Real Estate & Property Law

A Monument Waste in Florida

By Alan Ackerman

Broward News

The Broward County School Board has driven the school district into near-bankruptcy by overbuilding by tens of thousands of seats that now sit empty. Part of the reason is that every board member has had a pet project that's added to the hundreds of millions of dollars misspent.

Board Member Jennifer Gottlieb's monument to waste and excess, for instance, is something called "Elementary School C."

The school is being built in central Hollywood at a total cost to taxpayers of more than $25 million — at a time of teachers' layoffs and a debt-ridden finance ledger. It will add 834 classroom seats to a school district that already has more than 25,000 empty seats and is expected to have about 35,000 by 2012.

To obtain the land to build this unnecessary school, the board purchased 54 neighborhood homes for about $6.3 million, uprooting dozens of families and forcing nine households out of the neighborhood through the expensive use of eminent domain.

Well, I thought only Northern cities waste money on building far more than necessary, condemning when not necessary and using the democratic process of elections to abuse the underlying tenet of fiduciary obligation to the citizens who elected the officials.

Full post as published by National Eminent Domain Blog on September 01, 2009 (boomark / email).