ALTHOUGH THE VILLAGES EXTENDS INTO THREE COUNTIES, THE VAST majority of the development will soon roll across hapless Sumter County. Per capita income in Sumter County is about half the state’s average, and sixty percent of its population is on some sort of state assistance. In addition to being poor, it’s also far more rural than two adjacent counties—Lake and Marion—with less than one-fourth their population. When the build-out of The Villages is complete, Sumter will have 45,000 new homes, compared with 5,000 each for Lake and Marion counties. There will be roughly 90,000 Villagers living in Sumter County, outnumbering all other county residents by nearly 50,000.
Sumter County encompasses nearly 600 square miles of the quiet center of Florida. Even when fully built out, The Villages will remain a small rectangle on Sumter’s northeast corner. I know this, but I’m still surprised when it takes me nearly an hour on back roads to reach Bushnell, the county seat. The number of run-down trailer parks that post signs advertising their age-restricted status also surprises me.
Along the way, I stop by the tiny Leesburg airport, just across the Lake County line, to sneak a peak at the “Morse air force,” as Gary’s planes are often referred to. I spot two gleaming Falcon jets in a hanger detailed to look like it holds thoroughbred horses. Morse successfully lobbied to have a U.S. customs officer assigned to the airport, thus giving it “international” status, and allowing him to fly directly into and out of the country with foreign clients. Morse has also lobbied for and received tentative approval for interchanges off Interstate 75 and the Florida Turnpike that will help make The Villages and its environs more accessible to motorists.
I arrive in tiny Bushnell early for a meeting with county officials, and park beside the county’s handsome old courthouse. I ask a young, pregnant girl walking along the road where the center of town is. “This is it,” she replies. “Unless you mean Wal-Mart. That’s up the road.”
The air is hot and seems to cling to my body, and the town of 2,300 is quiet except for chirping cicadas. I see a sign for Bushnell’s one claim to fame: the nearby Dade Battlefield Historical Site, where in 1835 Seminole warriors (distantly related to Billy Bowlegs) ambushed and killed more than 100 American soldiers in a marshy meadow, thus starting the Second Seminole Indian War.
Inside the courthouse, which has served as the county seat for 100 years, I meet with County Supervisor Brad Arnold and Supervisor of Elections Karen Krause. She paints a picture of Sumter as one of central Florida’s last sleepy counties, but rapidly changing under pressure from The Villages’ development. “I guess it was just a matter of time,” Krause says. “We’ve got The Villages in the north, and now the southern portion of the county near Orlando is filling up with that city’s spillover. Those folks are tired of the mess down there—the crime, the traffic, the sprawl, the high cost of living—but now they’re re-creating it here.”
“Ten years ago, the number of registered voters in Sumter County was under 16,000,” she tells me. “Five years ago it was about 28,000; now it’s about 50,000. The majority of these registered voters are from The Villages. We knew it would happen; but we didn’t think it would happen so fast. Used to be we had more cows than people in the county, and just three stoplights.”
The trend shows no signs of abating, she says. “We are issuing 550 building permits a month for The Villages. We figure that each new house represents 1.9 voters. And unlike the rest of the county, Villagers are a conservative lot. Ten years ago, I was the very first Republican ever elected as a county commissioner. Now all the commissioners are Republicans.”
Residents of The Villages, along with Morse, quickly flexed their new political muscle by changing the way county officials were elected, advocating a new system of power distribution in the county, ironically titled “One Sumter.” County residents used to elect their five commissioners by district. Residents in district one, for example, would elect their own representative to the board, but not vote on a commissioner representing another district. But with just two district commissioners to vote for, Morse and the Villagers decided that they’d rather vote on the election of all the commissioners. Naturally, the rest of the county liked the protection the district system afforded them from the surge of new voters in The Villages.
The vote on “One Sumter” in 2004 was extremely close, but with a ninety percent turnout rate (twice the county average), The Villages won, and the era of big-stick diplomacy began. Villagers, with their overwhelming numbers, could now monopolize every county election. And yet many still felt stymied and underrepresented by the districting system. Although Villagers could now vote for all five commissioners, they could still run for only two seats.
To address this slight obstacle, Villagers pushed through a redistricting, which gave them a third seat on the county commission, and thus a lock on electing the county’s government for the foreseeable future.
Although Villagers have already lobbied for—and received—their own Sumter County sheriff’s substation and government annex, which is golf cart–accessible, they are no longer satisfied with the arrangement. There’s now talk of moving all county functions out of the centrally located, century-old Bushnell courthouse and relocating them to The Villages.
At our meeting, County Supervisor Arnold tells me that Chapter 190 is “a wonderful thing. I haven’t seen a downside. It helps grow an unincorporated part of the county in a rational manner.” He adds that he recently said as much to a fact-finding group from Georgia, whose legislature is considering the adoption of a similar measure. “The Villages pays taxes and yet it’s not a big user of county services,” he says. “It’s a win-win for us.” Arnold says nothing of the fact that transplanted retirees have politically overwhelmed the local-born population. When I ask him if these retirees might have a different set of priorities from local families—regarding schools, perhaps—he says he doesn’t think so.
He points with pride to the towns near The Villages, including the desolate municipality of Wildwood, which are preparing to benefit financially from the development. “Wildwood is annexing unincorporated land that will soon be commercial,” Arnold says. “They will also provide homes for workers. It’s a real boom for them. The Villages is a big economic engine. A lot of residents hope it’ll give their children a reason to stick around after high school.”
To gauge just how far The Villages has already expanded, I return from Bushnell along a sun-bleached, cracked two-lane county highway that goes through gorgeous rolling pastureland with broad vistas. I admire the shady stands of old live oaks in the meadows, and an occasional glistening lily pond. This is the Florida of piney woods, saw palmetto scrub, and sun-dappled hummock that Marjorie Kennan Rawlings describes vividly in many of her novels. Although an avid reader of Rawlings, I still had no idea that central Florida could actually be this stunning.
The Villages’ executives often refer to this scenic idyll of delicately interwoven ecosystems as “inventory,” and I soon see why, when up ahead the scenery abruptly changes. To my left I see a metallic water tower soaring above a treeless crest, surrounded by hulking piles of concrete sewer molds, partially finished streets, and mounds of sandy soil. Some of the landscape is carefully contoured and resembles the early stages of a new golf course.
To my right, mailboxes line the road beside old driveways scarred by tank treads. The homes are already demolished, and giant bulldozers have leveled what were once rolling hills. Pale sand and upturned oaks with their naked and gnarled roots litter the construction site for as far as the eye can see, which is pretty darn far. The development has leaped right across the road I am driving on, which will soon be converted into a multilane highway with strip malls. Concerns about the health of the area’s aquifers have apparently had no effect on Morse’s ambitions.
I head for what seems to be the eastern perimeter of The Villages’ mammoth construction site. But it’s hard to know for sure. The development is expanding so quickly that none of the local maps can keep up. I turn down a lonely lane that runs right along the Sumter and Lake county line, and I am soon rewarded with another vista of endless construction. The newest phase of nearly completed Village development sprawls to the horizon.
In the near distance, just across a brown rail fence, are scores of gently curving streets ending in culs-de-sac. Unlike the more rudimentary site I have just visited, here there are tidy curb cuts, sewer grates, utility boxes, stop signs, and even street signs. Only one thing is missing—houses—but they’ll be there soon. A wave of homes is already cresting on a nearby hillside and is poised to roll across this neighborhood-to-be. Given The Villages’ aggressive construction schedules, this neighborhood could be filled with homes built from scratch in a few months.
Across the street in Lake County, the land is still wooded and sparsely populated with older, somewhat ragged homes. I pull into the dirt driveway of one displaying a “For Sale” sign and walk a short way until the packed dirt ends and overgrown scrub grass begins. I meet a man who is leaning over a metal fence, with a yapping Chihuahua dancing about his heels. He’s in his early seventies and wears leisure slacks, old loafers, and a stubbly beard. High-voltage electrical wires buzzing atop steel towers bisect his yard, which is dotted with small orange trees. I’m staggered when he tells me the asking price is $750,000.
His name is Alan, and he tells me he relocated to the area eighteen years ago to get away from “all the commotion” of his native Orlando. “When I moved in here, there were just two mobile homes and us,” he says. “Now they’re building 34,000 homes across the street. Kind of boggles the mind, doesn’t it? And there’s nothing any of us can do about it. So I’m moving.”
“What do I think of The Villages and all this development?” Alan says. “I think it stinks. They’re building without any regard to the land. I’m no tree hugger, but I hate to see the land raped the way they’re doing it. They’re shipping in all sorts of clay and sand just so they can make the land flat. They’re cutting down trees, and putting in lakes where there weren’t any. There’s only one saving grace about this whole nonsense—it’ll be gorgeous when it’s done.”
The Villages brushes off the complaints of locals like Alan. “Everybody complains about change,” Gary Lester responds when asked about local opposition. “I’m still upset with the American League for adopting the designated hitter rule.”
My curiosity once again gets the best of me when I drive past a sign for a county park and something called the Spark Level Baptist Church. I turn down a potholed road with run-down trailer homes lining one side and an empty pasture on the other. The road ends at the church and an overgrown park with a few scattered picnic tables at the edge of some piney scrub. According to local historians, this neighborhood was founded by escaped slaves and is one of the earliest settlements in the region. At the time, the area was a swampy forest located far away from prying eyes. A state map from 1837 labels it “Negro Town.” Born in poverty, the small African-American settlement remains basically destitute. The trailers are badly rusted and the yards generally consist of packed dirt littered with discarded furniture, car parts, and empty gas cans.
I knock on the door of the trailer closest to the church. An older woman opens the door but doesn’t invite me inside. I ask her about the sprawling development next door. “What we going to do ’bout it?” she says, in a breathy drawl. “I been here fifty-five years. They covered up our fishing lake. I heard one day they gonna come and offer us. But I ain’t seen nobody. Guess they just going to put a big wall around us.”
She recommends that I speak with a neighbor named L.T. and his wife, Ruby-Mae, so I walk a few hundred yards to their cinder block home, step onto the sagging porch, and knock on the door. An elderly man cautiously opens it a crack. I explain my visit, but he remains ill at ease. “I’m kind of busy right now,” he says guardedly, his eyes not quite meeting mine. Try as I might to put him at ease, my visit is clearly making him uncomfortable. The Klu Klux Klan once held considerable sway over this area, occupying several local positions of power, including the sheriff’s office. A few local white residents tell me they recall signs reading “No Niggers Allowed” displayed inside private businesses as recently as a few decades ago.
I walk back to the church to fetch my car, but notice a path leading off to the side. The path narrows until it is just wide enough for two sets of sandy tire tracks. I walk along it, listening to the clicking, chirping and buzzing of birds and insects in the long motionless grasses. Oak trees draped in gray Spanish moss line the way on either side of me. The sun is strong enough to heat the hair on my head, and given the clinging humidity, the shade provides little relief, and the mosquitoes and sand gnats are even worse beneath the high canopies. I come across a brick home that looks abandoned. Outside, a mutt sits in a shaded gully beside a plywood doghouse tilting to one side. He looks at me, rolls on his back in the dirt, and goes back to sleep. Across from the driveway in the scrub are the meager remains of a one-room schoolhouse.
I walk up a short rise and gaze at hundreds of partially finished homes. The air is punctuated with the pop-pop-pop of nail guns. In front of me is a metal cattle gate. I climb over it and continue down the rutted dirt path, now surrounded by homes on either side. The neck of land ends in a shady cul-de-sac dotted with a mixture of new and very old headstones. I am in the old “Negro Town” cemetery.
The Villages naturally has little interest in building homes overlooking a cemetery, let alone a cemetery for poor black people. It doesn’t fit into the marketing plan. But the cemetery can’t be bought, and even if it could, disturbing it would be illegal. What’s the developer supposed to do when faced with such an obstacle? Surround it with a park and celebrate the site’s historical value? Mythologize it as Billy Bowlegs’s final resting place?
I climb over a fence and then a man-made earthen berm to see how Morse is addressing this awkward peninsula of land jutting into his housing inventory. I emerge in a parking lot beside a new recreation center. None of the homes are quite finished, but newspaper vending machines carrying today’s Daily Sun stand at the ready beside a mail kiosk. A green-and-white sign welcomes visitors to The Village of Caroline. The cemetery, hidden on three sides by a dense row of bushes planted on steep mounds of earth, is nowhere to be seen. I know it’s right in front of me, but I can’t make it out.
With little or no connection to the land outside the gates, burial poses a problem for Villagers, many of whom have, in any case, little interest in being interred locally. Some military veterans opt for burial at a regional cemetery, but for the most part, the dead and dying are sent home by airplane. Few personal statements are more powerful than where one decides to be buried, and Villagers express a clear preference for the soil of the communities they left behind.
Gated planned communities often have about as much in common with the local area and population as a Club Med resort—it doesn’t really matter where they’re located as long as the weather is nice. For example, a consortium of Japanese investors is seeking to build an age-segregated community in New Mexico for Japanese citizens. They may not speak English, but such concerns pale in comparison with the benefits of warm winters and the yen’s favorable exchange rate. As my former neighbor Dave Anderson tells me, he has always hated Florida—and still does. But as far as he is concerned The Villages isn’t really in Florida: “It just happens to be located there.”
Back in my car, I head toward the sleepy town of Lady Lake in the northwestern corner of Lake County to meet with the town manager. Lady Lake owes its existence to the railroad, which passed through the town beginning in 1884. The town was incorporated in 1925 but remained a rural farming community for much of its existence. During Prohibition, the swampier and nearly impenetrable portions of the county became popular with bootleggers. The Ma Barker gang hid out nearby until they were discovered by the FBI and killed in a dramatic shootout.
As late as the 1960s, Lady Lake was just a bump in the road with a population of 335. The town couldn’t afford to buy its one policeman a car, so he enforced the speed limit on foot with a whistle, and when necessary, hitchhiked to chase down a speeder. Until The Villages came along, the town’s only claim to fame was “Cathedral Arch”—a quiet street gracefully lined with giant oaks that once appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.
The area became popular in the 1970s with retirees of modest means searching for sun, good fishing, and low taxes. Land was cheap and zoning nonexistent. Much of Harold Schwartz’s old Orange Blossom Gardens is inside Lady Lake’s municipal boundaries. Three of the town’s five council members are now Villagers, giving The Villages much the same stranglehold on the municipality as it has on Sumter County.
But although many Villagers tell me that they moved here to escape suburban sprawl, much of it has been re-created in the outskirts of Lady Lake, with all its attendant aggravations such as congestion and crime.
The urge to build on the surrounding pastureland is too strong for the Morse family, as well as other developers, to pass up. There’s good money to be made erecting big box stores and housing developments—and that’s what’s happening. Driving into and out of the Lady Lake area of The Villages is becoming a real chore. Sadly, The Villages and local highway engineers are seemingly of one mind: they keep widening the roads, which then attract yet more cars.
I visit with the town manager, Bill Vance, a young, clean-cut professional, who is dressed in khaki slacks and a crisp white shirt. We meet at the Lady Lake town hall, a squat cement structure physically isolated from any other town landmark or neighborhood. When I ask him how he intends to manage the town’s explosive growth, he hands me a snappy booklet titled “Commercial Design Guidelines,” nods confidently, and invites me to peruse it during our interview.
After several years as a municipal reporter covering sprawling disasters across the country, I have a decent idea of what the booklet might contain: rules for managing sprawl, such as feeble landscaping requirements and gussied-up veneers for strip malls. One page displays a photo of a giant supermarket, considered a success story because it has “three or more roof planes per primary facade.” I’d seen the same monotonous so-called “managed” development ruin towns from Connecticut to Iowa to southern California. It’s one of the reasons I live in rural New England, where strip malls are not necessarily greeted with open arms.
“We want responsible growth,” Vance tells me. “The Villages has raised the bar for all of us.”
“What about designing for people, not cars?” I ask. “What about sidewalks?”
He points to plans he has for a sidewalk alongside the town’s six-lane highway, where no sensible human would dare to tread. Two days earlier, a young woman tried; she was killed—nearly sliced in two—by a speeding Lexus. The driver thought she had hit a dog.
“Would you walk on these sidewalks?” I ask.
Vance hesitates. “No. I guess not.”
For years, Lady Lake sat on the sidelines and watched The Villages get bigger and bigger. Vance’s basic strategy is to help this once sleepy town finally capitalize on The Villages’ growth. “You’ve got tens of thousands of folks here with nothing but time on their hands and money in their pockets,” he explains.
Living in a bubble takes a leap of imagination, but try as they might to insulate themselves from the real world, Villagers cannot survive without it. Every utopia has its soft underbelly; even the Biosphere 2 space-age terrarium project eventually needed oxygen pumped in. The Villages’ weak spot is employees. Villagers need shops, restaurants, and supermarkets, and these businesses need to be staffed by human beings.
“We can provide both,” Vance tells me. “But we’ll need more schools. A lot of seniors don’t want to pay for schools, but they want to go out for dinner and shop in local stores. Well, you need employees to staff those jobs, and schools for their kids. The same goes for the white-collar professionals. They’re not going to relocate here if there aren’t good schools for their children. It’s all interrelated. If you want a nice community, you need nice schools. And that takes everyone chipping in.”
On my way out, I ask Vance for something I can’t seem to find: a map of the region. “There isn’t one,” he says. “Until recently, this wasn’t a ‘region.’”
On my way out of Lady Lake, I come across a group of preteens playing in the street with their younger siblings. They’re dressed in jeans and shorts. The boys wear T-shirts, the girls wear tank tops, and most are barefoot. The oldest is named Tania, and she is nominally in charge. When I ask her what she thinks of The Villages next door, she pauses and looks at her debris-strewn dirt yard. “I wish I lived over there, too,” she tells me. “It’s so clean. And they have nice restaurants and stores. I bet the old folks are really happy there.” Her friends giggle at the improbable sight of her being interviewed.
A dark-haired kid named Jimmy stops riding his knobby-tired dirt bike in circles when he hears us talking about The Villages. His hair is long and straight, and he pushes it out of his eyes when he speaks with me. His toddler brother, Billy, also approaches and starts playing with his belly button. Pretty soon, all the kids are gathered in a circle around me, bouncing rubber balls or carrying dolls.
“I don’t like The Villages,” Jimmy says. “It’s a shame such a nice place is only for older people.” The kids all watch him intently. “You have to act different there, or they yell at you.” Several of the children nod their heads in agreement. Jimmy tells me that he was once dragged out of the movie theater for throwing popcorn at another boy who pissed him off. “My mom had to pick me up and she wasn’t too happy.”
I picture Jimmy’s mom dropping off her cargo of youngsters at the town square. I can hardly imagine a more incongruous picture: retirees strolling about in their fantasyland suddenly invaded by a station wagon full of someone else’s rambunctious children.
“I’m always getting in trouble for trying to skateboard there,” Jimmy says. “The old people ask us to stop or they get the police to stop us. I haven’t seen a sign that says ‘No Skateboarding,’ but they take your skateboard away anyway. I’ve had three of them confiscated. I’m getting a new skateboard, but I’m never going back there. The old people are always following us around like we were criminals.”
Tania interrupts. “I don’t want to live in a trailer anymore,” she says. “It’s too small for all of us, and I hate it. I want to live in a big house with fresh sod on the lawn—just like the old people.”
A muscle car with rap music pulsating out of its sunroof pulls up with two men inside. It’s Jimmy’s dad and a friend. Jimmy’s father is carrying a brown bag with what appears to be a liquor bottle inside. The children sense that he’s not in a particularly good mood and quickly disperse.
Later that evening, I meet with Jim Roberts, a Sumter County commissioner whose views often differ dramatically from those of the county supervisor, Brad Arnold. Roberts, a high school civics teacher for more than two decades, is a tall gangly man with rubbery limbs and facial features. He meets with me at the county’s satellite offices in The Villages.
He is in the middle of a reelection campaign, one made nearly impossible by The Villages’ lock on elections. He has the overwhelming support of his district in the south end of the county, but he must now win the support of the entire county. Making matters worse, the Morse family is using its media machine to support his opponent.
We sit at a conference table. Roberts’s sagging shoulders and the deep bags under his eyes betray his exhaustion. He pauses and then closes his eyes, contemplating where to begin. He starts with the gated roads that the county inexplicably agreed to maintain—by a vote of three to two, after the developer helped get a third commissioner who was friendly to The Villages elected to the board. Roberts shows me prior contracts plainly stating that The Villages would be responsible for maintaining its own roads.
Since the county is now stuck with maintaining the roads, they are technically open to the public, whether or not The Villages is gated. And therein lies one of bigger challenges to The Villages’ marketing: how to promote a sense of gated security when, for the most part, it doesn’t really exist. The Villages may look like a gated community, but most of the gates are actually little more than props. The guards (some of whom are semiretired Villagers) can ask questions, but they can’t deny access.
Roberts finds the charade distasteful. “Why should any county resident have to push a button and pass through a security gate to drive down a county road?” Then again, who in Robert’s district would even want to drive around in a closed subdivision? To further discourage such a possibility, many gates display an unsubtle “Welcome Home” sign.
But some locals have no choice. A carpenter who builds homes in The Villages told me about an incident when a Villager accidentally rammed his car. When he stopped to check the damage, she told him he didn’t belong in The Villages and shouldn’t be driving on “her” roads.
I find it increasingly difficult to take the role-playing that accompanies the community’s simulated security seriously, particularly when I am returning to the Andersons’ house after a rowdy evening at Katie Belle’s. One night, when asked by intercom about my intentions, I said, “To pillage and plunder.” The distracted guard gave me a cheerful “Okey-doke!” and opened the gates from a remote location.
Roberts tells me it’s neither the development itself nor its residents that trouble him. As a pro-business Republican, he has always considered himself a strong supporter of The Villages. “It’s a quality development which brings us lots of jobs,” he says. “For a cash-strapped county, a retirement community makes for an awfully attractive industry. I knew the developer was getting rich, but I was OK with that because I thought we were getting a utopia with all the advantages and none of the expenses.”
But Roberts grew wary when The Villages lobbied commissioners in Bushnell to approve, all at once, plans for 30,000 more homes. It concerned him that the massive expansion had too little of the sort of commercial development that keeps county coffers afloat through tax revenues. Retirees may use fewer county services than younger residents, but they still use some. Otherwise, Villagers wouldn’t need their own sheriff’s substation and county annex.
Roberts was also concerned about the environmental impact of the expansion. “Water levels are down, and what does the developer do? He challenges the same formula used in Tampa, Saint Petersburg, and Fort Myers.”
When he argued that the county should move cautiously and approve only one-third of the expansion at a time, Roberts says, he earned the eternal wrath of the Morse family. “The developer was moving too fast. It’s our job to protect residents of The Villages and the county as a whole from reckless planning. One day the developer will be gone and we’ll all be left picking up the pieces.”
Taking on the Morse family has consequences. The developer helps fund candidates for county office who are friends and business associates. And all candidates are dependent on his magnanimity. No candidate can win without securing a majority of votes inside The Villages. But because The Villages’ deed restrictions forbid door-to-door solicitation (unless a resident is personally introducing a candidate to friends and neighbors), candidates must generally rely on Morse’s own monopolistic media to deliver their message.
It comes as little surprise that The Villages’ media empire takes a dim view of Roberts. The Daily Sun seemingly goes to great lengths to keep his picture out of its pages. A recent example was a ceremonial groundbreaking at which Roberts posed with his fellow commissioners.
“Just for fun, I sandwiched myself between my colleagues,” Roberts said. “I wanted to see how the Daily Sun would cope with me in the center of the picture. Guess what? They cut the photo in half and displayed it in two pieces. You could just make out the knuckle of my little finger on one side, and my index finger on the other. The few times I’m actually in the paper, they print the same photo where I look like I’m snarling.”
More often than not, the only mention of Roberts is as the butt of a political cartoon or the object of an angry editorial describing him as a “big-spending politico trying to kill the golden goose” with his “inexplicable” and “wasteful” voting.
Left unmentioned is Roberts’s dogged refusal to accept any political donations. He runs a bare-bones campaign financed with a few thousand dollars of his own money. “I always teach my students that money is the corruptor of government,” he explains. “If I take money from someone, they’ll expect something in return.”
Roberts worries most about what he fears are Morse’s attempts to turn the entire county into the equivalent of one giant central district. Sumter County is run by what Florida calls a “constitutional” form of government—a boilerplate organizational structure generally favored by poor rural counties. In a constitutional government, all county officials are elected, including the sheriff, tax collector, property appraiser, and supervisor of elections.
Several commissioners backed by the developer have called for the creation of a “charter” government, in which county officials are appointed by majority vote of the board of county commissioners. If such a measure passes—as is possible—the board will soon appoint all other county officials.
“It’s like the central districts all over again,” Roberts says incredulously. “County government will just be a proxy for the developer—a developer who was never elected by the people. We’re not talking about a typical situation where there are twenty competing developers. We only have one, and he wants to control everything.”
The Morse family’s clout in Sumter may one day end as the southern end of the county fills up with more young families commuting to Orlando. But as with the mini-districts, it may then be too late—many of the important decision may already have been made.
It’s nearing midnight, and Roberts excuses himself. He has to be up early in the morning for school and he still has a long drive back to Bushnell. After teaching, he expects to spend the rest of the afternoon walking around his district asking for votes.
Morse is backing a different man in the primary, the county’s former director of public works, who resigned a few years earlier after butting heads with Roberts. Not surprisingly, he is very well funded, having raised about $60,000, with many of the donations coming from companies doing business with The Villages.
The next day, I attend a meeting of the Sumter County Republicans. Given the community’s conservative roots and active voters in a critical swing state, The Villages has become a favorite campaign stop for Republican candidates, both local and national. Jeb Bush was a frequent visitor, and his brother, the president, made a campaign swing through Sumter Landing in 2004. Tonight, Gary Lester is there, and he starts the meeting with a prayer asking God to bless, among other things, The Villages and the Republican Party. He then leads us in the Pledge of Allegiance.
He introduces Gary Breeden, the developer-friendly candidate for Jim Roberts’s seat on the Board of Commissioners. Breeden speaks with an ingratiating folksy drawl, and describes Sumter County as a “diamond in the rough—now is its time to shine,” and The Villages as “an absolutely wonderful development.”
Someone asks him about a possible water shortage. Breeden dismisses the notion with a confident smile and a wave of his hand. “There’s plenty of water,” he says. “Plenty of water.” Lester nods his head approvingly.
Afterward, I ask Lester whether he thinks his employer exerts considerable political influence over the county. He pauses for a moment to consider the question, and then looks me squarely in the eye. “He only has one vote, just like everyone else.”