Prominent political consulting firm gets $48,500 contract to market Lake Worth Beach ballot questions
Cornerstone Solutions is getting help from a former West Palm Beach city communications director to facilitate four town halls
A prominent West Palm Beach political consulting firm has been tapped to help educate Lake Worth Beach voters about five referendums on the March 10 ballot.
Cornerstone Solutions, hired by Lake Worth Beach in December for $48,500, is a fixture in Palm Beach County politics. Among the firm’s clients: the West Palm Beach mayor and city commissioners and Lake Worth Beach City Commissioner Anthony Segrich.
For the Lake Worth Beach referendum communications, the firm’s contract calls for “a fact-based public information campaign” through social media advertising, a dedicated landing page on the city website, newspaper ads and four town hall meetings.
Lake Worth Beach hired Cornerstone after consulting with “multiple other cities to see who they’ve used in the past for this service,’’ interim City Manager Jamie Brown said in an email to the Lake Worth Beach Independent.
“Being that Cornerstone has clients such as the Supervisor of Elections and the Palm Beach County School District,’’ Brown said, “it made sense to select them for these four small informational town halls over someone with little to no experience or no history of government clients.’’
Cornerstone founder Rick Asnani said his firm does not have a facilitator on staff. To facilitate the Lake Worth Beach town halls, Cornerstone hired a subcontractor, Elliot Cohen, who served as West Palm Beach’s communications director from 2012-2016 and has experience, Asnani said, as a facilitator.
The next town hall meeting is 6 p.m. Monday Jan. 12 at the Osborne Community Center at 1699 Wingfield St.
A dozen people attended the first town hall, Thursday Jan. 8 at the Peniel Haitian Baptist Church of Lake Worth at 2000 N. D St. And some, including City Commissioner Chris McVoy and former Commissioner Kim Stokes, criticized the presentation.
McVoy, who cast the lone no vote last year to put the charter changes to voters, said he was concerned about a four-page brochure, created by Cornerstone for town hall attendees, listing several “reasons” for each of the five questions.
“The presentation has to be neutral and cannot advocate one way or another,’’ he said, referring to limits in state law. “I am alarmed to see in every case what is listed as the benefits of voting for it and there is zero about what the negatives might be. That may be a legal problem.
Cornerstone’s contract with the city calls for the firm to spend $2,500 to have an election lawyer review the material, which Brown said will “ensure adherence to state statutes so they can’t be misinterpreted as advocating one way or another.’’
Cohen said the town hall’s purpose was to answer questions about the five referendums. “Questions about ‘could this happen or could that happen’ are really not the kind of questions we can answer,’’ he said.
Catherine Kohlmeyer, a resident, challenged Cohen, saying that the “reasons” listed on the brochure for the ballot questions “are things that could happen or might happen. So why couldn’t you not think about what may be the problems?’’
Others at the first town hall asked why the presentation didn’t include a map of city properties affected by two charter changes that would allow private leases of up to 99 years on public land at the beach and downtown. Assistant City Manager Troy Perry said the city would consider including a map at the next town hall.
Cohen, a former TV reporter in Miami and West Palm Beach, was hired in 2005 by then-West Palm Beach Mayor Lois Frankel, who now is a congresswoman. He left a year later to work for Broward Sheriff Ken Jenne, then returned to West Palm Beach in 2012 as Mayor Jeri Muoio’s communications director.
He left the city to take a private sector job in 2016, a year after he came under fire for dumping more than 2,000 pages of police emails on the city website without redacting names of confidential informants. At least one informant had to be moved out of town as a result, according to The Palm Beach Post. Cohen was eventually cleared by the Palm Beach County Commission on Ethics.
A few years later, Cohen was fined $4,500 by the state ethics commission for misusing his West Palm Beach position to solicit business for his private company.
After the Jan. 12 town hall, there will be two more, both starting at 6 p.m.: Jan. 22 at the Lake Worth Beach City Library downtown at 15 N. M St. and Jan. 28 at the Lake Worth Beach Casino Complex at 10 S. Ocean Blvd.
Here are the four pages of the Cornerstone Solutions brochure being handed out at the town halls:
