Garage has been a huge hit, bringing many families downtown for the first time,” Colonna said.
    The CRA also contributes money to Old Square Square, the Spady Museum, the city library and other nonprofits that attract people to the downtown.
    Mayor Cary Glickstein defended the CRA and said the state audit is unnecessary.
    “I hope this audit is not the result of one person’s letter that was full of innuendo and no factual information,” Glickstein said.
    “Our CRA has been a model for the state and the country,” he said. “The CRA has been funding nonprofits since its inception. This is not some sinister plot.”
    Franciosa quotes a 2010 written opinion by former Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum that CRA money should not be given to promote socially beneficial programs. “The CRA is operating outside its scope by funding the Arts Garage with tax dollars,” Franciosa said.
    The CRA says its purpose in supporting the Arts Garage is to bring Atlantic Avenue traffic into the Pineapple Grove Arts District.
    “The CRA should be happy this audit is happening because they can get a definitive answer from the state whether they can do this,” Franciosa said.   

A temporary lifeguard stand opened in March on Lantana Beach.
    “Town staff built the one on the dune,” said Lantana Town Manager Deborah Manzo. “We are hoping that the town will obtain approval from the state to put a (permanent) stand back on the beach, but we have to go through an application process to obtain approval (from the state’s Department of Environmental Protection) for that.”  
    The temporary tower, which cost about $5,000 including $700 for the roof, extends from the boardwalk near the showers.
    The original lifeguard stand was swept to sea in October during Hurricane Sandy.
— Mary Thurwachter

Lantana council members Malcolm Balfour and Lynn Moorehouse (center) cut a cake as Moorehouse’s wife, Celeste, watches at a council meeting. Kurtis Boggs/The Coastal Star

In Lantana, it only took 284 votes for Hypoluxo Island resident Malcolm Balfour to win the Group 2 council seat. That position was vacated last year by Cindy Austino, who moved to Florida’s Panhandle.
    Balfour, 75, a retired TV and newspaper journalist who worked at the New York Post and the National Enquirer, is the former chairman of the Lantana Nature Preserve.
    Balfour’s opponents were Joe Ferrell, an architectural design consultant for a flooring company and alternate on the Lantana Planning Commission, who received 174 votes; and Rosemary Mouring, a long-time community volunteer and a member of the Lantana Planning Commission, who received 80 votes in the March 12 election.
    Councilwoman Lynn Moorhouse, a dentist who represents Group 1, was re-elected without opposition.
    Balfour and Moorhouse were sworn in during the council’s March 25 meeting. The council chose Councilman Tom Deringer to be vice mayor and Moorhouse as mayor pro tem.
— Mary Thurwachter

By Mary Thurwachter
    
Council members in Lantana talked about rescinding the noise variance they approved in January so that contractors, by working at night, could more easily meet their construction deadlines for the Ocean Avenue Bridge.
    Although clearly annoyed when it looked like the contractor’s representative was a no-show at the March 11 meeting, when the topic was up for discussion, the town chose to take no action.
    “They don’t come and thumb their nose at us,” said council member Tom Deringer. “If we delay, we’re the bad guys.”
    As part of the agreement, which permits work related noise to occur from 6 to 11 p.m. until May 31, GLF Construction agreed to complete all pile driving no later than Jan. 25. But the pounding continued well into February, council members said, and that was a clear violation of the agreement.
    “I’ve gotten complaints about the pile driving,” Mayor Dave Stewart said. “I wish they were here with answers as to why.”
    After a 30-minute council discussion, GLF project manager Andres Sosa granted that wish, arriving at the council chamber. Sosa admitted the contractor was in violation of the agreement.
    “Do you still need to work evenings and do you still need to drive piles?” Stewart asked Sosa.
    Sosa said yes, that only 55 of the 100 piles had been driven at that date, and that it could take another month to finish that phase of the job.
    Despite any annoyances or problems, the council said it wanted the bridge to be completed on schedule. Sosa assured them it would be done in November.
    “All you have to do is stop pile driving after 6 p.m.,” Stewart told Sosa.
    Palm Beach County is building the $32 million replacement bridge, which will be 11 feet higher than its 62-year-old predecessor. The old bridge closed in March 2012.
    In other news, the council awarded a $47,440 contract to Matthews Consulting Inc.  for the engineering phase for improvements to address drainage problems in the municipal beach parking lot.
    The parking lot has a history of flooding after storms. The contract covers design, surveying, and permitting for drainage and paving improvements.   

 By Tim O’Meilia
    
For the first time since he was hired in 2005, South Palm Beach Town Manager Rex Taylor underwent an evaluation by the Town Council at a Feb. 26 council workshop.   
Taylor got good marks in sum from the individual council members, especially in dealing with employees, responding to council members’ requests and solving problems.
    “I back him 100 percent. We are lucky to have him,” said Mayor Donald Clayman, who was the most supportive of the eight-year manager.
    Although she gave him good marks overall, Councilwoman Stella Jordan said Taylor sometimes does not apprise council members of what’s going on. She suggested he begin an online calendar.
    Jordan also said he needs to study the town charter for conflicts and should be more available for town events and should attend advisory board meetings at least once annually.
    She suggested it was waste of money to have the town’s labor attorney attend a council meeting to announce an agreement had been reached.
    Jordan and Councilman Robert Gottlieb said they were disappointed the council was not involved in the police collective bargaining negotiations earlier. The council did not become involved until after negotiations had reached impasse.
    Councilwoman Bonnie Fischer interviewed town employees about their relationship with Taylor — giving him good marks — and lauded him for his handling of seawall endangerment.
    “This was a good exercise for the town manager to officially understand what each of us is concerned about,” said Councilman Joseph Flagello.
    Jordan pushed for the evaluation, citing a town charter requirement of an annual review. She even developed an evaluation form that at least one other council member used.
    She also said at that meeting and the following March 12 council meeting that Taylor’s contract violates the town charter requiring only five-year deals. Taylor’s doesn’t specify. No other council members took up her suggestion.
    In other business at the March 12 council meeting:
    * Council members Joseph Flagello and Bonnie Fischer were sworn in for their second two-year terms.  Flagello was unanimously chosen by his colleagues as vice mayor for the second year.
    * The council approved the settlement of a lawsuit and a new 10-year agreement with the city of Lake Worth to operate the regional sewage treatment plant.  South Palm Beach will receive $34,631 as part of a $4.5 million settlement between Lake Worth and six other governmental partners in the plant’s operation. Lake Worth sued the partners for $7 million in 2010, claiming underpayments. But a consultant hired by the partners uncovered shoddy bookkeeping and a state audit was critical as well. The new 10-year contract is designed to avoid the shortcomings of the previous deal. South Palm Beach spent about $18,000 in legal fees and $30,000 for its share of the consultant in defending the suit, for a net loss of about $14,000. The town had set aside $219,000 in reserves in case of a different outcome.
    * The council unanimously approved a variance to allow the Tuscany condominium to erect an entrance sign with lettering taller than the 8 inches allowed by the town’s sign code. “If we had the letters and numbers recommended (by the sign code) no one could see where we are,” said Tuscany President Linda Taft. The capital T on Tuscany will be 13 inches tall and the street numbers 3570 will be 10.5 inches tall.                                

Lee DiPietro has been running since she was a child. She competes in about 25 races per year.
Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star

By Mary Jane Fine
    
Lee DiPietro knows how it must look to the uninitiated. Here she is — it’s 7:15 in the morning, a time when many folks in Gulf Stream are still rubbing sleep from their eyes or stirring cream into their coffee — and she’s hot-footing it past their windows, not even breathing hard, occasionally calling out to a security cop, “No, no, I’m not running from anyone, I’m OK.”
    DiPietro grins, her past-the-shoulder-length hair still damp from the shower, and says, “They think I’m crazy.”
    Crazy, yes, crazy about running. And crazy good at it.
    DiPietro is an elite runner. The top American masters woman in the 2005 Boston Marathon. Twice a qualifier for the Olympic trials. A sixth-place finisher in the 1997 Hawaii Ironman, which meant 26.2 miles of running, 112 miles biking and a 2.4-mile swim.
    Her personal best marathon time: 2 hours 46 minutes 59 seconds. Just for comparison’s sake, the men’s qualifying time for the 2014 Boston Marathon is 3 hours 5 minutes; for women, it’s 3 hours 35 minutes — and that’s in the 18-to-34 age range. DiPietro turns 55 this month.
    “I’ve always been super competitive,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to win. You get that endorphin high and you meet all the challenges and you think, ‘Boy, I made it through that tough spot.’ ”
    Florida is its own kind of tough spot. Not for the heat, though. Much of the year, home for DiPietro and her husband, also named Lee, is Ruxton, Md., just north of Baltimore, where summers get plenty hot. Florida’s challenge is its table-top terrain. “No hills, it’s all flat,” DiPietro says, gazing out the window of the Ocean Ridge garden apartment the couple just sold; they’ll move, late this month, into a house nearby. “My legs feel kind of flat because there’s no change in pace.”
    Ah, but what’s running without challenges? So, pretty much every day, she’s up and out and, on this Monday morning, just returned from an 11-mile out-and-back through Gulf Stream to the end of Seagate and home again. Sometimes, for variety and “altitude,” she’ll run the old beach road north and over the bridge for what she terms “a little hill work.”
    She’s writing a book about running — Against the Wind, she calls it — and her editor, Herta Feely, is pushing her to comb through her past, relive her running highs and lows, dig deep into the inspiration, motivation and, yes, perspiration it takes to do what she’s done and continues to do.
    So back to the starting line: She was one of five daughters, the middle one, growing up on Long Island, and schoolwork wasn’t her personal best. “I was always an athlete,” she says. “I think that was my way of getting attention. I stood out. I couldn’t wait to get out on the playground. Lacrosse, field hockey, basketball, running.”
    Her parents divorced when she was 8. They both remarried, which meant step-parents and step-grandparents and step-siblings. “I think running was a big outlet for all those years,” she says.
    It was an outlet, too, when she was commuting to midtown, two hours in, two hours out, working in sales for the fabric firm Brunschwig & Fils. Back home in Long Island, she shook off her tiredness by running. It was 1985 when she experienced her first race — the last 10 miles of the Boston Marathon — to accompany her sister. “I jumped in right before Heartbreak Hill,” she remembers, “and, omigod, people are cheering for me!”
    Right then, the bug bit and it never let go. “In November of ’88, I ran the New York Marathon with my own bib on my stomach,” she says.
    Since then, she’s run — she pauses to calculate, gives up — oh, maybe 25 races a year, some of them 5Ks, some marathons. “You want to make sure you set an attainable goal and you can finish it,” she says. “Next time, you push yourself a little harder and you discover things about yourself.”
    In 2010, all that pushing got a double-whammy test, spelled out in the subtitle of her book: “An Ironwoman’s Race for Her Family’s Survival.” First, her husband, himself an accomplished triathlete, was diagnosed with cancer, a hamstring sarcoma. Then, the day before his surgery, their phone rang with the news that their then-30-year-old son, Tim, had been in a horrific accident and was being airlifted to the hospital. He’d broken both legs, cut a major artery, might never walk again.
    “My running background and discipline,” she says, “that mentality — hitting the wall in a race and pushing past it — got me through.”
    That mentality helped get her husband through rounds of chemo and radiation, their son through multiple surgeries. As if to illustrate, the front door opens and the other Lee DiPietro strides in, just back from his morning bike ride. Tim DiPietro visited over the weekend and announced that he’s embarking on a back-country ski trip in Alaska.
    On a hall table, there’s a picture of Tim, leg in a cast, leaning on a walker. And a photo of Tim now, all healed and raring to go. And there’s his younger-by-four-years brother, Cryder, the nonrunner of the family, who made his own athletic mark in lacrosse.
    So, yes, the good times are punctuated by bad ones, but, for DiPietro, even the bad ones have their purpose. “You can never tell what’s gonna happen on race day,” she says. “But you have these dark moments to think about what went wrong and how to make it better.”  

By Tim O’Meilia

Gulf Stream town commissioners gave a tentative green light to new street lights — provided town residents give a thumbs up to a demonstration model to be erected, perhaps near Town Hall soon.
    “Let people see what they are going to get,” said Commissioner Robert Ganger.
    What commissioners prefer is a power-efficient, long-life LED light set inside a black, six-sided, lantern-style covering with little adornment, atop a 12- to 14-foot black pole. The model, called the La Jolla by manufacturer Beacon Products of Sarasota, emits a white light that can be adjusted to any of three brightness settings.
    At its March 15 meeting, the commission deemed the La Jolla more elegant than an eight-sided lantern-style with more ornamental features.
    Fifty-three of the new lights would replace lights on the town’s interior roads. Another 35 cobra-head style LED lights would replace FPL models along State Road A1A.
    The taller cobra heads are necessary because they must be set farther off the road. The cobra heads would be black with painted black poles, replacing the concrete and gray poles and heads currently in place.
    “It’s an opportunity for improved safety and security but also an aesthetic streetscape,” said town planner Marty Minor of Urban Design Kilday Studios. “It creates a unique identity for the town.”
    Beacon Products is the only vendor offering the decorative lights, so the town will not seek bids.
    The new street lights will cost an estimated $380,000 but last 30 years. The black paint has a 10-year warranty and the lights a 5-year guarantee. “Considering it’s 30 years, that’s a good price,” said Commissioner Garrett Dering.
    FPL would replace the current lights, both along A1A and on interior roads, at no cost.
    Town Manager William Thrasher proposed borrowing the money from the $5.5 million in the undergrounding fund built from property-owner assessments. The money is available because undergrounding work will not begin until June at the earliest.
    The town would repay the money — including an additional $81,000 for street signs — at a 0.75 percent interest rate, cheaper than a 1.85 percent bank loan rate. The commission would increase town property tax by 30 cents per $1,000 of taxable property value for the next three years to repay the loan.
    Thrasher and members of the town’s civic association have said residents are willing to slightly increase taxes for the new lights and signs.
    Commissioners approved the black-bordered street, traffic and school signs in February.
    In other business:
* Commissioners Tom Stanley and Ganger were sworn in to complete the year remaining on the terms of previous commissioners. Both were appointed last summer and were unopposed in the March election.
* Town officials have dropped plans to install Australian pines along State Road A1A in front of the new Harbor View Estates after a disagreement with state officials over a “clear zone” for driver visibility along the three-lot stretch. State officials have insisted on an 18-foot clear zone, which would prevent installation of the pines. But the town will not remove any of the roadside growth there now. Town Manager William Thrasher said Australian pines would be installed along other stretches of the road between Sea Road and Pelican Lane when the opportunity arises, based on an 11-foot clear zone approved by the state Legislature in 1996 given the historic value of the trees to the town.                                

By Tim O’Meilia
    
Gulf Stream resident Martin O’Boyle’s request to remodel the entry way on his 1983 Hidden Harbour Drive home was denied twice by town commissioners at their March 15 meeting.
    During a four-hour hearing, the commission unanimously upheld Town Manager William Thrasher’s interpretation of the town code disallowing a 25-foot-high entry feature above the front door, then rejected three of four variances O’Boyle sought to override the code.
    “My taste on my property is not your prerogative. My taste on my property is not your business,” O’Boyle told commissioners after his challenge to the code was rejected but before the variances were considered.
    “What you’ve done here is reprehensible,” he said.
    O’Boyle has filed more than 300 public requests with the town in recent weeks for material relating to variances considered by the town dating to 1990, for variances involving architect Mark Marsh, who supported Thrasher’s interpretation, and for other material.
    Town Clerk Rita Taylor said she has filled some of the requests but not all of them. “We’ve got more than one resident in town who needs my attention. I’m trying to do my best to please everyone,” she said.                                  

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami has begun an investigation of allegations by a Manalapan resident that the town’s Police Department engages in racial profiling.
Resident Kersen De Jong first filed a formal complaint with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in December. The FDLE said it lacked jurisdiction and referred the complaint to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Tallahassee.
The case has since been transferred to the U.S. Attorney’s Miami office.
Manalapan Police Chief Carmen Mattox also has sought a review of the police department practices with the FDLE, FBI and the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. The FBI also said it lacked jurisdiction.
    An attorney for De Jong     has notified the town that a former houseguest of his agreed  to return to the United States to be interviewed. De Jong has said his friend, Donald Billings, was followed to De Jong’s home without reason on several occasions several years ago.
    De Jong also has complained that both Mattox and Police Officer Wayne Shepherd told him that police policy was to keep visitors out of town. Both Mattox and Shepherd have denied that.
    In February, De Jong’s lawyers demanded that both Mattox and Shepherd be fired and that the town establish an anti-profiling policy as required by state law. In a letter to De Jong’s attorney, Town of Manalapan attorney Jeffrey Pheterson said the town has an anti-profiling policy.
— Tim O’Meilia

Town voters, the few who did vote, overwhelmingly approved a charter change imposing term limits on the mayor and commissioners by a 52-14 margin.
    Elected officials can serve a maximum of three consecutive two-year terms as either mayor or commissioner, or four consecutive two-year terms in a combination of commission and mayoral posts. The change affects those currently in office.
    Only 18.4 percent of the town’s voters cast ballots, including five by absentee ballot. The turnout likely would have been higher if any of the four seats on the ballot were contested.
    Instead, Commissioner David Cheifetz moves over to the mayor’s position, Peter Isaac replaces him as a commissioner representing Point Manalapan, Chauncey Johnstone represents oceanfront residents and former commissioner Tom Thornton returns as an at-large commissioner.

— Tim O’Meilia

Manalapan Town Clerk Lisa Petersen administers the oath of office to Commissioner-Elect Chauncey Johnstone (left), Mayor-Elect David Cheifetz, Commisioner Tom Thornton and Commissioner-Elect Peter Isaac in the Commission Chambers. Kurtis Boggs/The Coastal Star

By Tim O’Meilia
    
In his first 15 minutes in office, Manalapan’s new mayor set an agenda for the Town Commission to deal with during his first year in office.
    “What I’d like to try to accomplish in the next year is to deal with the major issues for the town,” said Mayor David Cheifetz, shortly after he was sworn in with three new commissioners at the March 26 meeting.  All four were unopposed in the annual March commission election.
    The four items on his list: the town-owned water system and an impending multimillion-dollar distribution system upgrade, a budget process that leads to hurried last-minute September decisions, beach erosion and seawall standards and, finally, increased participation by residents in town business.
    Cheifetz also set out five rules “to run a more effective, less contentious meeting,” hoping to streamline the monthly sessions that often stretch to four hours. He later dubbed them “David’s Rules of Order.”
    Chief among them is a five-minute limit for both speakers from the audience and commission alike on a single topic. Also on the list: treat others with “respect and courtesy,” don’t repeat earlier points, don’t read a statement already in the record and stick to the agenda item.
    “We can either do it by the book” he said, referring to the massive Robert’s Rules of Order, “or by the five rules. Let’s try the five rules first.”
    That lasted until discussion on the budget process veered into Commissioner Howard Roder’s complaint about an expenditure placed in the wrong line item in the budget and the use of overtime and car allowances.
    “It’s sloppy work, and if I didn’t come up with this, who would?” Roder said.
    Commissioner Louis DeStefano urged Roder to meet privately with town officials to express his concerns before bringing them to commission meetings.
    At the suggestion of former Commissioner Robert Evans, commissioners decided to begin the annual budget process in June with an examination of projected expenses.
Estimated property tax revenues are not available until July 1. Budgets must be approved in September, by state law. In recent years, the commission did not begin budget workshops until August and often made final adjustments to the budget at public hearings in September.
    In dealing with another item on Cheifetz’s to-do list, Commissioner Tom Thornton announced a four-member task force to deal with the water system.
    “Do we sell it, do we keep it, do we give it away?” Thornton said of the system, which serves Manalapan and Hypoluxo. “It’s not that we’re running a bad system. It’s probably that we don’t have enough customers. You just have to look next door to Lake Worth to see what problems running a utility are for a town.”
    Thornton expects to have a recommendation in three months. The volunteer committee comprises Thornton, former Mayor Kent Shortz, real estate developer Nick Nichols and banker Barry Haase.
    In other business:
* Chauncey Johnstone, Peter Isaac and Thornton were sworn in as commissioners and Cheifetz as mayor, all serving two-year terms. Cheifetz nominated DeStefano as vice mayor and Thornton as mayor pro tem, and both were approved unanimously.
* Commissioners approved the purchase of a new all-terrain vehicle for police beach patrols, replacing a 2-year-old model that is requiring extensive repair. The cost will range from $9,500 to $15,000. Police Chief Carmen Mattox said several models will be tested on the beach before a decision is made.
* Commissioners rejected a proposal by Commissioner John Murphy to settle an eight-year legal battle with oceanfront resident Wendy Navellier. Murphy suggested the town accept $160,000 and the removal of a pool cabana building on the Navellier estate to end the dispute. Four commissioners said no and Johnstone had no opinion.  Since 2005, when the Navelliers began construction on a pool cabana without a permit or a variance, code enforcement fines of $450,000 have accrued. Navellier sued the town after the commission refused to grant a variance but lost. The Florida Supreme Court declined to review the case in February. The town has spent $340,000 in legal fees on the
case.                                          

By Jane Smith

The coastal South County retail market is stabilizing, say brokers who are breathing more easily after the past few years of real estate upheaval.
    Its brightest spots are Atlantic Avenue in Delray Beach, which has only a few empty stores, and Mizner Park in Boca Raton, which is nearly fully leased.
    Lord & Taylor, a department store that left the nearby Town Center mall nearly a decade ago, is expected to open this fall in the former Robb & Stucky furniture store. That store opening should energize the southern end of Mizner Park, brokers agree.
    Other relatively new tenants include the Yard House restaurant, iPic Theater and Tanzy bar and restaurant.
    Brokers expect the slowly improving economy to continue, allowing shoppers and diners to spend more freely.
    Food does really well in east Boca, said Roxanne Register, vice president of retail brokerage services for CBRE’s Boca Raton office. Other successful retailers sell fashion, jewelry and clothes.
    Mizner Park, with 236,000 square feet of retail space, is 98 percent leased, she said. Built on city-owned land with leasable retail, residential and office buildings, it requires visitors to pay for street parking.
    At Royal Palm Place, just to the south, parking is free. Restaurants dominate here, too. The plaza’s occupancy rate is between 94 and 95 percent for retail and restaurants, Register said.
    Parking is also free on East Palmetto Park Road, between the Intracoastal Waterway and the ocean. Retailers here cater to tourists and beach-goers. A new 7-Eleven convenience store sits on the north side.
    Asking rents along this street range between $25 and $40 a square foot, according to Spencer Grossman, senior commercial associate in Merin Hunter Codman’s Boca Raton office.
    “No one pays the asking rent,” Grossman said. “That would be like going into a car dealership and paying the sticker price.”
    He explained that national credit-worthy tenants, such as P.F. Chang’s, get the best deals. Next would be the regional chains, followed by local chains and then individual stores. Landlords feel more comfortable renting to chains because there is a company to go after if the one location fails, he said.
    The location in a center and the foot traffic also influence what a landlord can charge. As an example, he said, on Atlantic Avenue most tenants pay in the $50 range, but on the side streets that rent drops to the low $20s. Then, of course, the negotiating ability of the tenant’s broker plays a role. Tougher negotiators will get better deals, Grossman said.
    In Boynton Beach, the downtown area is hard to find.
    Some think the true center of the city lies on Congress Avenue, between Gateway Boulevard and Woolbright Road, because that is home to national chain stores and the Boynton Beach Mall.
    Still others think it should be east of the interstate. The Las Ventanas complex at the northwest corner of Woolbright Road and Federal Highway, with 40,000 square feet of retail on the first floor, is 45 percent occupied, according to Nicole Fontaine, retail associate at the Stiles Corp. in Fort Lauderdale.
    Parking is free there, but it is behind the stores, not out front. Despite that problematic parking situation, Fontaine thinks the area is finally coming into its own. “Las Ventanas is four miles north of Atlantic Avenue. A lot of people are getting tired of Atlantic. So we are starting to see more interest in Las Ventanas,” she said.
    Asking rents are $18 a square foot and are negotiable, she added. Tenants include Tsunami Subs & Wraps and Sweetwater Bar & Grill. She is seeking an Italian restaurant, a tanning salon, clothing store and a boutique fashion store.
    Sunshine Square, on the south side of Woolbright,  enjoys a 98-percent-leased rate. Only three spaces remain in the 140,000-square-foot center. A recently-expanded Publix grocery store is its anchor tenant, and two banks have drive-thru ATMs. The complex also has a free-standing building that contains a recently opened Panera Bread restaurant and a GNC vitamin and supplements store.
    Its secret? The center is 50 years old, but everyone from the nearby community goes there to shop at Publix, said Jami Passer, managing director over Florida properties for Edens, a retail developer and owner of community shopping centers along the East Coast.          About one mile north in Boynton Beach and to the east on Ocean Avenue sits an older center called Ocean Plaza, which is part of the Boynton Beach Marina District. It has only one vacant space; tenants include Café Frankies, Nail-Know-How salon and a Sushi Jo’s restaurant.
    Across Ocean Avenue sits Marina Village, a three-tower condo complex adjacent to the Intracoastal Waterway. Two Georges and the Banana Boat restaurants are nearby.
    The retail space is nearly sold out, said James Kwon, broker/owner at Prime Realty and Management in Boca Raton. He has 2,700 square feet of retail space left. The retail owner/tenants include Marina Bites convenience store and a hair salon, he said.
    Kwan is not picky about the new tenant — “whatever fits the bill,” — but it can’t be a restaurant because grease traps are not allowed and there isn’t enough parking. He is asking $16 a square foot for that space, plus $7 in common area expenses.
    At the Plaza del Mar shopping center in Manalapan, with 102,751 square feet, the occupancy level is about 67 percent. Crossman & Co., based in Orlando, got the center’s leasing contract last September, according to Ashley Thornburg, who recently started her own brokerage in Miami.
    The center sits in a town with a seasonal population base, affecting the type of store willing to locate in Plaza del Mar.
    “For real estate, the two biggest things that affect price are location and traffic,” she said. “We try to tell prospective tenants that the bridge closing is only temporary and once it opens next fall, it will be good again.”
    The bridge she refers to is the one that crosses the Intracoastal Waterway between Manalapan and Lantana. It closed in March 2012 while a new one is being built.
    Plaza del Mar is home to John G’s restaurant, Plaza Theatre, Evelyn & Arthur’s women’s apparel and the Ice Cream Club. But it still has a sizable empty place, about 10,000 square feet, which once housed an upscale grocer.
    “We are marketing to small markets/convenience stores or it can be subdivided for restaurants,” she said. Its asking rent is $25 a square foot.
    On the other side of the bridge, destination restaurants have survived the bridge closing. They are Old Key Lime House, Kona Bay Café, Tapas and Pizzeria Oceano.
    On the north side of Ocean Avenue, in the 200 block, the retail scene is bleak.
    “It was completely rented before the bridge closed,” said Marsha Stocker of Love Realty, run by Burt Handelsman, who owns that Ocean Avenue block.            “The bridge closing scared [almost] everyone away everyone. Now everyone is coming back.”
    She declined to reveal the asking rents, saying it varies depending on the space available from 400 to 2,500 square feet.
    When the new bridge opens in November, both Ocean Avenue and Plaza del Mar landlords should be smiling again.
    In Delray Beach, brokers, such as Register of CBRE, say that if Atlantic Crossing can start construction this year that will really make Atlantic Avenue sizzle in a few years.          The $200 million project, which will be built in two phases, still has to have its site plan approved in May. They hope to start construction in the third quarter, and then another 18 to 20 months until the first phase is done, Bill Morris, project consultant, said recently.
    “It will be a marvelous asset for the eastern half of Atlantic Avenue,” he said, “Plus the Class A office space in downtown Delray will bring high-end jobs to the downtown and increase customers for the restaurants that are already on Atlantic.”
    But it faces a lawsuit filed in early January by a group called Save Delray Beach. The group claims the city’s 3-2 approval was inconsistent with its comprehensive land use plan that calls the central business and surrounding neighborhoods to be preserved as the core of a charming village. Its attorney, Ralf Brookes, said final settlement negotiations are under way, hoping the result is a “truly exemplary traditional neighborhood design that furthers the city’s vision as a true village by the sea.”
The first phase is planned with 320 high-end apartments, 42,000 square feet of Class A office space and 45,000 square feet of upscale retail space.    Morris estimates that asking retail rates will range from $35 to $45 per square foot. He hopes tenants will be of high-quality, one level lower than those found on Worth Avenue.
    To overcome the parking challenges that come with shopping or dining on Atlantic Avenue, the Crossings will have valet parking and self-parking spaces, he said.
    After Atlantic Crossings is built, then that would “allow property owners to raise the rents,” Register predicted.

Gail Adams Aaskov, author of two books, also is a Realtor, property manager  and a town commissioner.
Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star

By Rich Pollack
    
Gail Adams Aaskov remembers getting the call that Sunday morning in February seven years ago.
    On the other end of the phone was Ocean Ridge Town Clerk Karen Hancsak, who was crying as she told Aaskov that a former deputy town clerk and police dispatcher, Serena Gomez and her husband, Joe, a former Ocean Ridge police officer, were both dead.
    The two, who had moved to the central Florida town of Eustis, had been shot and killed by a fellow Eustis police officer, who had also killed his wife before pointing his Glock semi-automatic handgun at his head and pulling the trigger.
    The triple murder and suicide sent shock waves through Ocean Ridge, especially its law enforcement and town government community. Now it is the subject of a new book Aaskov has written.
    Titled Signal 5, the police code for murder, the book gives detailed accounts of what happened that day and what led up to the murder. It also raises a question about what it was that led Cpl. Mike Mount to become so violent that he would kill his wife, his co-worker and his co-worker’s wife.
    “I wrote this book to tell the story and, of course, I had some questions about Joe and his relationship with this officer,” Aaskov said.
    Aaskov also had several personal reasons for writing the book.
    A 20-year resident of Ocean Ridge, Aaskov served on the Town Commission from 1995 to 2004. She returned to commission last year.
    During her first stint on the commission, Aaskov got to know Serena and Joe Gomez fairly well.
    “Serena was super sweet, she was a real nurturer,” Aaskov said.
    In fact, she says, when she first heard that the couple were moving, she tried to get them to change their minds. “We pleaded with them not to go,” she said.  
    Aaskov said she got involved in writing the book when Serena Gomez’s mother, Debra James, approached her and asked for her help. James was actually in her daughter’s home, hiding in another room, when the shooting took place.
    An attorney that James had contacted after the shooting had started the book but couldn’t complete it.
    “Serena’s mother gave me page after page of handwritten notes,” Aaskov said.
    In the book, Aaskov tells how Mount and his wife, Kimberly, were friends with Serena and Joe Gomez and how just a week before the shooting, Mount and Joe Gomez had gotten into an argument. Mount accused Gomez of flirting with Kimberly, who worked as an administrative clerk in the Police Department.
    On the night of the shooting, Aaskov explains in the book, Kim Mount had asked to spend the night with Serena and Joe Gomez, in part because of marital problems she was having with her husband. She brought her two children with her.
    James, her then 6-year-old grandson and Kim Mount’s two children escaped from the 6 a.m. gunfire unharmed. Behind them four adults lay dead.
    Though many of the questions about the murder are answered in the book, Aaskov leaves one mystery unsolved.
    “Why was Michael Mount so jealous that he killed three people?” she wrote.            

    To get a copy, contact Aaskov at 276-3220 or stop by her office at 5011 N. Ocean Blvd., Ocean Ridge.

By Margie Plunkett
    
Like a dutiful Boy Scout, Ocean Ridge plans to help residents cross the street — at A1A and Town Hall.
    The town is spending $13,500 on design and construction of a crosswalk on A1A between Town Hall and the beach, after receiving the go-ahead from the Florida Department of Transportation.
    “After much consternation with FDOT, they’re letting us install a pedestrian crossing,” Town Manager Ken Schenck told commissioners at their March 4 meeting.
    The project has been in discussion since about November, after a resident raised the issue of the dangers of crossing the state-operated A1A, Schenck said.
    The design of the crosswalk, which will include a handicapped sidewalk, is under way and Schenk will get three bids on construction of the project, likely in time for the commission’s May meeting. The town is paying Engenuity Group $6,500 for engineering services and estimates about $7,000 for construction.
    The FDOT must approve the design plans, but once it has, construction will take about two weeks, Schenck said, and could be done by the end of May, depending on when approvals are granted.
    Lt. Hal Hutchins of the Ocean Ridge Police Department conducted a survey of people crossing A1A at Town Hall during Martin Luther King weekend, determining that the number of people crossing met the 20-per-hour minimum required by FDOT for a crosswalk.
    The funds for the crosswalk will come out of the contingency budget. The majority of the construction costs are in building the 150-foot sidewalk area to accommodate the disabled, Schenk said.
 “I think it’s an awful lot of money,” said Commissioner Gail Aaskov, suggesting the town of Boynton Beach should contribute since the crosswalk will serve that city’s beach.
    But Schenk, who had already spoken with the city, said that wasn’t an option. “They don’t care if there’s a sidewalk or not.”
    While the city is bearing the expense and work of that walkway, the FDOT is marking a second crosswalk near A1A and Woolbright after Ocean Ridge complained about safety risks for pedestrians there. FDOT will paint and install signs at that crosswalk, Schenck said.