The Palm Beach Post du lieu suivant : West Palm Beach, Florida • Page 21

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 1998 The Palm Beach Post a PAGE 3B LOCAL I Computer purchase puts county, clerk at odds Wilken snubs delay request, spends $617,000 Commission actions 4B en," said county Commissioner Mary McCarty. Earlier, she said: "The voters are either going to have to take care of the problem by abolishing the (clerk's) position or by abolishing the person." Wilken did not respond to requests for comment. But her automation director, Ken MacLeod, said the county has kept his office hanging for details about future computer requirements. "Our needs are now," MacLeod said. "They're not next year." But Weisman said continuing uncertainty about the court system, and what types of computer and software it will require, make it all the more sensible to wait before buying anything.

In a memo to Wilken on Friday, Weisman also noted that computer prices keep dropping, and that Windows 98 $359 per computer, or 15 percent of the purchase price, below what the state usually gets through its Dell contract. Last year, commissioners chopped $1.5 million from Wilken's budget, partly to retaliate for her purchasing a $480,000 computer system over their Meanwhile, county project manager-Mike Pinkney said Tuesday he expects a three- to four-week setback in the effort to create the criminal courts system. Science Applications International a San Diego company expected to be named the prime contractor for the job next month, quit Monday after a dispute with two Pinkney said the county will try to work with the subcontractors directly. Staff writer George Bennett contributed to this story. is replacing Windows 95 as the most up-to-date computer operating system.

In response, Wilken's office said the 300 new PC's will arrive by Thursday. MacLeod said the PC's are unrelated to the criminal justice system anyway, and instead will handle such office functions as personnel, payroll and child support enforcement. The PCs made by Dell Computer a leading mail-order vendor have Pentium II processors that operate at speeds of 350 megahertz, making them fast, but not record-setting. They include CD-ROM drives, 64 megabytes of random access memory and 6.4-gigabyte hard drives. MacLeod said Wilken's office saved By Robert P.

King Palm Beach Post Staff Writer WEST PALM BEACH Four days after County Administrator Bob Weis-man asked Clerk of the Circuit Court Dorothy Wilken to delay any major computer purchases, Wilken responded Tuesday: Don't worry. Her 300 new personal computers will be here this week. Wilken's $617,000 purchase had county commissioners complaining that once again the clerk had taken them by surprise. But Wilken's computer chief said the county staff has known for months she was buying the PCs, which her office needs to replace obsolete ma chines and avoid the "Year 2000" bug. The PC debate came on the heels of another cyber-shock the departure of the prime contractor who was supposed to create a criminal courts computer system that Wilken's office and other county agencies would use.

That project was already five years delayed and more than $5 million in the hole. The two setbacks were unrelated, Weisman said. Even so, Wilken and the commissioners have sparred for years over the criminal justice computer system. Her purchase of the 300 PCs helped reanimate one of the county's most enduring political feuds. "That is the problem: Dorothy Wilk High-seas chase leads to 2 drug arrests 1 Frank Cerabino Dance of words still strips down to same grind Palm Beacher Stephen Fagan wants to set the record straight.

i After allegedly kidnapping his two young daughters from their mother nearly 20 years ago, he didn't take them to live with a stripper. "How can one characterize a human being that way by taking a cheap shot and calling someone a stripper?" Fagan told The Palm Beach Daily News in a story published this week. "She was an exotic dancer." Not a stripper. An exotic dancer. I ran this distinction by Al Goldstein, the pub-lisher of a pornographic magazine.

"What are you, Al?" I asked. "I see myself as a pornographer," he said. "Can't you come up with a better title than that?" I asked. Goldstein came up with "Fantasy Entertain-'. ment Industry Executive," but his heart wasn't in it.

"I'm just a pornographer," he said. Goldstein couldn't imagine there'd be a difference between a stripper and an exotic dancer. "It's just semantics," he said. The woman who stripped oops, I mean danced exotically while getting undressed met i Fagan at a bar where he worked as a bouncer. Actually, I may be accused of taking a cheap shot by characterizing Fagan's former job as that of "a bouncer." To be on the safe side, let's just call him a former "customer egress specialist" It's too bad Fagan's old housemate hadn't fig-; ured out a way to do interesting things with tu-' bers while taking her clothes off on stage.

Then Fagan could have bristled with righ- teous indignation that he lived with "a perfor- mance artist" with a grant application pending at the National Endowment of the Arts. I called up Rachel's, a "gentlemen's club" in West Palm Beach. "What do you call the women who work there strippers or exotic dancers?" I asked manager Craig Bordeaux. "We would label the girls as entertainers or exotic performers," Bordeaux said. And to think we're amazed that the Eskimos can come up with 20 names for snow.

"What's the difference between an exotic dancer and a stripper?" I asked Bordeaux. "They're interchangeable," he said. "One's just a fancier name." The name, Bordeaux said, has more to do By Joe Brogan Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Two men were arrested at gun-, point Tuesday after authorities say they dumped 15 bales of marijuana in the Atlantic Ocean while being chased by a Palm Beach County deputy. Michael Deneault, 37, of 8003 Citrus Park Fort Pierce, and Lamar Knowles, 25, of Freeport, Bahamas, were charged by the U.S. Customs Service with importing a controlled substance and conspiracy to import a controlled substance.

Marine unit deputy Thomas McElroy, 33, said he was patrolling 8 miles off Palm Beach Inlet about 7:30 a.m. when he saw the suspects speeding west toward him in a 29-foot Olympic open fisherman. McElroy, a 12-year sheriffs deputy, said the boat turned north to evade him and he chased it in his patrol boat for about 10 minutes before pulling alongside, drawing his pistol and ordering the occupants to surrender. His only companion was his drug detection dog "Rusty," a terrier mix, investigators said. Coast Guard boats and planes and a sheriffs helicopter later assisted him near the waterway, which is officially known as the Lake Worth Inlet The suspects had no firearms, but one had a knife, investigators said.

The boat was confiscated by federal authorities. Investigators estimated the weight of the retrieved bales at about 500 pounds, with a rough wholesale value of about $500,000, said sheriffs office spokesman Paul Miller. Investigators believe the marijuana load came from the Bahamas, Miller said. Marine deputies can make arrests beyond the 3-mile limit for state wa- ters because they are federally deputized by U.S. Customs, Miller said.

The suspects were booked at the county jail and were to appear before a U.S. magistrate today. A rvF A'YW' tZT If' ft fit 11 7 w' GREG LOVETTStaff Photographer A Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office marine unit takes two men to the U.S. Coast Guard station after they allegedly dumped 15 bales of marijuana into the ocean. Lake Worth considers $35 fire-rescue tax with the audience than the job itself.

White-collar guys watch "exotic dancers" take their clothes off. Blue-collar guys watch "strippers." The more faux-respectable the joint gets, the more obfuscating the job title becomes for the women who undress for a living. I spoke with Dixie Evans, president of the Exotic Dancers League of America Before I got down to semantics, I had to ask a simple question: "Sfl where do you women keep your member-: ship cards?" Evans is a voice for the professionally under-dressed. "The strip tease dancer has been discriminated against for many years," she said. "They're a lovely bunch of girls, what I like to call renegade girls.

"They're just trying to stay in the arts," she said. Meanwhile, Fagan is trying to stay out of "long-term government housing" (prison) on the charge of "sudden youthful relocation" (kidnapping). Fagan said he took his daughters because his ex-wife, Barbara Kurth. had frequently been drunk and neglectful. But to paraphrase a earlier complaint, how can one characterize a human being that way? It might be better for Fagan to say that Kurth was "alcoholically inclined," to the point of "chronic distraction." So he took the girls to live with a budding artist, ho used to take her clothes off on stage, but certainly wasn't a stripT.

Golfview first town in county to die By George Bennett Palm Brack Post Staff Writrr THE AREA FORMERLY KNOWN AS GOLFVIEW It can be argued this place died a few years ago when most of its longtime residents left or a few months ago when boarded-up houses first outnumbered occupied ones. There was the symbolic kiss of death in July when the town's 20-foot concrete entrance arch was disassembled and carted off to Yesteryear Village at the South Florida Fairgrounds. On Tuesday, though, the long demise of (iolfview became final and official. With the filing of some pajx-rs at the Palm Beach County Courthou. the tiny 1 year -old municipality ctaM-d to cxi4 W1 By Scott McCabe Palm Beach Post Staff Writer LAKE WORTH Thecounty has withdrawn its proposal to take over the city's fire-rescue department, leading Mayor Tom Ramiccio to propose creating a special taxing district that he says mhhmbb would spread the Royal Palm city department's fire-rescue $4.5 million cost study more evenly, begins 6B Instead of paying through property taxes, the average homeowner would pay about $35 a year for fire-rescue services, Ramiccio said.

Homeowners also pay separately for 37 other items, such as garbage pickup, on their tax bills. "It's only fair." said Ramiccio. The mayor said the homestead exemption precludes the owners of condos and homes LANMS ATES Sta Photog-WW Richard Berryman, Golfview's last mayor, files paperwork dissolving the town at the Palm Beach County Courthouse on Tuesday. home, will be swallowed up by neighboring Palm Beach International Airport, just as the golf course from which it derived its name was obliterated during World War II by It's the first time a city or town has dissolved in Palm Beach County and the first time a municipality has extinguished in Florida since 197. Golfview.

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