PB: Stanczyk: You can change your address right at the precinct!
by SDM
Twofer: Mayor Stanczyk is seeking the support of her colleagues for a bill that will be expensive and may encourage voter fraud.
The council’s Monday agenda contains an item that will add to the village’s legislative priorities <a href="http://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2013/0080/BillText/Filed/HTML”>Senate Bill 80 by Senator Joyner. The bill requires local governments to permit early voting for more hours, which will cost taxpayers. Alone this provision should be enough to give Mayor Stanczyk pause, but the bill has a much worse provision.
Senator Joyner wants to permit voters to change their address and vote by regular ballot right there on election day! Think about this terrible idea for a moment. It is bad enough to force the elections department to modify the rolls in a busy precinct, but it is insane to let the voter then cast a regular ballot instead of a provisional one.
Unless the elections department tracks the address changes perfectly, there is nothing to stop a person from roaming from precinct to precinct, voting over and over again. If the department catches a fraudulent voter, they will be handcuffed to prevent the vote from being counted because the ballot will be indistinguishable from the ones cast properly.
SDM Wonders: Does the Mayor read any of these bills before she puts them on the agenda?
Mayor Stanczyk also wants the council to blindly endorse the school district’s legislative priorities.
SDM is a supporter of charter schools and Miami-Dade County Public Schools is not. So it is no surprise that MDCPS is pushing a load of measures designed to limit the effectiveness of the district’s charter school competitors. For this reason alone, the village should decline Mayor Stanczyk’s invitation to support the MDCPS’s priorities.
If the village council needs another reason to decline to support the Mayor, they need only look at the money grab the teachers are demanding from taxpayers. MDCPS wants the legislature to “maintain the current employers’ contribution rate to the Florida Retirement System by absorbing the planned increase for the 2013-2014 fiscal year.”
When someone asks you to absorb the planned increase, what they are asking is for you to pay for the increase. Here, the district wants taxpayers like SDM to absorb a cost that was to be passed on to the employees.
SDM Wonders: Will Mayor Stanczyk acknowledge that she is pushing a measure that will either cause a tax increase or lead to a cut somewhere else in the MDCPS budget?
Perhaps these two examples still are not enough to get the council to give the Mayor’s proposal thumbs down. Permit SDM to raise another.
MDCPS wants the legislature to change the way the district must comply with the Constitutional Class Size Requirement so that it will be assessed at the school-wide average as it is applied to charter schools. Such legislative action would undoubtedly result in huge savings, but it takes an enormous amount of chutzpa for the Mayor to propose supporting it.
Why? Because the Mayor is asking the legislature to ignore the requirements of a constitutional amendment, which was passed overwhelmingly by voters! The proper mechanism to fix this issue is not legislation, it is repeal of the dumb amendment.
SDM Says: Until the voters repeal the class size amendment, folks like Mayor Stanczyk should be implementing the will of the voters not thwarting it.
Mayor Stanczyk is planning her campaign. She sees the handwriting on the wall and knows she will need to bring in outsiders who are unaware of how she has run Palmetto Bay into the ground to vote for her. She needs all the votes she can steal.
Does Mrs Stancyyk ever concern herself with details? It is unfortunate that these resolutions will pass without any contest by the remainder of the council. They just don’t care enough to question them.These items are important solely in the tortured mind of the Junk-selling lady. Who knows what nightmares lurk in her mind.
Stripped to its essence, local elections bring out people’s base instincts and blind tribal loyalties. Indeed, the only thing separating us from the Taliban so far is that voters have not been decapitated on their way to the polls.
Palmetto Bay politics are a prime example.During early voting, the police were twice called to restrain councilmember Joan Lindsay’s husband, Jerry Templer. In a fit of rage Templer kicked and punched a sign advocating the recall of Lindsay and Mayor Shelley Stanczyk, for their wasteful spending and reckless pursuit of frivolous law suits against schools and churches.
Templer then threatened councilmember Patrick Fiore, who was campaigning for John DuBois and Jim Araiza, claiming he was going “to get Fiore and DuBois.”Finally, Templer was telling voters in my presence that I “was one of the bad guys” for supporting the recall, and that the “courts were wrong” for siding with Palmer Trinity School, meaning his wife and her cronies are above the law.
In another instance, I called the police on a Tim Schaffer supporter for harassing voters, shoving papers in my face, and telling a Hispanic campaigner that he was “pulling that Latin thing on her.” In other words, she didn’t like his uppity attitude.
Scratch the surface and it’s obvious many of the winged monkeys supporting Schaffer and Pariser come from the same mold as those grumpy bigots who want all Cubans to go back to Cuba.
Now residents face a runoff between John DuBois and the incumbent Brian Pariser for vice mayor, and Jim Araiza and Tim Schaffer from District 2. The risks and rewards could not be higher.Voters must decide whether they want to be ruled by a tyranny of crotchety old condo commandos, who have allowed their own Christian values to be subverted by their worst NIMBY impulses.
Or led by young, progressive, intelligent, transparent, fiscal conservatives like Araiza and DuBois. For informed voters, the choice seems simple.Viewed from forty-thousand feet, Palmetto Bay politics provides a cautionary tale about people who can’t govern seceding from the county and taking matters into their own hands. Left to their own devices, officials like Stanczyk, Lindsay and Pariser have become drunk on their own power, bludgeoning residents with one self-serving ordinance after another. The time for change is now.