Status quo is Latin for “fuck you, I got mine, and you ain’t getting yours.”
My old Latin teacher might quibble with the translation, but that’s the real case against the nine charter questions on Deerfield Beach’s November 3 ballot. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board looked at all nine, A through I, and told voters to say yes to every one. I agree with them. I just don’t think they told you the whole story, so let me fill in the parts they left out.
The Mad Max Motel
If you’ve driven past the Sunrider at 100 Northeast 20th Terrace, you already know. It’s a third of an acre of oceanfront that sold for just over two million dollars back in 2003, and it looks like a set somebody forgot to tear down after the last Mad Max movie.
It’s not ugly because nobody wants it. It’s ugly because the rules written for our beach a generation ago make it nearly impossible to fix. The charter caps how much building can sit on a lot and what you’re allowed to do inside it, so nobody can make the numbers work. Amendment G loosens those caps. It doesn’t touch the height limits, which stay at 45 feet for multistory buildings and 55 for commercial.
Mayor Todd Drosky told the Board, “We are not your Mama’s Deerfield Beach.” He’s right. Mama’s Deerfield Beach had a motel on that lot that people actually stayed in.
What mattered 25 years ago matters a lot less today. Those rules were written to stop overbuilding. Now they just stop building.
It Was Always About Tony
The people who want March elections are the people who win March elections. That’s not a coincidence. That’s the plan.
Amendment D moves city elections from March to November. The Board’s main argument is turnout, and it’s a fair one. About one in ten voters showed up in 2025, and roughly one in seventeen actually picked the mayor.
But the Board also said the quiet part out loud. Deerfield Beach ended its police and fire contract with the Broward Sheriff’s Office, and Sheriff Gregory Tony went after city officials on social media. The Board worries he’d use a low-turnout March election to put two friends on the dais and win the contract back. Move the election to November and that plan dies.
There’s a price, and it’s a real one. D stretches the terms of the mayor and four commissioners by 20 months, out to November 2028. Full disclosure: I filed to run for mayor in 2025, withdrew, and endorsed Drosky. I’d still rather pay that price once than hand a sheriff with a grudge a cheap election.
If you haven’t been paying attention, Tony is wobbling. I am doing my best to help that along. I am the complainant in a Florida Commission on Ethics case against him, with a probable cause hearing to be set within the next month or two. This month he locked county commissioners out of the Public Safety Building, then held a half-hour press conference that raised more questions than it answered, while the county pushes to audit his agency. A wobbling sheriff with two friends on a five-seat commission is still a sheriff with a contract to win back.
The Saviors
So who’s fighting all this? Mostly folks who like the beach exactly the way it is, because they’ve already got their piece of it.
The loudest no comes from Save Our Beach, the crowd behind the 2002 amendment that built this lockbox in the first place. Their lawyer, Tom Connick, filed a sworn complaint with the Florida Elections Commission in September, claiming the city’s webpage explaining the charter questions crossed a legal line. The Sentinel’s Board read that same webpage and called it balanced and detailed. Maybe Tom should file one against them too.
Politics makes strange bedfellows, though I can’t picture who’d volunteer to climb into bed with Bett and Pam.
Then there’s Dan Herz. Years back, Dan went on Facebook to make it “very simple” for his neighbors. Thanks to the Save Our Beach amendment, he said, a drug rehab or sober home was the “highest & best use” of his 10,500-square-foot property on A1A, and when he was ready to sell, he’d sell to whoever paid the most.
Now he’s marching with the people behind that amendment, and I don’t think floor-area ratios changed his mind. Dan’s been planning a Redemption Tour for the March 2027 election, and Amendment D would push that election to November 2028. Whatever was left of his morals, he seems to have bartered it for a ticket on that tour.
Vote Yes
Nine questions. Nine yeses. November 3.
The status quo has had almost 25 years. Go look at what it did to the Sunrider. And we ended up with Dan.
Chaz Stevens is a First Amendment practitioner in Deerfield Beach, Florida. His work forced one governor to rewrite state law — and the governor wrote him into the bill by name. Oh, hell yeah! He drafts civil litigation pleadings and engineers public records work product for licensed attorneys at Sufficient to Show, and is the founder of REVOLT Training.
