Guest Author
If Plantation Council member Nick Sortal has his way, the Broward County city will move from a strong mayor to a city-manager form of government.
As the city’s population approaches 100,000, putting it among the 30 largest in Florida, Sortal believes it’s time.
“The city was formed in 1953,” he says. “We’ve never even had a charter review. We still have only ‘him’ language. We finally got a charter review committee in 2018. We reviewed the charter, but didn’t get it on the ballot for 2020 because of COVID.
“Twenty-nine of 31 Broward County municipalities have city managers. People know that we’ve outgrown it and should have a professional running our city who knows the ins and outs of the laws and regulations and can navigate the system much better than a layperson who gets elected every four years to run an 800-person corporation with a current budget over $200 million,” Sortal says.
Sortal brought up his proposal at Plantation’s February 10 council meeting. Its members agreed to hold a nonbinding workshop on April 24 to ask questions of an adviser of the Florida City and County Management Association. Sortal hopes to see both the charter review and city manager questions go before the voters in 2022.
Sortal enjoys being a maverick of sorts.
He is one of a few reporters who have crossed the road from holding elected officials accountable through a long career in journalism to becoming an elected official not subject to being held accountable by the media and the voters.
Sortal says he started contemplating the idea to run for office in 2010.
“I write about people who ‘do’, but I don’t actually ‘do’,” says Sortal, adding that politics was his No. 2 aspiration behind becoming a journalist.
Newspaper layoffs were another driving factor. His plan B was to try to get into politics. Sortal survived six rounds of layoffs at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and took a voluntary buyout.
“I wish I had started this 10 years ago,” Sortal notes. “I love it. I help people every day with the routine things involved in navigating through a city.
“I love communicating. Obviously, telling people how things work is a strong point for me. People are curious and I want it to be a situation where everybody grows.”
Although it’s not common for journalists to run for public office, Sortal had seen other former colleagues from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel get elected. Case in point, Earl Maucker — former editor of the Sun-Sentinel — serves as a Lighthouse Point City Commissioner.
“I saw a couple of people in Plantation that I knew were decent enough people — in fact, they were friends of mine — but I thought I probably had better ideas than them,” says Sortal.
In February 2018, when Sortal was a freelance writer for the Miami Herald, he filed to run for a Plantation city council seat.
“Jerry Fadgen was in that seat and resigned to run for Mayor,” Sortal notes. “He vacated the seat. It was a two-year term. Seat One and Seat Two were open with four-year terms. Seat Five was a two-year term.
“I thought, ‘I’ll take the two-year term, less competition. I would have walked all the way in without competition. But then Jerry died and his son Timothy filed to run against me. So I ran against a legacy — the second-biggest name in Plantation politics behind the (Frank) Veltri name.”
As he sought to win the seat against Timothy Fadgen, Sortal says he knocked on 6,000 doors, saying it was the “hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
Sortal took the seat with 50.63% — 409 more votes — over Fadgen, who was later elected to a four-year Plantation City Commission seat in 2020.
While Sortal followed local politics as a resident of Plantation, he says after his election, he had become cognizant of the level of information regarding the city that he did not know.
“It’s an incredible number of things,” he says. “Running and getting elected is one thing, but then knowing everything that it takes to do the job is another. I think everybody who gets elected goes in unprepared and that included me.”
During his first term, Sortal focused on the schools.
“People would tell me they love Plantation except for the schools,” he says. “I tried to build the city’s relationship with the schools, make it better, and let them know we’re there for them to try to change that conversation people have in their driveways about the public schools.
“There’s always something that I wanted to make my city better, encourage people to get people involved.”
Consequently, running for reelection was an easy decision, Sortal adds. He ran against Robert Koreman in November, taking 60.59% of the votes.
“I got 25,000 votes, which is more than anybody had ever gotten in the city,” he points out.
Reflecting on what he brings to the table as a former journalist, Sortal points out that he was a professional adviser for 10 year at American Heritage School, a private school in Plantation.
“I taught journalism as a life skill,” he says. “You learn to look up things, to ask questions, to seek both sides. Knowing how to parade through all of those records — that kind of experience is invaluable. The No. 1 thing I have is patience and not jumping to conclusions.
“I wait and hear everything. I take a little heat from it in the public because there will be something unpopular floating around, like plans for an unpopular development. I’ll sit back a little bit. But legally, because everything runs through quasi-judicial, we’re not supposed to form an opinion until we hear all the evidence. So the thing I do best is I hear both sides. I listen, I get people to talk.”
Sortal described his work as a newspaper reporter as starting the day with a blank sheet of paper.
“By the end, you got to figure everything out,” he says. “You got to figure out who’s bending the facts a little bit. It’s the same thing with being a City Commissioner. You gather info from everybody and you form a decision.
“The only difference is I don’t have to write the story. In some ways, that’s easier. But you do have to vote and advocate for what you think is right after doing everything. And then you’ve got to trust that people voted for you and the people trust you and your judgment.”
Now that he’s been on the other side of journalism and in politics, Sortal is seeing the results of the local news media desert that has resulted from the deep layoffs that have occurred throughout the industry.
“Overall, city reporters are missing the stories,” he says. “It’s changed so much from when 20 years ago, every city in Broward County had a reporter assigned to it. And now there are two reporters who cover all 31 municipalities.”
Sortal says there has not been one reporter at a Plantation city council meeting since he was elected in 2018.
“Not one person has sat in on our meeting,” he says. “Not one person has watched our meeting. They don’t really care about what happened in the meeting. They care about clicks. The one story that really blew up was when we did our meeting on Zoom and we got porn-bombed.”
Yet, while local news coverage has been minimized throughout the past several years, the criticality of local politics has become even more essential.
“We’re the decision-makers,” Sortal points out. “We’re the people that they know. Every day, so much of it is just keeping things running that people don’t appreciate until they stop working: water, road maintenance, sewers — the kinds of everyday life things that keep the trains running.
“But the city really isn’t the five of us who sit up there on the dais. For most people, the city is their local cop, the guy who mows the ball field or the person at the library who gets them a book. That’s the city — the 800 city employees. Most people interact with the city employees much more often than they interact with one of us five on the council. We’re not as famous as we all think we are.”
Case in point: a friend of Sortal’s did a survey in which 44% indicated they knew Sortal and approved of him and 11% knew him and did not approve of him.
“Which means 45% have no idea,” Sortal adds. “I ask people all of the time if they can name somebody other than their Mayor and nobody can name their local officials.”
“It’s incumbent upon local elected officials to educate and teach their constituents, Sortal says.
That’s where he has an advantage as a professional communicator, he adds.
“I’m really good on Facebook, Twitter, Nextdoor and on my website. I write a newsletter every week and I share with those platforms,” Sortal says.
Sortal will often visit HOA meetings where he is asked how they can get more people to come to their meetings.
“I tell them to screw something up,” he says. “Nobody’s coming to your meetings because everything’s running OK. The same with city council — the only time people storm the meeting is when they’re ticked off.”
Sortal says that while he has developed thick skin as a journalist who has had doors slammed in his face, phone conversations cut short by the other party handing up and reading negative information about himself on the internet, animosity does hurt in the political arena.
“There’s certain Facebook groups that I’m happier if I don’t read the posts,” he says. “It’s harder on your family because your family can’t respond to the criticism. I have control over whether I respond or not and my family often has differing opinions on what I should respond to or not and they can’t get to do anything. My family shows amazing restraint. I’m proud of them.”
By the same token, Sortal says he treats every person’s idea as he would a story tip when he was a reporter. While at first blush, it may not merit attention, a citizen’s idea could lead to action that ultimately improves something in the city, he adds.
“You have to have that humility,” he points out. “You have to have a sense of wonder. And you have to believe that people have something to offer.
“I ran on my record and the idea that I listen to everybody, provide leadership and give a sense of sensibility to the dais,” says Sortal. “I am not a single-issue guy. A lot of people quickly have gotten to know me. The No. 1 reason people vote for you is they know you. You knocked on their door.”
Sortal’s second term has been focused on dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, its associated economic impact, social unrest and increased political divisiveness.
To be of service, Sortal has relied on learning from the Florida League of Cities.
“They are amazing,” he says. “They give you info on what everybody else is doing. It’s like journalism: compare and contrast.”
When civil unrest began to emerge, Sortal turned to Plantation Police Chief W. Howard Harrison.
“I didn’t coach him; he already had it figured it out,” says Sortal. “His whole thing is de-escalation. Let people talk and talk them out of causing trouble. Our police department is the gem of our city, our pride and joy. We are a safe city because we have full-service police.”
Sortal says that Plantation was proactive in shutting down nonessential businesses and the parks with the onset of COVID.
“We were two days ahead of everybody shutting everything down and we’re on the back edge of opening up playgrounds and parks.”
Sortal has continued to educate himself through taken place in the Broward Climate Academy and participated in the city’s Citizen’s Police Academy and the Florida League of Cities Institute for Elected Municipal Officials.
He participates in triathlons to maintain his physical and emotional health. As with most people, the pandemic has brought on challenges.
“I thought I would be able to handle the emotional piece of it pretty well, and I think I have not as well as I would have liked,” he says. “But overall, if you make a decision that you know is the best, you can put your head on the pillow at night and if you can sleep well, then you know you did well.
“I love this job. It’s a great thing to be obsessive about. There’s always something to be learning and something you could be doing.”
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Carol Brzozowski is a writer and journalist based in Pompano Beach.
