Hollywood Mayor Not Running For Re-Election; Eleanor Sobel As Replacement?
BY BUDDY NEVINS
Mayor Peter Bober of Hollywood is not running for re-election.
He announced his decision in a letter to employees.
Speculation for his replacement immediately fell upon state Sen. Eleanor Sobel, D-Hollywood, who is leaving the Legislature next year because of term limits.
State Sen. Eleanor Sobel
“No one could beat her if she decides to run,” one long-time political observer says.
Another says, “She is loved in Hollywood, has name ID and could walk into this.”
Sobel, 69, was on the Hollywood City Commission from 1992-1998. Then she won election to the House (1998-2006), joined the Broward School Board (2006-2008) and the state Senate (2008 to present).
A third source texted Browardbeat.com that another politician was considering running to replace Bober: “I’m hearing (Hollywood City Commissioner) Patty Asseff is telling people she will run for mayor.”
Bober was first elected mayor in 2008 and re-elected in 2012. Bober, an employment discrimination lawyer with an office in downtown Hollywood, is of Jewish/Cuban heritage.
Mayor Peter Bober
For the Sun-Sentinel and The Herald who missed this story completely, here is Bober’s resignation letter to employees:
August 26th, 2015 at 4:53 pm
Is it true Bober may be moving to Carmel, California to run for office out there?
August 26th, 2015 at 5:21 pm
Senator Sobel would be a great choice. She does some serious work in the legislature and is beloved by the community. Can’t wait to see her run.
August 26th, 2015 at 6:13 pm
Here is an interesting bit of trivia. Peter Bober is the first Hollywood Mayor in nearly 50 years who left the job voluntarily. Keating, Giulianti (twice) and Oliveri all left in defeat. The last one who left voluntarily was either Mayor Bill Zinkil (who left to become Tax Assessor) or Mayor Maynard Abrams (who left to become a judge), sometime in the late 1960s or very early 1970s.
August 27th, 2015 at 6:53 am
Eleanor Sobel’s brain is fried and at her best she was never the brightest penny in the jar. Everyone in Tallahassee laughs at how bizarre it is to do business with her. Locally she is not well respected by government people who find her kooky. She should retire to her basket weaving and leave government to more capable people. Sobel was a failure at every job she ever held and left each those places worse off than she found them.
August 27th, 2015 at 10:37 am
I remember all the Mayors of Hollywood, going back to 1971. Each brought a unique perspective to the city, including Peter. I know all of his family and wish him well in his future endeavors.
August 28th, 2015 at 10:28 am
Eleanor Sobel has accomplished things because of a good staff. Personally, she is the stupidest elected official that I have ever met in thirty years of political involvement. If she becomes mayor, change the city’s name to Hollywierd!
August 29th, 2015 at 1:36 am
When Eleanor was on the Commission the city was better off in every way. Ask yourself a question .. Is the city in better shape today after twelve years of the majority of the commissioners being in place, Bober, Blattner, Asseff and Sherwood than it was 12 years ago. The city is in worst shape ever and these people have done nothing to better the city with any of their own visions or actions.
August 29th, 2015 at 9:09 am
we can find some new and fresh faces for our political scene in Broward. We have a county of musical chairs! Hey if your thinking about retiring or term limited come to Broward the democrats can prolong your career!!! We only like establishment candidates who will play by our rules and pledge to kiss the ass of our executive committee and club leaders.
August 30th, 2015 at 4:50 pm
I’m sure there are plenty of more stupid people in politics than Eleanor Sobel. I just cannot think of any names.
August 30th, 2015 at 7:36 pm
What intelligent person can stand hours of lying lobbyists lunatic character assaasinating self appointed activists and greedy worthless non profit self interest group officials? I sat and watched a condo president a lobbyist’s lie n no one said a word of criticism to her in Ft Lauderdale City Hall. Even this journalistic blog has people who attack people based on rumor. This is NOT what decent people can stomach.
August 31st, 2015 at 4:46 am
The curtain should come down on Ms. Sobel’s political career toot sweet. New ideas, talent, faces and energy are desperately needed—and not just in Hollywood!
August 31st, 2015 at 3:55 pm
Given the number of fact-filled posts I’ve written over the years on my blog about the clear-cut serial duplicity, overweening sense of entitlement and general sense of shadiness about notions of ethics and Good Government emanating from Eleanor Sobel, on one public policy issue after another of importance to the residents, taxpayers and Small Business owners of SE Broward -and there were so many stories I left out- it’s hard for anyone to seriously make the case that having someone of Sobel’s moral ilk as mayor of Hollywood could be seen by any serious person as anything but a GIANT step BACKWARDS.
Especially to any well-informed voter who, whatever else their politics and ideology might be, insists on electing people who value and respect #ethics #transparency & #accountability.
Yes, three simple but important areas where on a whole host of issues that affect SE Broward people’s daily lives, Quality of Life and sense of concern/pride about their community, Eleanor Sobel has repeatedly been found wanting. In the extreme.
NOT just NOT up to the task required of her as an elected official, but actually been found to be part and parcel of the larger institutional dysfunction that alienates the public, NOT part of its eventual solution.
Ever since Eleanor Sobel got into the state Senate following a bitter primary campaign where she showed no ethical scruples in attacking her two opponents -and arranged for others to do the dirty work via shady PACs she pretended to know nothing about- which itself followed her embarrassing tenure on the Broward School Board -more like an internship really simply because she couldn’t honestly imagine that SE Broward could go a year or so without her being around as an elected official drawing a govt. check- she has repeatedly shown thru words and actions that she puts her own self-interest and that of her political pals and cronies above the larger long-term interests of the community.
The evidence could not be clearer.
No wonder a self-involved, media concoction like Lauren Book could deign to look herself in the mirror in the morning and think that she could plausibly run to replace Sobel in the state Senate without ever having lived in SE Broward. Look what the standard here has been!
But then in evading responsibility and authorship of her own foolish words and actions -esp. those to help her political cronies evade the independent oversight and justice they’ve long deserved, like her efforts to spin JLAC re the Hallandale Beach CRA scandal that wasted millions, just to protect her confidante, Hallandale Beach mayor Joy Cooper- Sobel has been helped in large part by being an elected official during one of the sorriest eras of journalism in South Florida.
A time and age now where print and TV reporters -and newspaper columnists- routinely ignore stories (often given to them on a silver platter) that once upon a time would have kept them and their colleagues busy for days, weeks and months at a time, while keeping the local citizenry as well informed as humanly possible.
Unfortunately, Eleanor Sobel’s good luck -and Lauren Book’s too- has been our collective civic bad luck.
Sobel should take a bow and get off the stage and let people who are serious about putting the community’s long-term problems and interests front-and-center get the chance they need to show what meaningful innovation and common sense ideas can accomplish.
That does NOT include Lauren Book by any stretch of the imagination.
August 31st, 2015 at 5:18 pm
It’s a powerful cabal put together years ago by women who were all members and officers of NCJW.
Revolving electeds make the voters nauseated.
August 31st, 2015 at 5:22 pm
Tell me how many ethical complaints were filed let alone acted upon as accurate has the hallandale blog filed? Or is it just more mudslinging? Who wants to be a Mayor or State Senator if any jerk can carry on about them with no complaints filed let alone legitimized by official action?
August 31st, 2015 at 11:50 pm
Now I get why no one from Eleanor Sobel’s office answers the phone or responds to her constituents questions; she’s just too busy to care…
September 1st, 2015 at 1:04 pm
Oh, Count, I’m so very disappointed in you. You could have been a contender…
Especially since you were largely correct about what you wrote per Buddy’s 8/26 post about (thoroughly-unqualified) Broward Comm. Stacey Ritter’s interests in being head of the Greater FTL CVB, and their generally unappealing approach to promoting the area they’ve taken the past few years: You wrote, “The tourist development has been un-imaginative, boring…”
Please, it’s been so much WORSE than simply boring, it’s been banal.
All you or anyone else who wants to be better informed about Sen. Sobel’s strange antics while in office the past few years is read what I’ve already written -usually with links to what others have written as well- based on my actually being there when things were happening -or weren’t- as opposed to the approach taken so often by the Miami Herald and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
Tell me, what were the most salient facts to come out of Tim Ryan’s lawsuit against Eleanor Sobel in 2009 after he and Ken Gottlieb were defeated in her well-funded and unscrupulous 2008 campaign that was super-negative even for this area with little-to-no ethical standards? (I voted for Ryan.) What statements did Sobel make to the public and the media that were proven to have been self-serving lies?
http://miamiherald.typepad.com/nakedpolitics/2009/07/emails-revealed-in-tim-ryan-lawsuit-expose-an-ecos-secrets.html
Guess what, most people in Broward don’t know the answer because the two area newspapers and all four English language TV stations STOPPED sending reporters to cover the whole trial, as any check of their own archives shows. And I bemoaned this fact to anyone who would listen.
Tell me, why did Sobel choose to move her office from Hallandale Beach City Hall -where she paid almost nothing- to Hollywood so it could be near Hollywood City Hall? Better yet, why were Hollywood taxpayers asked to subsidize the costs of her office? Why couldn’t she have simply opened a district office in one of the MANY empty storefronts in downtown Hollywood or over near Young Circle to better serve her constituents?
I wrote about that when it was actually happening, as opposed to… well everyone else not named Sara Case. Eleanor Sobel didn’t even have the guts to show up in person for the Hollywood City Commission meeting asking for the money, lest she have to answer pointed questions from the dais about the appropriateness of the request and have to listen to her well-informed constituents question HER curious choice of priorities -yet again.
Tell me, why did Sobel try to prevent JLAC from investigating the City of Hallandale Beach CRA after the Broward IG’s damning report about the waste of millions of dollars? If you read my blog you’d know.
Broward Bulldog wrote this,
Two senators short-circuit Legislature’s plan to audit troubled Hallandale Beach CRA
By Willliam Gjebre, BrowardBulldog.org, NOVEMBER 26, 2013 AT 6:13 AM
http://www.browardbulldog.org/2013/11/two-senators-short-circuit-legislatures-plan-to-audit-troubled-hallandale-beach-cra/
Buddy Nevins wrote this on November 28, 2013, More coverups by Hallandale and Eleanor Sobel is to blame! http://t.co/X2DZcLDXEk
and I responded with this, http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2013/11/sandbagged-independent-audit-of.html
Yet Sobel had no qualms about doing the bidding of her campaign pals at the Broward PBA to have JLAC investigate the City of Hollywood after the voters of the city thoroughly rejected the PBA’s arguments and accepted the city’s in a referendum about the city’s budget, a loss that still rubs the Broward PBA and their more mouthy
members raw to this very day? (All you have to do is ask them and they’ll tell you.) Who wrote about that at the time? Me.
This, of course, came about AFTER the Broward PBA broke Hollywood’s city’s charter laws about campaign finance and disclosure in their attempt to punish officials who didn’t let them continue to ride roughshod over the city’s budget.
So Count, where are all the #SoFL media stories about those stories, or the city taking the Broward PBA to court for violating the rules, likely, intentionally? I wrote about it and I wrote about it when it was happening.
In the future, you might want to consider checking the record before your flippancy leads you to write something that can be so EASILY disproven by anyone looking at my blog’s archives.
In short, don’t throw stones at people who not only are more familiar with the facts than you, but who also have a much-more accurate arm than you.
I wrote about the curious and shady doings of Eleanor Sobel when they were actually happening, not after the fact. That the South Florida news media we are stuck with chose to ignore what was happening right in front of it, is NOT something that I can control.
September 1st, 2015 at 9:00 pm
Writing has little or no effect on elected officials unless followed up with ethics charges law suits fundraisers for good candidates and getting out the vote. As an investor n landowner from a family that lived and owned businesses in Hollywood we took our profits n left when developers and failed south beach redevelopment experts ruined downtown n people didn’t give a damn. Bloggers have dreams and hopes but end up with broken lives or hearts because they lack the work ethic to change anything