John Herbst is fed up. Who wouldn\u2019t be?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s walking away. That\u2019s a loss for the people of Fort Lauderdale.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s northeast will choose his successor, who will serve until the next citywide election in 2028.<\/p>\n
Building for a long time<\/p>\n
Herbst\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the end, this is a personal decision about time, focus and how I want to spend the next chapter of my life,\u201d Herbst wrote in a guest essay<\/a>\u00a0in the Sun Sentinel. \u201cFor me, this role, and the constant demands that come with it, are no longer how I want to allocate my time and energy.\u201d<\/p>\n Public service, performed capably \u2014 as Herbst has done \u2014 is grueling. The time demands are unyielding. The scrutiny can be intrusive. The political conflicts are unavoidable.<\/p>\n A political outsider<\/p>\n By nature and by experience, Herbst is an outsider.<\/p>\n He\u2019s a watchdog, a skeptic, someone who tells people what they don\u2019t want to hear \u2014 the very antithesis of most politicians.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cprogress.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s moonlighting work.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Even when Herbst was right, he was on the short end, especially when money was involved.<\/p>\n He alone initially opposed surrendering<\/a> prime downtown land for an entertainment venue that collapsed in a financial house of cards.<\/p>\n He alone opposed a truncated search for an untested city manager, and her salary.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n For Herbst, the final straw may have been the missteps regarding Lockhart Park, in the heart of his northeast district.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s view ended in the \u201cbetrayal\u201d<\/a> of a long-promised community park.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s convictions.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"John Herbst is fed up. Who wouldn\u2019t be? After three-and-a-half frustrating years as a Fort Lauderdale commissioner, he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":259541,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[2853,249,251,250,114,482],"class_list":["post-259540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fort-lauderdale","tag-editorials","tag-fort-lauderdale","tag-fort-lauderdale-headlines","tag-fort-lauderdale-news","tag-latest-headlines","tag-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}