John Herbst is fed up. Who wouldn’t be?
After three-and-a-half frustrating years as a Fort Lauderdale commissioner, he decided that endlessly fighting the status quo is no longer worth the frustration.
He’s walking away. That’s a loss for the people of Fort Lauderdale.
Herbst has steadily resisted the powerful tide of special interest influence and dubious financial decisionmaking, and too often, he has been all alone. That takes a toll.
Herbst, 62, will resign on Nov. 2, with two years left in his second term. On Election Day, Nov. 3, voters in District 1 in the city’s northeast will choose his successor, who will serve until the next citywide election in 2028.
Building for a long time
Herbst’s barely concealed disgust with the commission majority has been building for a long time, and it finally reached the breaking point. He also lost a brother in January.
“In the end, this is a personal decision about time, focus and how I want to spend the next chapter of my life,” Herbst wrote in a guest essay in the Sun Sentinel. “For me, this role, and the constant demands that come with it, are no longer how I want to allocate my time and energy.”
Public service, performed capably — as Herbst has done — is grueling. The time demands are unyielding. The scrutiny can be intrusive. The political conflicts are unavoidable.
A political outsider
By nature and by experience, Herbst is an outsider.
He’s a watchdog, a skeptic, someone who tells people what they don’t want to hear — the very antithesis of most politicians.
But those same qualities made him an indispensable presence in a city with a long history of dubious financial decisions, casually giving away precious public lands and approving more and more large-scale, high-rise developments, all in the name of “progress.”
For 16 years, Herbst was the city auditor. He was fired by city commissioners in 2022, supposedly for not telling them he was investigating a former police chief’s moonlighting work.
When he ran for office that year and won in a landslide, his colleagues tried to prevent him from serving. He won that battle, but it left a deep scar, as we knew it would, and the political losses began piling up.
Even when Herbst was right, he was on the short end, especially when money was involved.
He alone initially opposed surrendering prime downtown land for an entertainment venue that collapsed in a financial house of cards.
He alone opposed a truncated search for an untested city manager, and her salary.
He alone opposed a lavish and odd-looking new City Hall and got his colleagues to agree only after public opposition became too loud and sustained to ignore.
For Herbst, the final straw may have been the missteps regarding Lockhart Park, in the heart of his northeast district.
When he took a hard line against concessions to the politically connected Inter Miami soccer franchise, his colleagues chose Mayor Dean Trantalis to make a deal with the team, which in Herbst’s view ended in the “betrayal” of a long-promised community park.
Herbst relentlessly followed the money. His constituents should elect a successor with a similarly skeptical nature, an ability to resist lobbying pressure and the courage of Herbst’s convictions.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.