By Jerry Waxman
That was, according to eyewitnesses, part of the infantile temper tantrum thrown by attorney Wade Vose in the parking lot outside the Commission chamber after the Orange County BCC voted not to adopt District 2 Commissioner Fred Bum…..er…Brummer’s proposal at the March 11 meeting. One can visualize his throwing things and kicking automobile tires in a display of uncontrolled rage worthy of any second grader who has had their favorite dessert withheld.
Why such an outburst? Couldn’t be that he’s lost face with Republican leadership over this, could it? Couldn’t be that both he and the commission were caught way off guard and flat footed by an enraged and emboldened group of (heaven forbid) real citizens, could it? Well, let’s examine what’s been happening with ballot initiatives over the last couple of years. Well, actually, let’s go back over 50 years to see how things were stacking up.
The records show that The Disney Corporation in 1964 started buying up over 27000 acres of land in both Orange and Osceola counties. This, even before Earl K Wood was elected Orange County Tax Collector. The average recorded purchase price for these parcels was around $180.00 per acre, so the purchase price of all that property was a little over five million dollars, a real bargain. It took a couple of years to complete all of these transactions and it was all pretty hush-hush because if word had gotten out you could figure that Disney could have paid a lot more or squelched the deal altogether in favor of a rumored site in Broward County that was probably used as a bargaining chip if, in fact it even existed. Several realtors were used by as many or more straw parties to put this deal together.
It’s only speculation but what prompted Walt Disney to buy up thousands of acres of seemingly unusable swampland? The Anaheim Disneyland Park had opened in 1955 and it was a huge success, aided of course by Walt’s phenomenal TV marketing genius. It was natural that there should be an expansion into the east. I suspect that Walt had Florida in mind all along, the only choice being what part. In the1959 movie, A Hole In The Head, Frank Sinatra’s character s trying to sell the idea of a Disney style theme park in Miami to his buddy, Keenan Wynn, a successful developer. Wynn says to him that he should pitch the project to Disney. Whether or not that movie planted the idea the reality was that it started about that time. Things like that don’t just happen; it takes lots of planning and coordination. The D-Day invasion was three years in the planning with multiple parties taking part under high security and utmost secrecy and security.
How do you make a real estate purchase that large crossing municipalities and counties without attracting someone’s attention? It had to take years to coordinate all that. They had to conduct land surveys, get plot and site maps, do ground testing and feasibility studies all without arousing curiosity and suspicion. Buying the land was probably the easiest part of the deal. Getting zoning, local control of the land and land use permitting, tax breaks and water supplies plus whatever else they needed had to be worked out in secret meetings with city, county and state officials. Why, you ask? Well, who would invest all that money in unusable swamp land without those guarantees in place? Although you don’t think about it much Disney had to have a lot of both local and clandestine help. Local help, such as in the first round of purchasing buying a bunch of land from State Senator Irlo Bronson who sold it to him for around $100.00 per acre. Bronson had to have known what was going on because he was a prime mover of legislation favorable to Disney in Tallahassee and obviously in those early years he was keeping his mouth shut. The clandestine help came from OSS and CIA founder Wild Bill Donovan’s law firm, Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine. Here’s a pretty good description of the timeline involved. Why is this important 55 plus years later? The answer is that the model created then still works for them; what Disney wants Disney gets and screw the niceties and legalities because we can take care of that.
I don’t want anyone to think that this is a condemnation of Walt Disney World. Disney has done tremendous good in Central Florida, in fact what would it be like without Disney? It’s hard to imagine, yet most of us wouldn’t be here now because there wouldn’t be much here for us. We wouldn’t be discussing or building new venues in Orlando, and UCF wouldn’t have enjoyed the tremendous growth it’s had since the 60’s. There are, however, a few drawbacks in the way they affect our lives. So, this is not about Disney. It is about how politicians’ votes are affected by them.
Let’s fast forward from the beginning years to 2012 and the petition initiative to put paid sick time on the ballot. The initiative had worked in other major cities and it should have worked here. Over 50,000 voters signed the petition and it was up to the County Commission to approve it and get it on the ballot. Disney and several members of the Chamber of Commerce were against it and marshaled their forces to keep it off of the Nov. 6 ballot. Let’s face it, in a presidential election year with a 100,000 Democratic voter majority in Orange County there’s no way that paid sick time would fail. Here’s a timeline of the forces in play against the initiative. It tells you who the players are and who they communicated with including Lew Oliver, chairman of the Orange County Republican Party. It wasn’t until after the defeat that proponents of the initiative discovered the texting that was going on during the meeting, and the involvement of Oliver and Commissioner Edwards.
Enter Wade Vose. Vose originally challenged Bill Cowles, Supervisor of Elections to keep paid sick time off the ballot. Cowles explained to Vose that he put the initiative on the commission agenda at the commission’s direction and that if Vose was going to sue anyone it should be the commission. Cowles certified the petitions on August 17, 2012. Vose went to work to act against the sick time initiative and he had a lot of Republican allies, including lobbyists from Disney, the Chamber of Commerce, Seaworld, Universal, Darden, Southern Strategies and others. Lew Oliver collaborated with Commissioner Ted Edwards to stall until he could get Steve Precourt, a member of ALEC, to introduce legislation in Tallahassee to kill the initiative, at least temporarily by preempting local ordinances for those purposes. It’s all there in the timeline. They thought that might be the end of it but on Aug. 26, 2013 Vose filed another lawsuit to keep the sick time measure from the next election ballot.
During all this time there were petition drives gaining momentum including a water conservation petition led by the League of Women Voters and a petition by Citizens for Informed Elections to return to partisan elections for all charter officers. Add to that the death of County Clerk Lydia Gardner, which put a few people into the race for the office and the entry into the County Mayor’s race of former Orlando Police Chief Val Demings, who is qualifying by petition and there were going to be a whole host of petitions ready to go in 2014. And did I fail to mention the lawsuit that the Hispanic community filed against the commission for District 3? Well, the powers that be can’t have citizens exercising their rights where county business is concerned. After all, we (the commission) picked our voters-they didn’t pick us. If you don’t understand that last statement, I’ll get to it later. So somebody at Disney let it be known to Southern Strategies that there was a huge amount of money available to make all this stuff go away.
Details from here are not as complete as they should be and it may take a while until we learn more. A public records request was filed three weeks ago by the Val Demings campaign and as yet there has been no response to it. What we do know is that Commissioner Bum…er….Brummer had an enormous proposal drafted for him by Wade Vose which covered elimination of the Tax Collector’s office, limiting petition collection dates to 90 days, continuing non partisan elections to include constitutional officers and instantly adding two new Hispanic commission districts whose interim commissioners would be appointed by the governor. Stressing the need for speed Bum…er..Brummer cited outside influences activities which were growing stronger and superfluous petitions being filed. He suggested that the commission vote on it immediately at the March 11 meeting so that May mail in ballots could be produced. Apparently he discovered that all of these outside agitators were amassing WMDs and that the commission had to take preemptive action. That’s a bit of a stretch. Bum…er…Brummer’s memo was released and dated February 24, yet the Mayor received a copy on Friday, Feb 21, as did certain privileged members of the Republican Party. The Democrats didn’t find out until the 24th. It also appears that the two superfluous petitions were delivered to the Supervisor of elections office on the 24th as well. One was for an ordinance allowing people to raise chickens in their back yards, submitted by Lindsay Hodges, who works with the Expressway Authority and the other by Wayne Bersch for the Republican Party authorizing the commission to approve of the new common core standards. That’s most interesting because the Orange County REC voted down that resolution at their February meeting. That’s a fact that was published in the Orlando Sentinel and confirmed by Republican activist Tom Tillison. The last two initiatives were just a smoke screen for Bum…er…Brummer to justify his actions. Funny, how it all happened at the same time by two of the commission’s friends and allies. Makes ya think, don’t it.
Reaction and pure outrage by the grass roots activists was beyond belief. The internet was full of postings. Every Facebook page was brimming with comments and every writer in town, yours truly included, tried to write in the most creative ways to berate Bum…er…Brummer and his cohorts for, well, the polite term is overreaching. The truth is it was an unmitigated power grab diabolically worthy of its ALEC origins. I needn’t go into detail over the March 11 meeting because it was really no contest. The May mail in ballot died and the rest of the resolutions were tabled until an April meeting where the individual proposals will be discussed. Most of these proposed amendments to the city charter are without merit and can be easily challenged by an alert opposition. These proposals are specific for the commission’s consolidation of power and leaves real voters and citizens without a necessary voice.
Things can change, however. There is a new group out there called the Orange Rising Coalition and they’ve just issued a press release on their next news conference:
“VOTE LOCAL will mount a public information campaign to ensure Orange County citizens can and will vote confidently in our upcoming August 26th local elections and beyond.”
“The battle for Earned Sick Time uncovered a pattern of arrogance and greed so widespread it has united our diverse community to take our local government back,” said Stephanie Porta, director of Organize Now. “And that’s what Vote Local is all about.”
VOTE LOCAL is a project of the Orange Rising Coalition and includes: Black Women’s Roundtable, Community Business Association, Communication Workers of America 3108, Central Florida AFL-CIO, Central Florida Jobs with Justice, Emerge USA, Equality Florida, Federation of Churches United to Serve, Fight for 15 Florida, Florida Coalition on Black Civic Participation, Florida Consumer Action Network, Florida Institute for Reform and Empowerment, Florida New Majority, Fraternal Order of Police Florida State Lodge, Mi Familia Vota, National Congress of Black Women, National Council of La Raza Action Fund, Organize Now, PICO United Florida, Transit Riders Union, UNITE HERE Local 362.
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Vote Local is going to pry off the lid of city and county elections and expose the soft underbelly of corruption that is rampant in Orange County politics. Good for them.
I will shortly expose the fallacies in Commissioner Bum…er…Brummer’s proposals, one by one in a future column. Right here seems a good place to stop. Why? Because my brain is exploding. Brum…er…Bummer!
