Here, we address a few of the reasons of why our proven tourist-attracting website was stripped of Florida pro-tourism related info and converted to this tourist-repelling version. This conversion was also conducted to set the record straight as a public service to those that have been deceived by the illusion of the tropical mirage created by the unconscionable Florida tourism, business, and real estate industries. Put simply, in our opinion Florida has become a deceptively terrible place to vacation and live...
.The above video illustrates just one example of why we are justifiably incensed with the well funded tourism industry here. The above huge ornate glass and stone artwork mosaic (about twenty feet in diameter/across) is just one of many that are inlaid into broadwalk loitering areas where homeless winos, bums, and juvenile misfits hang out.
How many hundreds of thousands of dollars they threw away on just this one little part of a large project -- which is said in total to have encompassed 100 million dollars -- we can only wonder about, but what we do not question is the often stated contention here locally that examples such as that depicted in the above video involve kickbacks to the persons dispensing the funding in the tourism organizations.
Note that these expensive ostentatious artworks might be appropriate in exotic locales of the rich like the French Riviera of Monaco, but this is just the southern end of the "redneck riviera", the northern end of "Little Havana" and "Little Haiti", and the increasingly low-life beach-goers here are of an arrogant, rude, trashy "third world" mentality.
Realize that these glamorized artworks do absolutely NOTHING to attract tourists to the beach, and the loitering areas with their seedy "occupants" likely repel some folks.
So, contrast that expensive waste of a mountain of money with our self-funded pro-tourism website which was proven to attract tourists and new residents to the area, and the fact that the local tourism agencies would not even come up with a replacement computer to keep the original website going, not even an old used one, at a cost of only a few hundred dollars at most for a new PC.
Lastly -- for now -- given the fact that their refusal to help keep our beneficial revenue-generating website going, resulted not only in the loss of it entirely and the beneficial revenue it generated for them, but that we have out of righteous indignation converted our efforts to a resource that will decrease tourism and therefore will negatively impact area business revenues.
Add to that the fact that one of the refusals was from the local Hollywood Beach Business Association, the member businesses of which stand to lose revenue because of our website transition (and other efforts), and you have got to ask yourself, "How stupid is that?"
A second example of throw-away-money and how it is senselessly wasted here (unless you consider the kickbacks) is that last year nearly half a million dollars was blown on a two day festival on the beach ("Brazil Fest") targeted at a small local audience. Sure, there was a crowd from the targeted audience for all of two days, but did the little crowd spend even an infinitesimal fraction of the half million dollars in return? No way. With the recession, beach accommodations, restaurants, and bars were seriously hurting, and many folded -- if they had simply given the half million dollars blown on the festival to the beach businesses, the businesses would have been much better off. Of many controversial news items surrounding that farcical waste of money, a recent "expose" was reported whereby a marketing firm had been paid a substantial part of the half mil, and they can show absolutely nothing that indicates that they did any marketing at all (probably just pocketed the remainder after doling out the kickback)... And this same local tourism organization (along with any other tourism, business, or real estate organization) that gave away the half million could not manage to come up with a PC to keep our pro-Florida tourism site on the air that was proven to draw tourists and new residents to the area, and therefore "business"... Sidenote: the local tourism organization puts out significant amount of money for several beachfront festivals each year, and altho the festivals do generate slightly larger than normal crowds, they also have booths set up along the beachfront broadwalk with non-local vendors selling food, drinks, clothing, sunglasses, souvenirs -- everything that the local permanent shops, the bars, and restaurants provide, so the net effect is that beachfront businesses actually lose money during festivals to the extent that they complain about it, to no avail (realize that the supposed intent of the festivals is to help out the permanent beachfront businesses)...
A third example is that the limited parking on Hollywood Beach has always been a problem, such that local newspapers have complained about it. Gridlock occurs with vehicles driving around looking for non-existent parking spaces; wall to wall stopped vehicles, polluting the air you breathe. So, the local organizations, rather than improve the situation, eliminated a great deal of what parking was available. In one example of eradicating parking spaces, they replaced parking spaces near the broadwalk with the ornate fresco-fancified loitering areas (noted in the first video above) where winos, druggies, vagrants, the homeless, and juvenile delinquent misfits hang out. A second example of ignoring the parking problem was that they took part of a parking lot that was adjacent to a putt-putt golf course and an empty fenced-off lot (that had been there for FOURTEEN years), demolished it all and replaced it with a poor excuse for a "park" -- another hangout for the aforementioned undesirables. They soon realized that the park was thoroughly lame (and left too many parking spaces?), so they demolished the new park, and replaced it with a slightly better and larger park eating up even more of the original parking spaces, all of this transpiring in about one year (after it had been empty for 14 years). Now, the entire area, including what little remained of the original parking lot, is all going to be demolished next year to build a high rise hotel -- they knew YEARS AGO that this high rise hotel was going to be built, yet they confoundingly have blown untold amounts of money on this ludicrous fiasco of creating a temporary pretty much unused park, all of which was a total waste (unless you consider the kickbacks) and only worsened the parking gridlock problem. Below we provide a video of the expensive, unused, temporary, wasted "park"...
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A fourth example is that the city of Hollywood recently installed new "street lights" on over three miles of it's beachfront broadwalk and pedestrian/bike path. Now, Florida's Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are refusing to grant permits for Hollywood's beach renourishment project until the city puts an ordinance in place to make lighting along the 6-mile beach sea turtle friendly. Back to the drawing board, another of the mountain of wasted project$ that has to be done over because of local management lacking foresight.
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A fifth example is the above video, which depicts the mountain of money the city threw away to put in scenic but needless landscaping - eliminating parking spaces -- on side streets on the beach where people drive around in vehicles trying to find non-existant parking spaces, which there used to be considerably more of before they knocked out about a dozen parking spaces per street with the landscaping. Also notice how they paved the streets with bricks, another fancy smancy waste of money when simply paving it over with concrete would have been adequate (the bricks will end up as debris in the next hurricane surge, propelled down across AIA into the intracoastal waterway...).
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But, outside of a little moaning and groaning with the above colossally monumental DUH examples, we do not have much here yet, but there are hundreds of examples yet to go (which unfortunately increase daily) and until we can get back to adding more examples check out our "Top 10 Reasons to...(AVOID Florida) page or see our overview of "DUH Keys" page for a sample of the type of valuable local resident insider information that we are going to provide here, and see our "Oncoming Trainwrecks" page for a preview of specific future topics which we hope to get the time to provide more detailed information on, and...
In the Interim...
If you are -- or know of anyone that is -- a tourism competitor with Florida and see the advantage of promoting this site (or if you live in Florida and prefer to repel tourism away from here), either contact us at the email address below or contribute to our cause by clicking on the "Donate" tab at the top of this webpage. Our computer that we use to maintain this site has crashed and we currently are using a rented laptop which we cannot afford to keep renting, so this site will remain as is until we can manage to procure a replacement computer. Help us get back on the air so that we can expose more about cruddy, corrupt Florida and send tourists elsewhere -- to your region...
If you cannot help monetarily, publicizing this website would help get the message out. One way of doing that is to take a minute to note this website at any of the bookmarking/sharing services below -- this might at least help us "go viral". Be sure to tell everyone you know to do the same...
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Interested in buying the rights to this website?
If you are interested in taking over this website, send us an email at jeb@lifesacoast.com.
. .Our email address: jeb@lifesacoast.com
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