On the Road Growing East and Fast
If you want to understand how much Mount Dora is growing — and why that’s costing the city (and residents) so much — follow the water
Thanks to the recent rate increase in water and wastewater utilities, at least on balance sheets Mount Dora’s utilities are now in good shape for its future.
It probably won’t feel that way when city utility customers open their April bills to find the first half of a two-year, 25% rate increase for those utilities. (For customers consuming an average 7,000 gallons a month, the additional bite will be about $13 a month.)
The increase, recommended by a rate study initiated last fall and approved by council on March 15, is needed to adjust a serious revenue shortfall in the city’s fund for water and wastewater utilities. The goal of the increase is to get the balance up from near zero (where it is to day) to 90 days (of funding revenue), and then to keep it there for the next five years.
In part, the fund insures smooth operation of the massive mechanics of circulating water and wastewater through a growing city in Florida. But even that margin is dicey.
“Since we’re a small utility, we should have a 120 to 150-day balance,” says John Peters, Mount Dora’s Public Works director. “A major line break could still kill us.”
In the past, the city has frequently dipped deeply into operational funds to pay for capital projects, but the volume of new projects coming at the city due to growth have outstripped any continued ability to pay in that way.
Maintaining a healthy cash balance for the water / wastewater utility fund is even more crucial, however, for securing future bonds to pay for upcoming utility projects. The city’s current construction bond was for $14 million and has about $5–1/2 million left on it (enough to pay for utilities relocations for the 441–46 interchange project, but not much else).
If anyone’s breathing a sigh of relief over the rate increase finally getting passed — council was still debating their own recommendation up to the March 15 meeting with the cash fund running down to zero — it’s public works director John Peters. Projects from his department will remain a steady fixture in council’s business going forward for years to come.
Utilities can be the elephant in any city’s budget, with Mount Dora’s Public Works operation (including water and sewer plants and lines, electricity, street and sidewalk maintenance, stormwater, trees, and engineering) taking up half the city’s annual $39 million operating fund and calling for $30 million in future capital projects over the next five years, relocating and extending utility lines for growth and increasing capacity for distribution.
And whatever those projects anticipate, all they do is turn the page to many more that will follow as Mount Dora doubles in size along its eastern border.
Other city issues are far more popular. Council chambers have been filled to the max with supporters of departing city manager Vincent Pasture or the new equal rights ordinance. More time was spent disagreeing over the placement of the Christmas tree than just about any other item on the March 15 agenda.
Even those who daily work with them, utilities are technical, complex and largely out of sight until budget discussions come around again, so that when they blare for attention everyone feels a little blind-sided.
But council’s decisions about city utilities matter because such a huge part of Mount Dora’s vastly changing future starts with them. How and where they go into the ground is the foundation of whatever is to come.
The Citizen has covered city utilities several times since last summer, writing about the city’s overall water challenges, the Innovation District project, debate over the 441–46 interchange, the controversial water / wastewater rate study as a well as reviewing the operations of the department.
Although big pictures are crucial for long-term decision-making, they fade fast because they aren’t simple. (Anyone who’s been at recent council meetings about the rate study can see how difficult it has been for council to wrap their heads around the realities of financing utilities.) But with the opportunity of growth also comes the pain of it, and Mount Dora’s growing pains will only get worse if we don’t pay attention to them.
Toward this end, we asked public works director John Peters to offer readers of the Citizen a drive-through of the areas that will be affected by the utility relocations, visualizing the work to be done and what will fast become a reality as a result.
What was surprising was that although much of it is still rural and unincorporated, the affected area on the east side of US-441 is bigger than all the neighborhoods of “old “Mount Dora” combined. The planned innovation district is just a small piece of the area — about 1,300 acres. Around that, more residential development is coming and will be here much sooner.
Along the way, we also learned a lot about the challenges facing a city utility in an age when budgets are tight, water resources are dwindling, competition for talent is stiff, and comprehension of both citizens and their elected representatives that borders on a scary obliviousness.
Like it or not, utilities are the essential source of a city’s functioning. Flip a switch, turn on a tap, flush a toilet — without these simple motions, business crashes to a halt and daily life goes back to something resembling Florida’s withering cracker days.
Keeping the juice flowing without interruption while growing twice in size was the object lesson of that drive.
On the Monday I drove out with Public Works director John Peters, the afternoon was partly cloudy, dry and warm, with the intoxicating scent of orange blossom now mixing faintly in Florida’s smash of spring pollen. We met up at City Hall and I got in with him as we headed out of town on First Avenue toward 46, where all the fun begins in May.
Everything looks here as it has for years — Baptist church, little strip mall with laundry and convenience store and pizzeria, Hobdy’s Transmission and Auto, houses crowding up toward the street, a few laurel oaks fanning over the street.
Looking down the road from here, there a few signs of the changes that will double Mount Dora’s population to 25,000, with an eastern border expected to head several miles out from here toward a booming commercial district and freeway entrance — everything the hapless fictional Mount Dorans imagined in the 1981 bomb of a movie Honky Tonk Freeway.
That is, if all the foundations — roads, utilities, development deals, and crucially integration with the rest of the city — get properly done.
All the growth transforming the east side of Mount Dora’s arrives via the Wekiva Parkway project, linking the eastern and western toll routes around Orlando at Mount Dora in 2021. Right where the Parkway will exit near Round Lake Road and SR-46 will be the Innovation District, a 1,300-acre mixed-use commercial development for light industrial, high tech, health care and possibly higher education, with some high-density residential (apartments) thrown in.
With a vastly enlarged and improved route into North Lake County, city and county planners see a huge movement into not only Mount Dora but also Eustis, Tavares, Leesburg and up to the Villages.
To funnel the expected increase of traffic into Northern Lake County, SR-46 and US-441 will be widened, and another route up Round Lake Road onto SR-44 and then to US-441 will be created through road widening.
The 441–46 interchange project starts things off. After going through a number of proposed designs, Mount Dora council in 2013 approved an at-grade lighted intersection there with a flyover to divert southbound traffic from 441 turning onto eastbound 46. The Mount Dora council of 2016 concurred with that assessment at a public meeting. The DOT expects it will cost them $42 million and three years, starting in 2017, to construct.
When council meets next on April 5, Public Works will be requesting approval for contracts for construction of utility relocations around SR 46 US 441 intersection, plus easements. The good news is that the bid came in considerably beneath expectations — $3.4 million instead of $4.5 — but with another $850,00 in easements necessary, the tally will still top $4 million.
In order to stay on schedule for the DOT construction of the interchange, a significant amount of the necessary utilities relocations will need to be done soon by the city — starting this May and significantly accomplished by the end of December. (For more about the interchange project, see “Crossroads for the City of Mount Dora.”)
Driving under the current interchange overpass, it’s hard to imagine now how different the interchange will look, but it’s significant to note that 46 and 441 will be expected to be much more similar in size to each other — thus why its transforming into a lighted intersection. Much of the southbound 441 traffic is expected to curve off toward the Wekiva Parkway using a looping flyover ramp that avoids the intersection. How that will impact surrounding neighborhoods, no one is sure.
Heading east from there on what is now SR-46, with Veranda Apartment on our left we turn right onto the access road to Wastewater Plant #2 on the right. As part of the interchange project, the facility’s current access from 46 will be relocated with a driveway headed from the south side of the facility winding over to 441. It will cost about $1.5 million to move the road and related utilities and buy several easements, with the DOT reimbursing the city for about $180,000 of the work.
Anticipating needs on the city’s growing east side, Wastewater #2 was completed in 2003 at a cost of $12 million, paid for by a 40% water/wastewater rate increase. (Imagine how happy citizens and council were back then.) I got out to take a few pictures, and was surprised that the air was, well, not bad: only faintly pungent. According to Peters, closing a septic treatment operation there has made a big difference. Still to come there is a new biosolids treatment plant, if the council approves the contract with private partner Merrell Brothers. Plans are to build it adjacent to the facility. The current method of treating biosolids — having it hauled off — is getting cost-prohibitive as EPA regulations tighten. While there are upfront costs ($600,000) to solar-dried process that is planned, the public-private partnership will be paying for itself within six years. Multiple municipal partners are also expected to join in as they too seek relief from the spike in biosolids haulage.
The big round storage tank at the plant was black with mold. Cleaning it will cost about $1 million, but with all the other pressing concerns, that’s not appearing in any budget soon. Peters is more concerned about just keeping up with overall plant maintenance. Water and wastewater utilities are an expensive operation. In February council approved a $60,000 request to replace a weir assembly in Wastewater Plant #1 that dates back to the 1950s. Aging infrastructure is the bane of city utilities right now around the state — Fort Lauderdale and Charlotte County have both appealed to the state for emergency funds to replace 50-year-old water pipes now breaking all over their areas. Downtown Mount Dora’s $10 million construction project, completed just this fall, replaced utility pipes that had been under the streets since the 1920s, but neighborhoods fanning out from downtown still contend with old underground pipes. Repair needs are picking up as tree roots grip and crush pipes. In the summer, lightning strikes also play havoc.
Worrying about the unexpected is what keeps public works directors awake at night. Dealing with those problems quickly and efficiently is what gets addressed around the conference table every day.
For example, until recently, there hasn’t been a way for the department to monitor water pressure drops in the old pipes still under Mount Dora’s aging neighborhoods.
“Back in 2014 when the water main broke at Lincoln and 441,” Peters says, “we knew we were losing water like a banshee, but we couldn’t find it. Then, once we did find it, we didn’t know how big the affected area was for boil water notice (once you go below 20 lbs. of flow pressure, utilities must issue a public boil water notice). People were calling in to say they didn’t have water pressure; that’s how we mapped the affected area.
“At a meeting the next day, we figured there were about 50 data system sites in the network and decided to put a pressure node in the water and reclaimed systems at those points. Now we can run that data and tell what pressure is at any given moment. Now when we have a break, we can pinpoint where the pressure is dropping. We can also look at nodes going out in concentric circles to see where they have fallen under 20 lbs. and have to issue the boil water notice.”
From there we continue west on 46 toward Round Lake Road with 600 acres of orange groves starting to bloom on the north side of the road, and light industrial shops and repair sheds sprinkled on the right. The DOT recently surprised Public Works by announcing that this phase of the road widening would be advanced by a year, with a potential start date also in June 2017. That means that the current utilities relocation job starting in May will be doubling in size.
The good news for the city is that 46 is widening on the north side of the road (the current north edge becomes the median), which will simplify the relocation work somewhat. Still, these utilities relocations will cost the city an estimated $3.3 million. The DOT is picking up the cost for engineering ($300,000) and another $600,000 because the lines will have to be built on a faster schedule, using a higher grade pipe.
Originally, the cost for this phase (not expected to begin until next year) was supposed to be deferred to be paid by impact fee credits from developers in the Innovation District. (Had the cost of this construction instead been added to the current capital plan, the recent rate increase would actually have been much higher.) But with construction now moving up, the city has two options: find a way to pay for it from the water and wastewater fund (and possibly have to raise rates), or build the lines hoping that developers will turn out fast enough to pay for the work with impact fee credits. (Impact fee credits allow developers to pay for utilities while deducting those costs from their overall impact fee charges.)
And, while commercial development in the Innovation District is still remote on the planning boards (so much so that one council member recently called it a “pipe dream”) — the impact fee fund has money in it now from residential development currently under way, enough to cover construction expenses until the next round of bonds are approved.
At the intersection of 46 and Round Lake, it looks like, well, like it has for decades — groves and fields to the north, scattered housing on small-acre lots to the south. Signs are up advertising sale of parcels (one screams BELTWAY COMING!).
Development of the Innovation District proper — making deals with commercial interests and building out — can’t start until the big job of running out utilities and building road infrastructure is completed. But there’s intense attention now being paid to it by county officials who had been working with Mount Dora’s former planning and development director and deputy city manager Mark Reggentin. (He’s developing economic opportunities for Apopka as well as commercial development in the Kelly Park area — which some call Innovation District South.) Even though Mount Dora doesn’t own this land, owning the utilities that stretch out to it gives the city a strong say over what will get developed in the district.
And while commercial development is a lot more complex than residential (that spreads like kudzu around Florida’s traffic arterials), commercial has an obvious benefit to the city, as well to all of North Lake County, providing a far more robust economic engine than the area’s present service economy whose primary engine is 55+ residential development. Work is now beginning on the planning end as Lake County commissioners in February heard a zoning request to alter 265 acres within the proposed district from agricultural to planned unit development.
Right now, the Innovation District is a distant and dicey proposition; a lot of things can falter along the way to dim its promise. (Consider the failings of Clermont’s Wellness Way, teetering towards residential development-only collapse .) Crucial is how well Mount Dora and Lake County planners work together; equally important is how much leadership there is in the city’s planning department (how long before our new director will be found?) — and how well council continues to stay disciplined and focused in their support of it.
We drove south down Round Lake Road a ways to Sullivan Ranch, the 670-home development now under Centex that completed building out this year. The city ran utilities out there in 2005, with the understanding that Pulte Homes, the original developer, would pay for them through water and sewer impact fees. They paid for the first 150 houses, but due to an accounting glitch, the rest of the money for subsequent homes built was never collected by the city’s finance department, and by the time the city found out it was almost too late to litigate. Former city attorney Cliff Shepard was the one who investigated the matter and successfully retrieved about $2.1 million in additional impact fees without having to go to court. (Note to file for new city attorney Lonnie Groot: train a close eye on the fast-approaching development ball with Sullivan in mind; it is much more difficult dealing with city interests in unincorporated areas.)
Peters says that the new utility lines running out the Innovation District will allow for a redundancy line to Sullivan Ranch, a loop which allows several ways to run water and wastewater. If one line fails, supply could come from another direction and the affected neighborhoods won’t have to be put under mandatory boil water notice. (Peters has the same thing in mind for development throughout the area and particularly for Country Club of Mount Dora and Lakes of Mount Dora, both currently served by single lines.)
The south end of Sullivan Ranch terminates in Orange County. The development gets its reclaimed water for yard watering from two 150-million gallon ponds in Apopka. Peters plans to link into that system and connect it all the way up to Mount Dora’s planned reclaimed water facility at Thrill Hill.
“In that way, (Mark) Reggentin and I are still shaking hands and doing business,” he said.
He wasn’t so sure how the Innovation District and Kelly Park economic districts would be working together, or whether one would end up dominating the other.
As we drove away from shacks and trailers and fields, it was hard to visualize the enormous transformation just a few years away once the Wekiva Parkway exits here — especially since the city in now without a planning and development department head to pull it off.
North of 46 on Round Lake Road we pass Round Lake Elementary on the left. Everything is rural, rural, rural here — pastures and country homes mostly, with the occasional sign for Ted Cruz or Donald Trump here and there. A new connector road called the Baker Round Lake Extension is planned that would go all the way up to SR-44 for an additional traffic feed to and from the Innovation District and diverting some of it away from the 46–441 intersection and Mount Dora.
“Beautiful land out here,” Peters said, obviously imagining what the next stage of Mount Dora’s future extension might involve. A loop utility line will also eventually need to be run through here to provide redundancy for the Innovation District.
Utility lines now in the planning won’t go this far east. Instead, they’ll run along Niles into Britt Road for the north-south corridor of the eastern edge of the current budgeted work. The lines there will be for new residential development as well as provide loop lines for what’s already there — Summerview, Stoneybrook, the Country Club of Mount Dora. Peters said that along with Addington Homes’ large development, engineers from four other developers have approached the city about their planned utility service.
Along Niles Road is Water Plant #2, completed in 2014 at a cost of $4.1 million (at rate increase that year helped to pay for that.) According to Peters, capacity in this plant is sufficient for drinking water needs of all development on Mount Dora’s east side all the way out to Sorrento. The loops lines will also deliver much more even water pressure.
While we drove up to the plant, Peters told me that some people were using the driveway for target practice, shooting bottles in the road and fixing targets to the light poles. “We can tell when they got bull-eyes from the pockmarks,” he sighed. Because the main Public Works office on Highland is closed due to mold damage, staff for the various departments are spread out all over the city. Water/wastewater manager Josh Kramm has his water staff here, and his wastewater staff at over at Wastewater Treatment Plant #2 off 46.
Heading north, Britt Road is mostly passes nurseries where development hasn’t taken over on the west side of the road. It’s a narrow, winding road, so the city will need to get numerous easements to work in their lines. Negotiations with property owners are much easier when done collectively — one plan provides everyone an incentive for participating — but there’s always the thorny, stubborn, standout individual property owner to contend with. Peters told me about one property owner who contends her property line; when public works staff come out to check a drain field, they have to be accompanied by a sheriff since she’s usually there and armed.
“The things people don’t know about what our workers contend with every day,” Peters sighed.
In the news this week was Gov. Scott’s veto from the state budget of some $500,000 earmarked for the Britt Road utilities extension. I asked Peters how this would affect the work, but surprisingly he said not at all. “Actually, it’s the second time that item has been axed from the budget,” he said. “We had requested it, but we budgeted for the amount ourselves just in case. The Britt Road extensions have a price tag of about $4 million and must be complete in advance of SR-44 widening (see below.)
Earlier this year in their stage of the budget negotiations, the state legislature cut $600,000 for Mount Dora’s biosolids project, but Peters said the city has asked for it knowing it would probably not make the cut. Besides, the public-private partnership biosolids treatment contract now being negotiated will offset that loss.
Peters didn’t think any of the state’s road projects were in any danger of being cut from the budget.
So for now, all of Mount Dora’s utility relocations are moving forward. But it is the nature of city utilities to roll on a constant tide of natural events and disasters, budget woes, false starts and abrupt changes from state and regional planners, the economy, and, most directly, the will of one’s own council.
With projects doubling up on the near horizon, I asked Peters how he was handling the added stress.
He sighed again. “It’s a challenge.”
* * *
New utility lines will be going in from where Britt Road intersects SR-44, all the way west to where they currently terminate into the Lakes of Mount Dora.
Peters said that he’d heard plans of widening 44 all the way into Deland — as an official evacuation route from the coast, it’s currently way too narrow. But it wont be something on Mount Dora’s plate.
Just a ways down from the Lakes of Mount Dora, on the north side of 44 is Thrill Hill, the 110-million gallon reused water reservoir the city will use to supply the reuse watering needs of all development on the east side of town. The city spent more than $1 million to acquire the abandoned clay mine, located off Thrill Hill Road, where back in the day Mount Dora hot rodders raced their cars late at night. Several million more will be necessary to make it a viable water source for residents. The city is now spending an additional $600,000 for permitting with DOT to allow dirt from the abandoned clay mine to be used by contractors for coming road projects. With forty to sixty percent of water use in Florida ending up in irrigation, the size of present and future development on the east side of Mount Dora is well exceeding the city’s present capacity to supply that need.
Right now, the city has a about 23 million gallons of capacity for delivering reused water from storm water and excess surface water for irrigation. Florida’s 3-month dry season officially began on March 15. Peters calls it the “Pansy season” “because that’s when everyone goes to Lowe’s to buy their pansies and get their yards green.”
It’s also when water usage goes through the roof. During the next three months, as much groundwater is used for irrigation as the city needs for the rest of the year.
“We have to augment our present reclaimed system a lot during these upcoming three months — about 1–1/2 million gallons a day,” Peters says. “ It costs us money to augment because we have to pull the extra needed supply from wells. We have a consumption use permit for those wells — by 2020, we’re supposed to be down to zero use for the well at Wastewater Treatment #2 (the one off 46). But then for the rest of the year we have excess reuse water, which we resupply to the aquifer at spray fields shooting the excess water out of big irrigation guns at the ground. A total waste of water.”
Instead of throwing that water away, Thrill Hill will allow the city to keep it until it’s needed. There are three ponds on the Z-shaped property, with the largest pond at about 90 million gallons capacity. The flow of water through the three ponds acts as a filtration process, where the big pond lets everything settle out and passing cleaner water on to the others. Treatment will also involve running it through disc filters and chlorination.
“In the end, it will be a cheap source of alternative and much less of a drain on the aquifer,” Peters says.
Nothing was said about the vast thirsty green lawns that will stretch eventually from here to Sorrento. Not accounting for the additional burdens of periodic drought (remember the state dried and then almost burnt to a crisp in 1998 during the last great El Nino season, and just last year South Florida was gripped by a sever drought), water sources are drying up in the state — demand is fast outstripping supply. Until water use regulations drastically change, Mount Dora’s Public Works department job is to figure out how to supply the need in the least taxing manner possible.
* * *
Driving the last leg of 44A to 441 along the planned utility relocations route, Peters told me about the DOT’s eventual plans to widen 44A all the way out to 44. They also plan to widen 441 from Donnelly to Liberty — the last stretch of 4-lane 441 along that route. Funding has yet to be approved for these parts of the project, but Peters told me he’d heard that the 44A widening was getting the green light, and that work on 441 would probably be bundled in too, since it makes it a bigger construction job and can be managed more efficiently.
The 44A extensions will be dicey because the DOT didn’t purchase additional right-of-way and the design calls for numerous inlets. “I’m looking at potentially 32 water boil notices,” Peters said. “Every inlet they put in, I’ll have to deflect our water and sewer mains.”
I asked him how the DOT green-lighting these additional project would affect Public Works. “We get six months notice, is all,” he said. They won’t hit at the same time as the first round of DOT projects starting in June 2017, but they will impact everything that follows.
Clearly, it’s going to be a very challenging five years for Public Works.
We end up back at the Public Works facility at Highland and Lincoln. The main building is closed due to mold damage, so staff is spread out between temporary trailers on-site, a rented office on Center Lane on 19A, as well as out at the various treatment facilities. It makes department meetings a nightmare, as well as doing routine things like filing timesheets in from so far away.) Peters said they could repair the main building some to allow for storage of transformers now being kept outside (they’d last longer), but if repair costs go to more than 50 percent of the value of the building, they’d have to meet current code, which the building isn’t up to, and the work would have to stop.
Peters said that a new Public Works facility has been priced at $1.8 million and would house all of their staff plus Parks and Recreation (now located on Ninth and Donnelly in the old library building) and Purchasing. Shops and storage bins are around the building are lousy shape, and Peters would like to replace them, too, for about $700,000.
But with all the other big-ticket projects now on the Public Works plate — and some of those, like Thrill Hill and biosolids treatment under close scrutiny of council as the next budget season comes round — there isn’t much hope that Public Works will have a place to call home very soon.
A full plate, indeed, and challenges coming from every direction. All the development guns are cocked and loaded and aiming at Mount Dora. The city currently has no planning and development director; Mark Reggentin is now developing economic opportunity for Mount Dora’s big southern neighbor. The logistics of rolling out so many utilities projects on a short timeframe (and from no central location) exceed current Public Works staffing capability. (Peters hopes to get approval to change a planned assistant public works director job to a project manager to handle the immediate need.) It’s a tight labor market, with stiff competition from private utilities and better-paying municipal ones. Project partners with the state have staffing problems of their own; state employees haven’t seen a pay raise in 11 years.
Development will come, with all the questions of commercialization and annexation and integration with a very different “old” west side of town. Politics will change given the enormous re-distribution of votes.
And there are even bigger questions yet to answer. Jobs may be coming through the Innovation District, but are families willing to move to Mount Dora given that Lake County schools are viewed as being far inferior to those in more urban areas? And does Mount Dora want to come to resemble Lake Mary or Clermont? How much can it shape its own destiny, given the enormous clout of development?
A few days after our drive I headed back out take a few more pictures along the route and remind myself of what I saw fleetingly the first time. It was a grey Saturday morning and Mount Dora was about its normal business, driving to Publix and Lowes, with people riding bikes and working in their yards. The Lakes of Mount Dora was conducting a community yard sale. Traffic was lining up outside Rennigers and more was coming up from Orlando to Mount Dora for the spring collectibles and crafts show.
Having finished the route, I drove into the Country Club of Mount Dora to visit the abandoned cemetery that’s wedged in a tiny corner between golf fairways and fine houses. The Country Club is the established, “old “ section of the “new” Mount Dora, the granddaddy development now two decades old. Clouds were looking heavy with rain, but people were out walking dogs and the fairways were well-trafficked with golfers. I thought of the one utility line running under my car down Country Club Boulevard, and wondered how much life in this pretty area of Mount Dora would change if it failed, rendering taps useless. A lot changes when the water isn’t there.
In the cemetery, it was brooding and dim as rain began falling lightly through the canopy. The 2-acre site is so grown over now you have to look hard to find the few markers still bearing witness to generations of black field-workers who were buried here, possibly all the way back to the Civil War. Lot of lost history here, abandoned, near forgotten, while just yard away the good life rolls on. Florida development is that way, ever racing forward toward a future because so many see themselves in it.
I’ve wanted to see this cemetery cleaned up and surveyed and restored to a level of historical and community respect, similar to the work done on Mt. Carmel-Simpson next to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. But as I walked around that day on leaf-littered lanes peering into the dense brush there the dead are lost under, I thought: Maybe letting old dogs lie really is the best way to respect them in a time of immense change. Letting time take its course. These grove and agricultural workers were never included in the city’s official history (still largely aren’t), why demand that serve the new Mount Dora?
Maybe an overgrown and forgotten cemetery is just what Mount Dora needs as it now leaps into its future. A solemn reminder that things thrive in this state always at a price.
But that, of course, isn’t Public Works’ concern. They run the pipes, but citizens decide what they’re for.
David Cohea, Writer (d[email protected])
Originally published at www.mountdoracitizen.com on March 20, 2016.
