Demolition is imminent for the city of Deerfield Beach’s Building Department — the City Commission voted 3-2 to outsource the job to a Fort Lauderdale engineering and surveying firm.
But it didn’t go down without a fight Tuesday night.
Mayor Jean Robb and Commissioner Gloria Battle said they’d been “blindsided” by the request to award Calvin, Giordano & Associates the contract to review the city’s building plans and permit applications. It means that 14 Deerfield Beach city employees will either be laid off, get hired by the Fort Lauderdale firm or displace other city employees.
“It is an outrage,” Robb said. “It’s the wrong thing to do.”
Fifteen other Broward County cities have outsourced building department functions to a third-party provider, according to city staff members. For Deerfield Beach, the idea came from the city’s inability to fill building department vacancies due to the city’s relatively low pay scale and a dearth of candidates.
Last year, revenues from the building department’s permits were $475,844.91 more than it cost to pay the salaries there. Robb wanted to know: Why not take some of that profit and put it into increasing salaries?
But Vice Mayor Bill Ganz said that hiring an outside firm will give the city more flexibility the next time a downturn in the city’s development occurs.
.”We’ve been through these cycles and we don’t have the flexibility … to expand and contract depending on the need and demand like a private firm does,” Ganz said.
, 561-243-6624 or Twitter @AnneBoca
