UPDATED: Calvin, Giordano's Own Private City of West Park

• If you have any Outsourcing projects, focused on single and multi-year engagements, then look at OutsourcerMarketplace.com and post for Free. Great Site

• I think this article made some interesting points, I read a textbook directly related to this topic, its called Transportation Engineering and Planning by Papacostas , I found my used copy for less than the bookstores at http://www.belabooks.com/books/9780130814197.htm

• The CG group picked up almost $3million in the 2 years they have "serviced" Surfside, thats approximately $200,000 a month! Now that wouldn't be so bad if the town actually benefited from the "work" but there has ABSOLUTELY BEEN ZERO IMPROVEMENT during their tenure. We too had their non existant code enforcement and conflict of interest building official untill the county put a halt to it. I don't blame them but the horrible decision making process of the Mayor and commission. All this nonsense goes on under the nose of our town attorney, who bty was the city attorney of Sunny Isles, another CG firm. I guess the FBI and state attorney are too busy to look into sleep little Surfside!

• Thanks for writing the article and for more information on the subject, I recommend reading the blog about Surfside, Florida. Just go to Google or your regular search engine and type in restore surfside and it will take you there. All of Calvin,Giordano and Associates inv(o)ices are listed. You think you are paying too much??????

• Calvin Giordano provides code enforcement services to the Town of Loxahatchee Groves, a tiny rural hamlet in Palm Bch County. Let me tell you what our experience has been: Our town had not a single code complaint in the months of Aug, Sept & Oct 2008 and again in Jan 2009. Yet Calvin-Giordano billed our town $18,800 for these four months of "code enforcement services" to do...ABSOLUTLEY NOTHING! We also paid this outfit mega-bucks to do our Comp Plan and they gave us a finished document that was not even properly spell-checked and is still being challenged in court at this very moment. We paid this same company $14K to do a traffic study. But the results were all wrong, the numbers were whacked and the study is not worth the paper it's written on according to PBC's traffic engineer. There is plenty more...but really what more do you need to know? These 3 experiences above pretty much say it all about Calvin-Giordano's fabulosity. Lox Groves resident

• If this then possibly that, and if that then possibly this ... if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bicycle. And then bring in the race card. You are scattered and all over the place with thoughts not nearly ready to come in for a landing. Look, either there's a payoff scenario taking place or there isn't. If there is one, then put them in jail. You weren't going to stop that under any circumstance. But you don't fail to help save taxpayer funds because you fear maybe somebody could do something wrong. That is no way to run a railroad. Going to the private sector is the only way to get us out of this government pension mess. It's a smart business move. You're nuts.

• I just called City Hall in Pembroke Pines and spoke to someone in the bureaucracy in planning. I asked them what happens if Calvin Giordano has a permit to review on the city's behalf where they are also the engineer of record. They said that in that case the contract calls for another engineering firm to review the permit and make the determination in order to avoid any conflict. That sounds OK to me, and yes I am an engineer. Retired but still licensed. This kind of arrangement is not unusual to government and the answer I got was exactly the one they are supposed to put into place.

• Capitalism is reverting to an earlier state when the market provided almost everything. These new corporate towns are actually nothing new. Some of the first settlements in Florida were either corporate towns, where all services were provided by, say, the asphalt plant; or they were constructed pre-fab and entirely by developers. The corporate town is a great unexplored subject in American history. WE get one of our first shopping malls from a corporate town up in Minnesota in the early 20th century.

• "You cannot blame a company" No, but you can blame the city governments that sell themselves to a private organization which makes a habit out of collecting cities into its pocket. If there's a conflict of interest, the public servants should see that and rectify the situation and not simply feed the monster which may one day spell all of our demises. If you go by the Haliburton reference it's implied that the city governments could be getting kickbacks of some nature in order to ensure only one company services all the local government work. I doubt this is very new, though. Several development companies in Florida have created whole cities for well-to-do white and latin american families and provided much of the services to the residents. To me this just seems the new American way: build a private entity whose job it is to make a ton of cash and provide a service or lifestyle to those who can afford it. I expect next to see super-strip-malls where land is bought up by the mile for super convenient, super long, super commercial districts alongside suburbs.

• Smoke. Fire.

• All those cities went out to bid for the work this firm is doing. Lots of firms responded to that offering. Firms were selected in accordance with city procurement codes. There is no dispute about this in the business. You cannot blame a company for trying to do well in the best of times, much less the worst of financial times. In Weston they have almost no employees there and all their services are delivered to them by contract. Union contracts are increasingly forcing cities to outsource in order to find cost savings. This is how residents can reduce taxes and this firm is willing to take on the work. So what? What exactly is your point here?

• Would we then make the connection that Dennis Giordano is akin to Dick Cheney?

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