Fort Lauderdale is now the seventh most miserable City in the US! Thanks, Mayor Jack Seiler!

Fort Lauderdale is now the seventh most miserable City in the US!  Thanks, Mayor Jack Seiler!

 According to Forbes listing of  “Most Miserable Cities in the US, 2012”, (http://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2012/02/02/americas-most-miserable-cities/) , Fort Lauderdale has unfortunately risen from being the 10^th most miserable city in the US (last year) to (now) the 7^th most miserable city. And our do-nothing Mayor Jack Seiler, along with Commissioners Bruce Roberts and Romney Rogers are largely responsible for this, by not working to reduce the cost of Government.

Forbes looked at 10 factors for the 200 largest metro areas and divisions in the U.S. Some are serious, like violent crime, unemployment rates, foreclosures, taxes (income and property), home prices and political corruption. Other factors they included are less weighty, like commute times, weather and how the area’s pro sports teams did. One tweak to this year’s list: they swapped out sales tax rates for property tax rates.

Our City’s unemployment is hovering around 10%, foreclosures here are higher  than anywhere else in the US, and political corruption has been rampant in our area.

And of course Fort Lauderdale has been hit hard by the housing downturn. Median home prices in our area (which include Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach) are down 50% since 2006 to a recent $183,000.

We also have a cripplingly high budget. It’s twice the size of our budget just 8-9 years ago, and is now twice as large as other cities our size. Nonetheless, our elected officials and City employees are like drug addicts; trying to take every dollar of revenue they can from us in order to continue their spending addiction.

I chose to move here in 1998 because of the beauty of our City. We have the canals of Venice, the weather of the Caribbean, the beaches of Hawaii, the diversity of New York and the yachts of the Mediterranean. I cannot imagine living anywhere else. Because of all the intrinsically great things our City has, it is disappointing to me to see us on a list like this.  Imagine where we would be on this list without the beaches and the great weather!

Yet here we are the seventh most miserable city in the US…. And if you don’t think Seiler is going to push for increases in the millage rate this fall, (along with looking for ways to raise other fees), you’re leaving in a dream world. We’ll be even higher on the list next year!

I was appalled to hear Seiler, Roberts and Rogers last month (at the Civic Leader’s Forum) state they thought our City’s budget “was about the right size”. They are either clueless to economic realities or else they are in the pocket of special interest groups.  They are certainly not looking out for us, the resident and taxpayer! Remember that if you are voting for a District Commissioner on March 13.

Earl Rynerson