You might be surprised to learn that two sitting Democrat Broward County Commissioners and the currently-suspended Republican Mayor of Deerfield Beach actually have something in common. Each of them cast a vote on an agenda item in which either they or a spouse had a financial interest. Amazingly, the Democrat State Attorney of Broward County, Mike Satz, only prosecuted one of them. You guessed it, Democrat Satz only brought a criminal charge against the currently-suspended Republican Mayor of Deerfield Beach. The two Democrat Broward County Commissioners were dealt with solely by the Florida Ethics Commission.
You might be thinking that the facts of the case against the Republican mayor were far more egregious than the facts against the two Democrat County Commissioners, but you would be wrong.
In 2003, Democrat County Commissioner Diana Wasserman-Rubin improperly voted on parks grants that benefited her husband, a grant writer for Southwest Ranches. She failed to disclose the fact that her husband would benefit financially from her vote. In 2007, Democrat Wasserman-Rubin agreed to pay a $15,000 fine levied by the Florida Ethics Commission. $15,000 was the amount of the bonus her husband received from the parks grant she voted on. Democrat State Attorney Mike Satz announced in November 2007 that his office would review the matter to see if it warranted criminal investigation. To date, no criminal charge has been brought against Democrat County Commissioner Wasserman-Rubin.
Democrat County Commissioner Josephus Eggelletion is a very interesting character. He worked as a lobbyist for Waste Management at the same time he sat on the County Commission. These dual roles collided in 2005 when he admitted that he voted as a County Commissioner to award a $26,556 contract to Waste Management to pick up garbage from county buildings. He agreed to pay a $2,500 fine levied by the State Ethics Commission. Democrat State Attorney Satz never brought a criminal charge against him. In 2003, Democrat Satz also cleared Eggelletion of any criminal violations when he was caught using a government issued credit card to purchase more than $3,300 worth of personal items and claimed 55 hours of sick time from his school board job when he was actually out of town on official county business.
The criminal case brought against Republican Mayor Al Capellini by Democrat Satz is actually much less serious than the cases involving the two Democrat County Commissioners. On April 28, 2003, Capellini provided written disclosure to the city of his business relationship with developer Deerfield Development Group (DDG). On April 17, 2003, his engineering firm filed a “Conceptual Access Plan” with city officials. The vote on DDG’s plat took place on June 3, 2003 and it was bundled together with several other agenda items and put on the consent agenda for a simultaneous vote by the City Commission. Capellini’s engineering firm earned a total of $16,500 from DDG for creating 23 sets of drawings, holding numerous meetings and processing their plat application. That money was paid over a period of three years and in 2003, the year of the bundled vote, the $11,500 payment to Capellini’s firm from DDG accounted for 1.229 percent of the revenue that year of Atlantis Environmental Engineering. Although Democrat State Attorney Satz had the information for three years, he chose to file the criminal charge against Mayor Capellini on December 12, 29 days before candidate qualifying for Deerfield Beach’s municipal election.
The concept of “Equal Justice Under Law” is firmly rooted in the minds of every high school civics student and every law student. Democrat State Attorney Satz must have been absent the day those lessons were taught. The concept was first discussed in the funeral oration of Pericles in 430 B.C. and the words “Equal Justice Under Law” are emblazoned on the United States Supreme Court building in Washington. We take these historic words for their literal meaning and that is that everyone must be treated equally under the law and that their treatment does not depend on what their political persuasion might be.
The timing of the filing of the criminal charge against Mayor Capellini makes it pretty clear that the goal of Democrat State Attorney Satz was to affect the outcome of the Deerfield Beach municipal election. In view of his failure to bring criminal charges against Democrats Wasserman-Rubin and Eggelletion, Satz should dismiss the criminal case against Mayor Capellini and refer the matter to the Florida Ethics Commission. Failing that, Governor Crist should step in to preserve the integrity of the judicial system in Broward County by removing the partisan politician Satz from the Capellini case and replace him with another State Attorney from another county who can assess the case and decide how best to proceed.
