Leisureville

by Andrew D. Blechman

  After two decades of marriage, Elton Mayer’s second wife died. “I’m no longer looking for love,” Elton told me by phone from his little home in The Village of Orange Blossom Gardens. “I’m just looking to survive and perhaps enjoy my remaining days.” He tells me he has fallen a few times lately, and one of his retired daughters is contemplating moving to The Villages to keep an eye on him. “But I still eat what I want, and take a nap when I want, no matter what time of day it is. I go anyplace I want to go in my golf cart, and I play golf once a week!”

  There are occasional reminders of how cruel the real world can be. Several months after my last visit, Sassy the clown sends me a rather disturbing e-mail: two residents of The Villages (a husband and wife) were shot at point-blank range. The wife died instantly, but the husband, who ran outside to plead for help dressed only in his underwear, survived.

  This incident had the makings of stereotypically brutal crime that seemingly justified a life of secession. The couple’s somewhat estranged adult daughter had invited three young men to her parents’ home. These men shot the parents, stole some jewelry, and then fled, allegedly taking the daughter as a hostage. The culprits were angry youths right out of central casting, and the daughter had a history of substance abuse and reckless behavior. Once captured, the men snarled at the camera, and one demanded “the best lawyer in Florida.” The daughter maintained her innocence, but her father took out a restraining order, effectively banning her from her mother’s funeral.

  Sassy described the sordid crime as a parable about parenting. “When we seniors reach the retirement portion of our lives, we are not always finished being parents, and we can never escape our children. I have had friends in that position or with children who are still struggling to get it together and have lived with them here. You’d think by the time you reach my age the kids would be squared away, or have done themselves in by now. Thank God the worst problem my kids have is to be overweight.”

  On the lighter side, The Villages was national news once again when a report cited an alarming number of sexually transmitted diseases among residents. The late-night comedy shows had a ball with this rich material.

  Meanwhile, The Villages and Gary Morse have continued to tighten their noose on politics in Sumter County. As Election Day approached, the candidates backed by The Villages had amassed a huge amount of campaign funds. As expected, Gary Breeden received favorable coverage in The Villages’ media, and Jim Roberts did not. Roberts’s ally on the board of commissioners, Joey Chandler, faced an equally difficult primary against a candidate who was backed by The Villages and who worked for a contractor in The Villages.

  The Villages’ candidates ran a bare-knuckles campaign. Roberts found himself forced to run in the primaries against a shadow candidate—a twenty-one-year-old waitress who never campaigned. Her mom works for a contractor in The Villages. Villagers living in Sumter County were also the target of many so-called “impartial” telephone surveys filled with serious misinformation. A sample question: “Would you still vote for Commissioner Chandler knowing that he raised taxes twenty-two times?” The two candidates responded with a Web site that attempted to address these distortions and others coming from The Villages’ media.

  Not unexpectedly, Roberts and his colleague lost. They garnered plenty of votes in their own districts, but Villagers now represent a majority of voters in the county, and as seniors, they are more likely to actually vote. I must say that I felt a pang of remorse, even in distant New England.

  Goodwill—which is critical to the healthy functioning of a complex interrelated society—has seemingly evaporated. The new board of commissioners is looking into moving the county government from Bushnell to a more “convenient” location beside The Villages in the county’s far northeastern corner, because it is the “geographic center of the population.” Legal notices have been moved from an old countywide newspaper in Bushnell, which had published them for decades, and which was the low bidder for the contract, to The Villages’ Daily Sun. County residents must now purchase Morse’s heavily biased newspaper if they want to read such announcements. Frustrated by their marginalization, many county residents are hoping to overturn “One Sumter” or even split the county in two.

  The board is also questioning the wisdom of building a park for families in the southern end of the county. “The one thing that’s missing in these parks is children,” a commissioner said. He didn’t mention that many of the parks are dilapidated and uninviting. The board will probably sell two-thirds of the south county parcel and ask volunteer groups to construct park facilities. And now the board wants to prohibit nonresidents of The Villages from using certain gated roads within the development, regardless of the fact that residents of the county are paying to maintain them.

  The board is also moving to reduce the fees Villagers pay the county for emergency services. There’s no talk, however, about the one financial issue that should be of real concern to Villages: the hundreds of millions of dollars in debt they are saddled with—an amount that is likely to rise as the community builds out.

  New homes, golf courses, and recreation centers continue to pop up seemingly overnight as the development bulldozes its way across Sumter County. The Villages has finally released information whose existence it continually refused to confirm: plans for a third “town center.” It will be named Brownwood, after the Morse family’s tourism complex in Michigan, which once included Gary’s failed steak house. Business in Spanish Springs appears to be brisk, but Sumter Landing continues to struggle commercially, with stores and restaurants coming and going. One wonders what effect the addition of Brownwood will have. Home sales are also slowing. Some newer residents complain that they are living in virtual ghost villages.

  Morse’s own Villages chamber of commerce, where I bought a map on my first day in town, has closed after “achieving its goal”—whatever that means. Meanwhile, supersize strip malls continue to sprout up all over the place.

  The Villages is finally beginning to comprehensively address the concerns of residents who are actually old. A seven-story enclosed assisted living and continuing care facility is under construction across the street from the recently expanded hospital. Plans call for 250 living units, with their own pools, spas, and covered parking for golf carts. The Morse family continues to wrangle with the state over how much more development local aquifers can withstand; the water district is considering temporary water restrictions, especially in light of the continuing drought.

  Rich Lambrecht of CDD 4 and Joe Gorman of the Property Owners Association continue their relentless pursuit of fairness and equity for all Villagers. Lately they’ve had some successes. Rich got The Villages to pay the lion’s share for fixing the sinkhole on the Nancy Lopez golf course, and to assume a liability for eighteen other retention ponds. Rich was much relieved: “With two or three sinkholes a year we had a big issue on our hands,” he said.

  Joe’s relentless crusade for fair representation led to another concession by Morse: The Villages agreed to let residents in the older of the two central districts vote on whether they want to elect representatives to the central district government or leave it in Morse’s hands. However, most of the big decisions have already been made in this central district, and so far there are no plans for a similar emancipation of the newer Sumter Landing central district.

  The nonbinding resolution passed narrowly, but its future remains uncertain. Democracy is messy, and many Villagers prefer the convenience of government by contract. Concern over outsiders using The Villages’ pools seems to get more attention from residents, particularly after one Villager’s wallet was stolen. Other Villagers have complained about contractors who use clubhouse bathrooms, and about the increasing number of children who arrive without guest passes.

  Villagers may be able to exclude young families and the poor, but Mother Nature still plays by her own rules, sometimes to frightening effect. In February, a powerful tornado came through central Florida an
d hopped across newer construction in the Sumter County area of The Villages. Hundreds of homes were damaged or destroyed, a country club near the Andersons’ is no more, and an untold number of golf carts were tossed around like discarded Jolly Ranchers. Although neighboring communities reported more than a dozen fatalities, there were none in The Villages.

  Although many of my friends were shaken by the tragedy, life in The Villages hardly skipped a beat. The deadly tornado interfered with plans for a chili cook-off the next day; but as Sassy reported, somewhat surprised, Spanish Springs was still filled with suntanned seniors happily strolling about as if the tornado had never happened. And the severe weather did little to dampen Mr. Midnight’s lusty enthusiasm.

  “We escaped with no damage,” he wrote to me a day later. “We have plenty of food and water. Please send Viagra.”

  Acknowledgments

  I’D LIKE TO THANK THE MANY RESIDENTS OF THE VILLAGES WHO let me tag along with them for days (and nights) at a time. I’d particularly like to thank my former neighbors for opening their lives to me, as well as their home. This book would never have come to fruition without their help and generosity. I’d also like to thank Erin Cox, formerly of The Orlando Sentinel for acting as my initial Villages tour guide and sounding board, and The Orlando Sentinel as a whole for their brilliant investigative work on Chapter 190, The Villages, and Gary Morse. Central Florida should consider itself fortunate to have journalists of this caliber. I’d like to thank the following people for kindly enduring hours of seemingly endless questions: Joe Gorman, Rich Lambrecht, Jim Roberts, Dan Connelly, Mark Fooks, and Edson Allen.

  There were a number of people who were instrumental in the writing of this book. I’d like to thank my keen editor, the ever-dapper Jamison Stolz, Morgan Entrekin, Catherine Drayton, Sid Plotkin, Dr. Gerald Lucas, JHK, my wonderful parents, and of course, Erika and Lillie.

  Lastly, I’d like to thank my hometown for being a real community by nurturing its elders and youngsters, demanding participation, and holding fast against the forces of mindless sprawl and other community-destroying trends. May we continue to live in generational harmony for years to come.

  For more information regarding the subjects I write about, I highly recommend the following books: Fortress America by Edward J. Blakely; Prime Time by Marc Freedman; Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler; Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck; Privatopia by Evan McKenzie; and I’ll Be Short by Robert B. Reich. There are some groups out there working to promote social reengagement—civicventures.org is one of them. For more information regarding Leisureville, please visit www.andrewblechman.com.