Deerfield Beach Commissioner Dan Shatnetzy, pictured middle,
won by a whopping 0.83% of the vote (aka three votes, two from deceased voters)
Apologies to our non-Broward readers, as we temporarily turn our attention to Deerfield Beach, FL
When you spend your life working with hard data—whether calculating orbital mechanics as a rocket engineer or parsing through municipal statutes—you learn very quickly that feelings don’t fly. The math has to work. The data has to back up the claim.
Right now, in Deerfield Beach’s District 3, the math isn’t adding up.
On June 26, 2026, CVE Master Management Board President Eli Okun sent a formal letter to District 3 Commissioner Daniel Shanetzky. The correspondence was mailed directly to Shanetzky’s city office at 150 N.E. 2nd Avenue.
Download the entire here (PDF)
The contents of that letter lay out a stark boundary dispute between a sitting elected official and a private corporation. The Board requested that Shanetzky route any invitations for outside individuals to attend their meetings through Executive Director Vallen Smikle. They asked him to limit his public comments to MM matters. Most notably, the Board requested that he refrain from “publicly discussing, characterizing, promoting, criticizing, or otherwise commenting on” CVE Master Management business unless he has obtained accurate information and is “specifically authorized” to do so.
The cornerstone of the Board’s letter is a claim that Shanetzky has made public statements regarding CVE MM projects that contained “inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading information”.
(Disclosure: I have no financial, compensatory, or material relationship with CVE Master Management Co., Inc. The City of Deerfield Beach has not issued an official position regarding this correspondence).
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Master Management has a massive job. They run the security, transportation, roads, water, and lighting for an entire community. They don’t have the time or the liability bandwidth to draft a formal grievance, address it to a city commissioner, and mail it to a government building unless they are deeply confident in their position. My vibe tells me they aren’t making this up.
But as we always say here: vibes are great, but data is king.
The letter from CVE Master Management alleges “inaccurate” statements, but it doesn’t quote a specific statement, cite a date, or name a specific project. Recently, Smikle politely declined to provide further internal materials, citing CVE Master Management’s status as a private organization.
He is exactly right. They are a private organization. They have no obligation to open their books to the press just because a city commissioner happens to be in their zip code.
But Shanetzky is a public official. And the moment that letter hit his city hall inbox, it became a public record.
We aren’t interested in a debate about whether elected officials should or shouldn’t talk about private entities in their district. The First Amendment is a wide highway. What we are interested in is role-misrepresentation and accuracy. Did an elected official misrepresent his authority? Did he introduce incomplete or misleading information into the public square, as the letter alleges?
Did he break the law?
To find out, we are applying our standard methodology: Intentional Malicious Friction.
We have filed a comprehensive Chapter 119 public records request with the City of Deerfield Beach. We are pulling the emails, the calendar invites, and the text messages. We are pulling the primary source documents to map exactly what was said, to whom, and when.
The private sector has made its claim. Now, it’s time for the municipal data to do the talking. We’ll publish the receipts as soon as the City Clerk hands them over.
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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.