WPB Honors Henry Flagler, Really ?
November 10, 2020
The residents of West Palm Beach have elected a Mayor and City Commission who can’t be bothered to investigate any new projects it votes to accept because it is easier to spend a few minutes and listen to staff’s recommendation. Below are excerpts from a story in the PB Post, and it tells of a new project and honors Henry Flagler.
The project manager is WGI, (Wantman Group) the project is $32 million dollars, it was decided at the CRA meeting where Commissioner Lambert voted approval of the project. When the project goes before the City Commission Lambert will vote again for approval.
The Wantman Group has received another lucrative contract from the city. This is the same company who employs Jeffrey Brophy, senior vice president of WGI and Mr. Brophy owns a home in Andros Isles and rented his home to then City Commissioner Keith James who voted approval on every contract that contained a WGI contract. James said he paid “fair market value” for the rent, but never showed proof.
It gets better for WGI after City Commissioner Christine Lambert was sworn in and 4 months later WGI hired her husband Monty as a Senior Business Development Manager.
Lambert stated previously the WPB ethics officer made the decision she had no conflict of interest in voting for WGI projects. I say WPB has no ethics since April 4,2019.
Do you believe the Lambert’s wont benefit from her vote? Read the excerpts and the entire story below.
“An old spur that was part of Henry Flagler’s railroad a century ago will become West Palm Beach’s latest park, a linear spot to rise near the northern edge of downtown.
The city commissioners, acting as the Community Redevelopment Agency board, last week approved a $500,000 contribution to create the park behind Flagler Station, an eight-story apartment building designed for downtown workers, at Banyan Boulevard and North Tamarind Avenue.
The 34-foot-wide, landscaped, lighted park will run behind the building, between Tamarind and Sapodilla avenues. Plans call for installing a “ghost train,” an outdoor artwork recalling the trains that once rode the rail, which will remain in place.
“Everybody deserves great open spaces close to where they live. That’s always the goal of our projects,” Christopher Roog, executive director of the redevelopment agency, said Friday.
The 94 affordable apartments and park, expected to cost a total of $32 million, are scheduled for completion in early to mid-2022.
Edwin Muller, project manager for WGI, said Flagler Station is designed as a gateway for downtown and for the historic neighborhood to its north.
The developer is HTG Banyan LLC, a Coconut Grove-based affordable housing builder, whose project manager is WGI Inc., a West Palm Beach design and consulting firm.”
If you take the time to read the Post story please notice the additional story “West Palm presses for $21 million sea-level grant to help redo Currie Park.” Where is the $30 million dollar Park Bond voters gave the city in 2020? Certainly didn’t go to Police and Firefighter contract for pay raises.
Tolerance for violence is readily accepted in 2020. America is in crisis with cities being torn apart, burning down cities, looting, destroying statues and Americans killing each other over slavery the Confederacy and shooting of unarmed black men.
Lets take a look back to Henry Flagler, who never owned a slave, he leased them, and what he did to bring the railroad to Florida, and let them ask themselves if honoring Flagler is the right thing to do. Read how “Flagler co-opted powerful news outlets to spread distorted versions of events” Get the press on your side and your side is the winner.
“How slave labor built the state of Florida — decades after the Civil War.”
From 1885 to 1913, Standard Oil founder Henry Flagler built an empire in Florida of railroads, hotels, steamship lines, resorts, even cities, from Jacksonville to Key West. He raised Palm Beach and Miami from the sand. And like another real estate tycoon, his name is blazoned across the state’s landscape: Flagler College, Flagler County, Flagler Memorial Bridge, Flagler Beach.
Few know, however, that Flagler built his tourist empire — and modern Florida — by exploiting two brutal labor systems that blanketed the South for 50 years after the Civil War: convict leasing and debt peonage. Created to preserve the white supremacist racial order and to address the South’s labor shortages, these systems targeted African Americans, stealing their labor and entrapping them in state-sanctioned forms of involuntary servitude.
Committed to preserving his and the state’s reputation, Flagler co-opted powerful news outlets to spread distorted versions of events.
When the U.S. Justice Department, African American leaders and northern muckraking journalists exposed Flagler’s labor practices, he colluded with powerful government, newspaper and business interests in Florida to whitewash public knowledge and, by extension, the historical record itself.
Flagler and Florida were not aberrations. Convict lease laws in almost every Southern state essentially criminalized blackness, providing a means for authorities to arrest freed people for pseudo-crimes like vagrancy, lease them to private companies and force their labor.”‘
Read the entire story in the Washington Post below.
The end