Scott Wyman, The Sun Sentinel

September 21, 2008

Scott Wyman
The Sun Sentinel
200 East Las Olas Boulevard
Fort Lauderdale, Florida 33301

RE: “Minority Business Program is Mismanaged” – Your story in today’s Sun Sentinel

Mr. Wyman,

Shades of Casablanca!

“I’m shocked. Shocked.”

11 years ago, partly as a lark brought on by Broward County’s desperate attempt to give a hotel to a Black man, I lead an effort to –A- establish a minority owned company and –B- leach a la a lamprey eel onto the perpetually lactating mammary of minority set asides.

The part about the hotel, the Black man, and the eternally guilt ridden modern American Liberal Broward County Board of County Commissioners is Broward County writ large, isn’t it?

R. Donahue Peeples, and I still hope that the “R” stands for Rex as in Rex et Imperator, wanted to get a “free” hotel in Broward County. Having gotten a “free” hotel in Miami Beach he figured it would be “nothing but net” to euchre the rubes in Broward County.

Alas, unlike Miami Beach where he got an existing building for “free”, he would have to build a new one here. The simple solution would have been to sell his most favored spot at the Gravy Chain station to one of the major hotel chains. He would have toasted his great good fortune while the nit-wits who run this county could have come down from the Cross of White Guilt for at least a while.

Unfortunately he needed financing.

He had a quasi commitment from the Bank of Sark. It was written on a cocktail napkin with the appropriate stains and smudges. One of them erased the phone number. He had a promise from a bank in Death Valley that was only open on Tuesday nights. Their promise of construction financing was a contract that was only binding at parties and then only within the octave of one of our suns rising in the West. He, as Trollope said, “had no tin”.

I founded a company with 3 minorities as principals. The goal was to solicit minority set aside business.

I was immediately solicited by Broward County, the Broward County Board of Education, TRI-RAIL, the North Broward Hospital District, and the State of Florida. They wanted me to bid on an astonishing number of contracts. Each of the above named entities had people ready to help me in the bidding process. [Isn’t current County Commissioner Eggelettion on the public pad at the Board of Education as a “diversity expert”? Charles Dickens had a great line – “I’ll retire to Bedlam” – that would apply here.

I got the project to the point where lower case perjury would have been required to “matriculate the ball down the field”. Employees of several of the above named entities had perfected their blind eye routine. I chose to remember that “when a man is upon oath he holds his soul in his hands as if it were water. He opens them at his peril.”

Now I read that $37,700,000 of Federal Funds for air port and mass transit projects has gone walkabout.

Like I said, “I’m shocked. Shocked.”

One last thing.

You say “the agency lacked detailed procedures to set goals and then monitor participation”.

After all these years, after all those noble intentions, after all that money, can someone, anyone, tell me the difference between a “goal” and a “quota”?