Pompano Beach has two official Facebook pages. Both have 39,000 followers. Both open on the pier. Only one of them is the city.
The other one is trying to pick who runs it. According to the paperwork it filed with the State of Florida, that is not what it’s for.
We’ll get to the paperwork later.
If you follow one of them, it’s worth checking which. The city’s page is called City of Pompano Beach. The other one is called Pompano Beach, Fl. Official, because it turns out Official is a word anyone can type. In your feed, the only thing separating the government from not the government is a small blue checkmark next to the city’s name. It’s about the size of a pencil eraser. If you thought you were following the city, that’s not on you. It was built so you would.
The city’s bio is one sentence. “The Official Facebook Page for the City of Pompano Beach.” The other bio is a tourism brochure with a confession stapled to the back. A diverse destination in paradise. Beautiful beaches, golf courses, parks, and an amazing PIER, in capital letters, because the pier earned it. Great Dining. PET Friendly. Then, last line, after you’ve already packed your sunscreen, “We are the PEOPLE & NOT the city.” The disclaimer comes after the PIER. That’s where disclaimers go. After everything you came for.
The cover photo is a pelican. The pelican looks like it has read the page.
The bio opens with “Pompano Beach, Fl. Official ‘LLC’. News Media Reporting.” The ‘LLC’ is in single quotes, which is how you write a word you’d like the reader to say with a raised eyebrow. A limited liability company with the word Official in its name and quotation marks doing the liability work. By the time the page signs its own articles, “By Pompano Beach, Fl. Official LLC,” the quotes are gone. Somewhere between the bio and the byline, the LLC got its confidence back. Residents First. Always. Signed, a company.
Where the city’s page has a button that says Learn more, this one has a button that says Subscribe. The city wants you informed. The page wants you enrolled.
Enrolled in what is the fun part. Scroll the page. There’s a sunset. Then the election. Then the election. Then the election, covered from one side, the way a campaign covers an election. Then another sunset, right about when you’d start to wonder. The sunsets are the garnish. The election is the meal. Most news outlets have a city beat, a crime beat, a weather beat. This one has a ballot beat, and just enough sky to keep you from noticing.
Its October 1st endorsement opens with “Pompano Beach does not need more politics as usual.” It says this on a page that is politics with a sunset in between. I’ll give it this much. It isn’t usual.
Pinned underneath is a request to subscribe and help fund “Pet Meetups, and more.” So I went looking for the pet meetups. I scrolled the way you scroll when you’ve lost a contact lens. Endorsements. A sunset. Candidates. Commission math. Another sunset. Not one dog. The page has found time to photograph the sky over and over, and never once the thing it asked people to fund. The dogs have been subscribed to. They have not been met. The pets were the pitch. The politics are the page.
Here’s the politics, in plain English. The city commission is the group that votes on everything the page says it cares about: flooding, roads, development, a new City Hall. Right now the commission is tied. The page endorses four candidates. Three of them already have seats. The fourth is running against the person who holds the District 2 seat. So the page looked at the commission and found that the people already sitting there are doing a wonderful job in Districts 1, 3, and 4, and a terrible one in District 2. Three is a tie. Four is a majority. The page did not need a pollster. It needed one more chair.
The same post objects to six traffic lanes being cut down to four. It is working very hard to turn three votes into four. Lanes, no. Votes, yes. Four is either too few or exactly enough, depending on whether it’s asphalt.
The October post also lists “Demand transparency” among its priorities. It says voters deserve to know who is funding candidates, especially when those interests may later come before the Commission. I agree with every word. I’d only ask that it apply to June.
Because in June, there were five.
On June 16th, the page posted “Opinion: Pompano Beach Residents Must Come First.” The graphic showed five candidates under a banner that read Five Strong Voices. One Stronger Pompano Beach. District 1, Audrey Fesik. District 2, Brandi Zabadal. District 3, Alison Fournier. District 4, Beverly Perkins. District 5, Delvin M. King. The post said the LLC proudly supports candidates who have committed to protecting neighborhoods.
By October 1st, five strong voices had become four. One was removed by a court. One was removed by the page.
Start with District 5. Delvin King, the page’s candidate, was removed from the race by a court. That left the incumbent, Darlene Smith, with no opponent. A resident then sued the city to reopen the sign-up window so someone else could jump in and run against her. It didn’t work. Darlene Smith won District 5 without a single vote being cast.
The page covered it. One headline says District 5 voters were left without a choice. Another says Wayne Oken fought to give District 5 a vote. Remember that name. The page certainly does. District 5 voters were left without a choice, and the page is right about that. It just didn’t mention that the choice it wanted them to have was its own candidate, and when that didn’t work, a replacement.
With District 5 settled, District 2 became the only seat left that could break the tie. And in October, the page changed its District 2 candidate. Brandi Zabadal, one of the five strong voices, was out. Freddy York was in. The October post doesn’t mention Zabadal. It doesn’t mention a change. It doesn’t mention there was ever a fifth voice. One Stronger Pompano Beach, now with one voice fewer and one voice different. Residents First. Always. Candidates, subject to change.
It turns out five was never the number. Four was.
In the comments on the October post, the page calls its four “the most credible candidates you will find.” It adds, “We are very fortunate to have them.” In June, the most credible candidate you would find in District 2 was Brandi Zabadal. You’d think a page that finds the most credible candidate would stop looking once it found one. Voters deserve to know who is funding the candidates. Apparently they don’t need to know who the page was endorsing in June.
You might also like to know who runs the page telling you how to vote. The bio found room for the golf courses. It did not find room for him.
So here he is. According to the state’s Division of Corporations, Pompano Beach, Fl. Official LLC was filed in October 2024. Its manager is Wayne Oken. Its registered agent is Wayne Oken. Wayne Oken is also the resident who sued to reopen District 5. And yes, he’s the same Wayne Oken from the headline about fighting to give District 5 a vote. In Pompano Beach this year, the person suing the city and the news media covering it can be the same person.
The filing also says what the company is for. Charity. Community service. Photos, news and information. That’s the mission, on file with the State of Florida, signed by Wayne Oken.
Hold it up against the page. The photos are there. Sunsets, spaced for cover. The news is there, if headlines about the owner count as news. The information is mostly about who to vote for. And the charity, as far as I can scroll, is a Subscribe button and a pet meetup nobody has ever photographed.
Picking a commission majority isn’t on the list. It’s the thing the page does most, and the only thing that didn’t make the paperwork. Not in the purpose. Not in the provisions. Not even in the fine print, which, on this page, is usually where the important things go.
One more thing the filing settles. The LLC is real. It has a filing number, a manager, and a signature. It never needed the quotation marks.
I said as much on the page. I named the person who filed the LLC, using the state’s own public record, and asked the page for the same transparency it demands from the city. The page replied that Wayne Oken is not the only admin. Then it added, “Next time you dox a name, you are banned.”
Doxxing is publishing someone’s private information. A home address. A phone number. Naming the manager of a company from its own public state filing is reading.
So here’s where the page stands. Voters deserve to know who is funding the candidates. Voters who ask who runs the page get a warning. One of those is transparency. The other is a ban.
As for not being the only admin, the State of Florida lists one manager. If there are others, the bio has plenty of room. It fit the golf courses.
None of this is an accident. Oken’s background is in political science. The name one word away from the city’s. The bio that reads like a brochure. The disclaimer parked after the pier. The sunsets spaced just far enough apart that you never quite notice what’s between them. That isn’t a community page that wandered into politics. It’s a political science background with a pier for a profile picture.
The news media covers him closely. Wayne Oken has a byline on the page. He also has headlines. He speaks at a commission meeting, and the page runs a story about Oken calling out a District 3 candidate. Most people who want their public comment covered have to wait for a reporter. He brought his own. It’s a full-service operation. He files it, he says it, he writes it, and he covers it. The only job left open is reader. That’s you.
That is not how news works. That is how a group chat works. A group chat with 39,000 members and the city’s name on the door.
Running a political page is legal in Florida. Endorsing is legal. Changing your mind is legal. Suing the city is legal. Writing headlines about yourself is legal, if a little lonely. Wayne Oken could do all of it under a name like Pompano Beach for a Commission Majority, and every one of those 39,000 people would know exactly what they were reading. He went with Official. He went with News Media Reporting. He went with the city’s name, the city’s pier, a bio that sounds like the city’s brochure, and a sunset every time you start asking questions. And he put the part about not being the city at the very end, after the golf courses.
The quotation marks were in the bio the whole time. They were just around the wrong word.
Demand transparency, the page says. Consider it demanded. The next time Pompano Beach, Fl. Official tells you how to vote, you’ll know whose name is on it.
Just don’t say his name in the comments.
