Orlando is Full of It: A Commentary

by Gabe Kaimowitz

Listen up, folks.

The dead black souls at last are messing with your property values
like you messed with their lives for decades in the last century. They’ve left
you a present.
While you were voting to have a billion or more dollars for more places to entertain your historically white sports, theater, and music followers, black souls be eating at the ground underneath until you can smell their petroleum stink between your toes. As Malcolm X once said when he heard JFK had beenkilled, “the chickens have come home to roost.”

Listen closely. You can hear the clucking again.

An area of soil and water pollution as big as the North Downtown Orlando Site around pretty Lake Concord and Orlando Sentinel offices undermines the credibility of anyone who voted
to bet taxpayer money on a $1.1 billion trifecta. The tip comes from Orlando’s top tout–The Old Buddymeister himself, Buddy Dyer.

He sent the message to an Orange County mayor. A half dozen County Commission dwarfs
had the chance to make that losing bet. They have been told that fresh sports/entertainment venues can bring local happiness to the historically black carcinogen-soaked poor black ghetto in the City’s blighted downtown section called Parramore–championships to tourists, tax revenue to the local yokels.

What progress! In 1980, after blacks rioted in Parramore in response to an invited consultant firms prediction that there would be no development west of the I-4 barrier except around Lake Dot.
A decade later, an arena was placed there after CBS-TV”s 60 minutes told everyone that
Orlando wasted more federal money for foolish projects in blighted black areas than any other city.

Orlando is counting on the rural rubes representing Apopka and Zellwood, Windemere and Edgewater,
Holden and Winter Garden, even Parramore itself, to agree to spend more than $1 billion to bring
more circuses to the masses, to bring crowds to the City from Disney World 15-20 miles away.

All the blabber and bother in Orlando about a new Events Center, Performing Arts Centre, and a refurbished Citrus Bowl is not going to change the fact that those buildings will be bathing in and around arsenic and old petroleum products steeped into the soil for years to come without a massive cleanup.

Rich Crotty, the Mayor of Orange County, can support Buddy Dyer to his heart’s content, but the votes of the Orange County Commission will not alter the damage seeping under those proposed palaces from old gas stations, oil storage tanks, dry cleaners, garbage dumps, junkyards, and trash collections.

The heart of the pollution lies in and near the currently empty lots stretching from Glenda Hood’s
Vendor Way of Ye Olde Shoppes with African chachkas, and Jamaican food on West Church street,
to Orlando’s historic segregation cross streets, at South and Division. Zoning kept the area black north of South Street, and west of Division.

But such political land scandals of the past pale by comparison with the reality of pollution today.

What Scandals?
Banks came to Florida from North Carolina and Georgia to get rich off the coming
boom expected in downtown Orlando in the middle of the 1980s, after Bill Frederick
and the other Duke Boys came to power.

One lender, NCNB/C&S/NationsBank/Bank of America, knew money makers could count on politicians like tax assessor Rich Crotty, and former GOP Secretary of State Glenda Hood, to devalue and demolish properties in Parramore so that land would be available cheap for them to buy and
then pass on the taxpayers for new palaces. Bank of America actually has an ATM machine
right in the middle of the white Oasis on Church St. No matter. Pollution still undermine the ground there.

Whether more palaces are built and refurbished, some poor taxpayer is going to have to pay for the
mess underneath some day. Anyone with common sense would make sure that the ground and water below were cleaned up before a new a half-billion dollar arena was placed in one corner of the
vast polluted area. But political common sense in Orlando seems to be limited to the present.
They won’t be around tomorrow, when everything hits the fan.

Do the taxpayers care that Orlando has kept such self-evident truth buried in records that were
faked to the federal government, absorbing millions in U.S. Community Development Bloc Grant funds–not in 1980–but today while CBS is not looking?

How many more million of federal dollars will be spent to clean up the South Downtown Orlando
site, polluting not only the proposed venues but also the ground under the current Arena, nearby Lake Dot, a recreation Centroplex, the new FAMU law school, the new federal courthouse site, and surrounding parking lots. Who knows? Who cares? Let the next politician worry.

Bear in mind that state and city taxpayers continue to help the Orlando Sentinel spend
millions to clean up the Northern Downtown Orlando Site of similar pollutants. Some state
experts years ago said that the pollution around Lake Concord may have been flowing
into this proposed Southern Downtown Orlando site, toward Lake Dot.

Regardless, whether that expertise is true–the proposed South Downtown Orlando Site
has enough pollutants of its own in the ground. Why then did Orlando and the Sentinel in 2004
crow about the possibilities of ripping off the state and federal governments for money for
the so-called brown fields in and around Parramore? They claimed only two sites were contaminated.

Perhaps they were sure of that small number because assessments were scattered and
isolated, and no one, but no one who was not paid by them likely would ever discover the truth–
and report it. Sadly, they were right–until now. Is it already too late before buildings continue to go up on the Parramore sites without a South Downtown Orlando Site cleanup costing millions of dollars?

How did they miss the other sites when assessments of the Hickory Boys properties were revealing one polluted location after another in the Brownfield zone? Who knows? Who cares? All the meaningless Sentinel sentiments and City braggadocio will not change the seeping into underground water and soil of contaminants regarded as dangerous by any state standards.