Board Member Screams Out F U

     Last night’s meeting of the Progresso Village Civic Association in Fort Lauderdale degraded into a profanity screaming free- for- all.

     The volatile melee was all over the much discussed Homeless Feeding Camps the City is trying to place.

     This is Progresso Village Civic –



     And this is Progresso Village Civic –



     It’s a neighborhood that had started it’s comeback when the bottom fell out of the economy a few years back.

       Now, it’s mostly known as the neighborhood by Sunrise Boulevard that the City originally proposed to move the troublesome hardcore homeless into, in order to get them out of the downtown parks.

     That proposal died on the vine last month, but the tension in the Progresso Civic group hasn’t died.

     Here’s the problem …..the five members on the Board of Directors had quietly told the City that they could put the feeding center in Progresso. The problem was, most of them owned rental houses there and lived elsewhere.

     To make matters worse, one Board member, Ron Centamore, actually is the President of the Downtown Residents group that is pushing to have the vagrants moved out of the downtown! Talk about a rotten cauldron !

     Mayor Jack Seiler came to last night’s meeting in hopes of calming the situation.


                 Seiler in front of room trying to calm the situation

     The Mayor was not successful.
 
     The meeting built to a boil. 

     The residents were mad. They felt they had been poorly represented by their non-resident Board and were strongly taking the Board to task, when one Board Member, developer Renee Lepine, who was unfairly shouldering much of the blame for the Board’s action, banged on the table in front of him, lept up, and yelled 

                               Go F_ _ _ Yourselves (Renee filled in the blanks!)

     As he fled the room, he added, you can all go to hell.

     So much for kinder political discourse!