Election Day in Mount Dora

Lots of sound and fury, but will anyone turn up to vote?

November 3, 2015

Note: I’m wearing my citizen hat today, so the opinions expressed here are coming from just another local.

A hot and humid morning in early November for this Election Day, annoying for this time of year, cloyed with resilient phantoms of distant climate-changing news. England is experiencing its hottest November ever, Miami is mopping up from the weekend’s Emperor tides (the semi-annual monsters have graduated from King), and Southern California trains an uneasy eye on approaching, El Nino-flush thunderstorms. In Florida, it’s just par for the course; we’ve been hot on Christmas Day, and this past summer the mercury broke 100 three times. This is just annoying kid’s stuff.

Can’t blame the weather for folks not turning out at the polls today.

When I pulled into my polling station on Grandview at 6:55 a.m., I was the first voter to show up at the door. Behind me I saw Ryan Donovan (First District incumbent) unload a big campaign sign from his truck; at the corner one of Mark Slaby’s kids was waving his sign (at-large seat challenger), and someone else was waving a sign for Laurie Tillett (First District challenger).

According to Lake County Supervisor of Elections Emogene Stegall, only 2.4% of Lake County’s 203,924 registered voters have cast early ballots. Early voting in Mount Dora did see at least a couple hundred ballots cast. Stegall predicts a turnout of 23 percent for the county overall, as the county penny sales tax is up for renewal and there are a dozen political races in seven cities.

Here in Mount Dora, there may or may not be more election heat. We also have charter amendments, six of them. One of the most controversial ones would eliminate the at-large council seats. (As Mount Dora grows, the potential for uneven council representation is greatest with the two at-large seats.) Unfortunately, these amendments rarely fare well at the ballot because the reasons are so poorly explained. The city can’t advocate for them one way or another, and our local news stream is still too thin to do much explaining, either. People don’t know the justifications for the charter review committee recommendations, so they are asked to trust that the recommendations were made for a reason with a yes vote.

And that just doesn’t happen in a town where suspicion of government has been steadily fanned by a website that calls itself a watchdog acts more like an attack dog, advocates for all of the challengers in the races and naysays the charter recommendations on the basis that they were just made by former council members looking to get back their jobs.

Since late last year, Mount Dora News has been keeping the waters of public opinion churned with chum — bloody populist issues like preventing tall buildings and saving oak trees. Stuff that sounds great or important but rarely has more than a few flakes of truth. The News has been, without fail, a battering ram of opinion dressed up as the defender of the citizenry.

Without any real journalism to quibble with, it was easy for the News make damaging claim after claim against city officials. A Sunshine Law filing was made against incumbent council members; it was thrown out, but the negative publicity was effective. The anger generated against council by this constant drip-drip-drip of allegation and innuendo grew to embarrassing levels when council members, who are paid volunteer wages for their civic duty, were shouted at during council meetings. Really?

One of the big News populisms was attacking the city’s decision to remove failing laurel oak trees downtown as part of its streetscape project. Save the trees! Downtown business owners were understandably upset to lose what they consider a distinctive mark of Mount Dora’s downtown corridor, but the city’s had sound reasoning and their responses were not deaf. The way some people in this town remain outraged about the city’s decision, it reminds me of teenagers who can’t get a parent to say Yes. Girone, Tillett and Slaby have all campaigned on revisiting the now-completed streetscape.

Some Lake Sentinel reporters persist in characterizing relations between the city and its citizens as profoundly off-kilter, bringing it up again during negotiations between the city and unincorporated Sylvan Shores over utility fees. Is that really how the city’s majority feels about its government? (Do they even care?)

Without a center of local news, the contentious periphery can control events. I wrote about this, and it it is the reason I got involved as a citizen journalist. (So I do have to thank that website for the reverse inspiration.) Mount Dora Citizen is the news site edited by Mel DeMarco, and I’ve been a contributing writer since it launched last June. There is so much ground to re-claim from a news desert. The site has covered events and departments, communities and officials. It’s profiled restaurants and high-fived the Mount Dora High football team. It has examined the city’s plan for growth and gone in-depth into the biggest event on Mount Dora’s horizon, the expansion of the Wekiva Parkway and the proposed Innovation District. It’s given recognition to the living and remembrance of the dead.

Obviously, all this local news weighs heavily upon today’s election. But has it motivated voters enough to sound off at the polls? The reach of a website these days in the online world is miniscule, and Facebook pages of small media outfits are exiled to alogrithms suited for the big boys. I doubt more than a quarter of the city’s residents even know about any of the online Mount Dora media now active.

I pine for the days of the weekly print newspaper available to all. Mount Dora Topic, where art thou?

The Citizen has drawn fire for being too much in the pockets of those the News has trained its sights upon. Some readers, fired up with suspicions raised by their media of choice, doubt the Citizen’s motives in covering non-governmental events in Mount Dora. Minds full of conspiracies do see them everywhere. With national media so irresponsible in their journalism, it’s hard to believe that it could be any different locally. That’s bad news for us.

Oddly, the Mount Dora News faded for the summer, at least from public view. Very few posts on either their website and Facebook page. Has the scant appearance of actual local news shooed them out of the limelight? I’d like to think so, but I understand the News has a very active and broad email base. Maybe all you need to do is keep the choir fired up.

The politicking has gone similarly — not as visibly as you’d hope for a public weal. Candidates who refused to talk to the Citizen appeared at forums where incumbents had not been invited. I have not received a single campaign communication from the First District challenger. I don’t like feeling like my district has a choir I’m not invited to.

At-large challenger Mark Slaby, to his credit, has campaigned visibly and accessibly, while incumbent Michael Tedder has done almost nothing. It’s his to lose, and Slaby’s to win. Slaby ran afoul with the Citizen’s editor Mel DeMarco for quoting her on a campaign mailer that city council members needed changing out. DeMarco called him out for it, making it quite clear that the Citizen does not make candidate endorsements. Slaby mentioned the “public shaming” at candidate forums, so I don’t think he accepted the point. (And oh, how the haters went on about the use of statements in campaign literature, with the same depressing uniformed opinions that cast a huge pall over this and future elections, both locally and nationwide.) So far, Slaby has been breezy on the surface and oily on substance; let’s hope he can be trusted with the thing he wants so earnestly.

Mount Dora News did wake up from its summer slumber for a post yesterday, on the eve of the election. In it they stated that Ken Mazik of Main Street Leasing (the haters’ favorite piñata, next to Mark Reggentin), changed his local address to a business he owns on Fifth Avenue so he could vote for Ryan Donovan in the First District contest. The post went on to say how he doesn’t play by the rules, supports all the incumbents and, in a town when a single vote can swing the balance, his latest deed is just wrong, wrong, wrong, The Facebook post was widely commented and shared.

Now, there’s enough ring of truth in the post to make you wonder. Worth a response, don’t you think? Only by the time any information could be ascertained, the election would then be over. Besides, the local haters guild doesn’t need much to get them going; just saying those guys’ names is enough to ignite the cannons. It’s like code — Ken Mazik, Mark Reggentin, oak trees, crooks.

No harm in playing politics this way is there? I mean, it’s how the big boys are playing out there. Truth is not the issue in national politics, and the details can be spared, too. Such local shenanagans, then are par for the course; but how depressing to see the hate churn determine the reality we live with in this small town.

Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. I can’t tell how far local news can reach these days. Whether we’re all too news-saturated and desensitized to care. Whether the local has died and cannot be resuscitated. Whether the Mount Dora Citizen’s honest attempt at local news reached anywhere. Whether anyone will show up to vote at all this off-year.

Yes, well. And this is just this year. By this time next, we may be scream-deaf, ducking into polling stations while state troops and local militias shoot it out. At least, that is what the brains-on-fire crew would have us believe, passing that bad, bad torch. All we get from it is scorched earth.

Idyllic, isn’t it.

Meanwhile, the city begins to set its sights on massive construction projects at its fringe that will transform Mount Dora life for decades, perhaps forever. Whatever peripheral issues that have taken up all the volume on this year’s campaigns, we’ll see if they have any register at all once the campaigners become the incumbents.

As I left my little polling station on Grandview, the city was still waking to a hot November day. Someone was pulling in the parking lot to vote. The other guy I voted with waved to me as he drove off. Down at the corner, campaigners urged their signs at traffic as Mount Dora drove by.

Sound and fury, indeed.