“This is my badge. There are many like it but this one is mine. This badge is special. It represents justice. It represents commitment. It represents service. It represents pride and it represents sacrifice. I have worn this badge for many years. Today, I will wear this badge, my badge for the last time. I will receive a new badge. My new badge will have the word “Retired” engraved on it. I will carry my new badge with pride, but it will never fully replace this badge, my badge. God bless the men and women of the Delray Beach Police Department. I will miss you all.” Lt. Toby Rubin on his Facebook page.

Last Friday, my friend Toby Rubin retired from the Delray Beach Police Department.

My guess is that many of you don’t know his name. But you should. Because he and others like him are important contributors to Delray Beach.

Toby rose through the ranks from officer to lieutenant in a stellar 30 year career, but when history books are written most likely Toby’s name won’t be included.

That’s a shame, because men and women like Toby who serve in our Police Department and elsewhere in city government don’t get the credit they deserve for what they do day in and day out. They built this town.

Lt. Rubin didn’t get rich serving our city. He does have a decent pension to go along with aches and pains that come from a hard life spent protecting and serving our city.

Delray Beach is not an easy place to be a police officer. Or a firefighter. Or these days—a planner or a parks maintenance employee—pick your job.

You pick up a newspaper and you read about public pensions destroying municipal budgets. You open your email or visit social media to share good news and find a diatribe about government and government workers.

But I know a different story.

I saw a different side to the argument.

Oh, I won’t pretend that bad government employees don’t exist—they do. A few exist in the upper echelons—suits who manage to whine about problems but offer no fixes other than cut, cut, cut. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. They always look down, backwards and elsewhere when they ought to be looking in a mirror to see waste up close.

But I saw the other side. I worked alongside people who got things done.

Delray Beach didn’t happen by accident. The downtown didn’t magically transform from blight and grime to vibrant and safe.

Neighborhoods didn’t just miraculously clean themselves up and your $120,000 house didn’t increase to $500,000 or in some cases to over $1 million because some self-important politician or self-anointed citizen watchdog remade your crime and drug infested village into a place where you can take a golf cart and visit 130 restaurants, attend festivals and see free Friday night concerts at Old School Square.

It took vision. And it took money.

It took guts. And it took years.

It took hard work. And it required collaboration, dialogue, passion, patience, optimism and team work.

And it took guys like Toby Rubin.

I used to ride with Toby in the late 80s and early 90s when he was a member the “Tact Team.”

The drug dealers called them the “jump out” crew because they rode in big black SUV’s through drug and crime infested neighborhoods and jumped out to arrest people selling narcotics on almost every corner.

We were mere blocks from the beach and the downtown, which was mostly dead back in those days. I rode with some legendary cops: Mike Swigert, Chuck Jeroloman, Don West, Alan Thompson, Jeff Rancour, the late Johnny Pun and a very young Jeff Goldman, who is now our chief.

I saw Delray through their eyes and many others in the department: Skip Brown, Will McCollum, Craig Hartmann, Michael Coleman, Ed Flynn, Dwayne Fernandes, Robyn Smith, John Evans, Robert Stevens, Tamijo Kayworth, Terrance Scott, John Battiloro, Bob Brand, Tom Whatley, Paul Pitti, Mark Woods, Paul Shersty, Rick Wentz, Jimmy Horrell, Casey Thume, Russ Mager, Geoff Williams, Scott Lunsford, Bobby Musco, Nicole Guerrero, Jeff Messer, John Palermo, Dave Eberhart, Brian Bollan, Scott Privitera, Vinny Mintus—the list goes on and on and on and it continues with excellent officers today.

Most of these names, the general public will never know. But they make the city safe. And without safety there is no community. There would be nothing to argue about, because iPic wouldn’t want to be here and neither would anybody else.

There is no investment, there is no appreciation of property values and there is no quality of life without people like Toby Rubin.

All of those people I mentioned and hundreds more cared about Delray and took great pride in what they were building here. They knew they working on something special—as does the parks worker, the planner, the people in utility billing and the really nice people in the City Clerk’s Office and throughout city government.

We have done a lot in this country to denigrate public servants and public service. It’s pathetic and it’s wrong.

We fixate on what it costs to have a Police Department and a Fire Department, to have a cultural center and a library. We begrudge our public workers when they get a pension and when they get a raise. We send angry emails when they screw up and they do. We all do. Want to see dysfunction? Spend some time in the private sector.

Yes, we need to demand good services delivered efficiently and professionally. Accountability is a good thing, but we also need to make room for gratitude and we ought to take some time to consider the benefits, not just their costs.

That’s actually a good approach to everything.

As Toby spends his first week in retirement, I’d like to wish him a long and healthy life. And I want to thank him and so many others for sticking a young reporter in his SUV and showing me and so many others what needed to be done to transform Delray into a place we can all take pride in.