Leisureville Page 11

  “C’mon, Barb, throw the ball already!” a batter barks out to the pitcher. Barb underarms it across the plate and the batter smacks it hard. It’s a pop fly to center field. The fielder shuffles around uneasily, trying to get under the ball. “I can only see so far,” she shouts, adjusting her eyeglasses. She catches the ball anyway. “Way to go, Tammy!” Barb hollers back to the fielder.

  Soon practice is over and I cautiously approach Barb. Who am I to presume? She’s sitting on a bench cleaning her cleats. A few other women sit nearby on lawn chairs, discussing the practice game.

  “Hi, I’m writing a book about The Villages and I was looking to talk with all sorts of folks about living in a retirement community,” I say to Barb. “I want to make sure I get a well-rounded view of things. I heard that there was a lesbian community here.” I grimace and squint my eyes as if bracing for a car crash.

  Barb is quiet, and doesn’t take her eyes off her cleats. She doesn’t introduce herself, nor ask my name. An awkward thirty seconds pass before I clumsily try again. “Do you know where I might find some, uh, lesbians?”

  Another grimace, and then I really start tripping over myself. “Some of my best friends are lesbians. My brother’s gay. I’m from Massachusetts.” Several of the women walk away, not angry, but visibly uncomfortable.

  Barb’s silence isn’t helping matters. She finally throws me a bone. “It’s hard to tell who’s a lesbian and who isn’t,” she offers. “It’s not like they carry a banner that says, ‘I’m a lesbian.’ It’s more like in the military: ‘Don’t ask; don’t tell.’”

  OK. This is a start.

  “It’s kind of like being an alcoholic,” Barb continues. “It’s part of who you are, but you wouldn’t want to wear it as a label.” I’m saddened by the analogy, which suggests self-hatred; Barb clearly belongs to an earlier generation.

  “Do you live alone?” I ask.

  “No,” she says.

  “Do you live with a housemate?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are some of the softball players lesbians?”

  “Yeah, most of the good players are.”

  “Do you consider yourself a ‘good player’?” I ask.

  “Yes and no,” she says curtly. “Look nobody wants to break their anonymity. It’s just not proper. Nobody knows what might happen to the information. It could make things hard on you in the neighborhood. It could be that your friends and neighbors wouldn’t want to be guilty by association. It’s not like people burn crosses around here, but still, it’s never far from one’s mind.”

  I tell her that where I come from, women who love each other walk hand in hand down the street. “That’s not OK here,” she says. “At least not in public.”

  “I had suspicions about one woman,” she continues. “I caught her practicing her throwing at home with a man’s sock—so she wouldn’t throw like a girl. She said it was her husband’s sock, but I don’t think she was married. She said she had kids. Maybe she does. Half of us do. Maybe more. I thought that maybe I was wrong; maybe she’s not like that. Then I saw her at a restaurant with another woman and they looked like they belonged together. You know what I mean?”

  I ask if we could exchange names and phone numbers, just in case she might want to talk some more at a later date. She says no. I tell her that I’m not interested in outing anyone and suggest that she might give me a pseudonym. She ponders this for a while.

  “Call me Ellen,” she says brightly. “Like that comedian lady on TV. Yeah, call me Ellen.”

  “Ellen” walks away toward her car. A woman from across the way bellows out to her: “Hey, Barb! Barb! It’s me, Fran! What time do you want dinner?” Barb keeps walking to her car, fighting the impulse, I imagine, to turn around and acknowledge her roommate in my presence.

  An hour or so later, I run into Mr. Midnight standing in the sunshine outside Katie Belle’s. “I’ve penetrated the lesbian community,” I say. He laughs. But I can see that something’s on his mind. After all his talk about sex and secession, he apparently doesn’t want me to get the wrong idea about him.

  “I want you to know that I speak to my maker at night,” he says. “I ask for good health, peace in the world, and someone to love.”

  Listening to Mr. Midnight try to be pious is actually more painful than funny. There’s an awkward pause, which I keep expecting him to break with a punch line. I yawn. Mr. Midnight fidgets and looks bored.

  Is he really about to quit his hedonistic lifestyle, dedicate himself to making the world a better place, and even embrace monogamy?

  I don’t think so, but I probe a little deeper, just in case. “How was your visit with Insatiable Sally?” I ask.

  Mr. Midnight hesitates, and then speaks his mind. “Excellent,” he says. “But I had to let her go. She wants someone to love and cherish her. I don’t love, and I don’t cherish. So it’s over. She knew the rules.”

  8

  Government, Inc.

  ONE PECULIARITY OF THE VILLAGES, PARTICULARLY GIVEN ITS GEOgraphic size and population, is that it doesn’t have any municipal buildings. This is because The Villages, despite the fact that it spans three counties, is a privately held business situated on unincorporated land.

  When asked, few residents can tell me how they are governed. Most queries are met with a blank stare and an abrupt change of topic, usually to golf or the weather. That’s not particularly surprising, because few people understand how The Villages is governed even after it is explained to them.

  It’s an exceedingly Byzantine enterprise—and one that took me quite a while to comprehend as well—with an alphabet soup of legalisms. It’s amorphous complexity obscures the fact that Gary Morse owns much of the community and exercises enormous political control over it.

  By choosing to live under the Morse family’s private regime, Villagers have voluntarily relinquished many of their civil liberties. In exchange for unlimited leisure and recreation, they’ve traded the ballot box for the suggestion box. The underlying assumption, it would seem, is that self-governance isn’t really very important. Those who have run afoul of Morse’s policies refer to the “Village vision”—a willful disregard by the vast majority of Villagers of anything that threatens their rosy outlook. I suspect that this laissez-faire attitude may well take a beating one day soon, as home values stop appreciating at a blissful twenty percent a year, and residents are eventually beset by problems that force them to confront a privately owned government. It’s easy to lose oneself in The Villages’ resort-like atmosphere, but reality has a way of intruding, and residents have little recourse when it does intrude.

  To gain a better understanding of The Villages quasi-government, I sign up for a special class given weekly by The Villages: “Community Development District Orientation: Your Introduction to Your Special Purpose Units of Local Government.” The two-hour class is taught in a building as nondescript and nearly invisible as the quasi-government it houses.

  Several rows of folding chairs fill the meeting room. Sixteen people show up, including two reporters from the Daily Sun. A man named John Rohan steps up to the front of the room and introduces himself as the district administrator.

  Rohan asks everyone where he or she is from, and then comments about the bane of most northerners’ and midwesterners’ existence: “Gosh, I hear there’s a lot of snow back there! How deep is it? It sure is nice and warm here, isn’t it?” When asked, one attendant responds that he’s from the Florida Panhandle. “Gosh, that makes you a ’Gator fan, I bet!” Rohan says.

  “OK. Cool. Let’s get started. But this is complicated, so feel free to attend this course again as many times as you’d like. OK? Here we go. Sometimes folks think we’re a municipality because of our size, but we’re basically one big master-planned development. It started out as a mobile home community surrounded by farmland on a lonely county road. There were contractual-based fees for utilities, public safety, and golf, so the developer, in his wisdom, created districts and numbered
them. Each one is a unit of ‘special purpose local government,’ which is a general-purpose government for a region. But it can’t issue building permits, comprehensive plans, annex, or do law enforcement. But with the exception of those four things, it operates just like a regional government; only it doesn’t lie within incorporated boundaries. OK?

  “You see, growth pays for growth in Florida: somebody’s going to pay. This is a mechanism to fund and finance infrastructure and support services. At some point in time the last nail will be nailed and the last slab poured, and the developer will be finished with his dream, but he knew that someone would have to manage those golf courses. The developer knew that this lifestyle would have to continue after he’s done. To provide for this, he builds recreation centers and sells them back to the community. OK? Everyone still with me?”

  Rohan takes out an easel filled with large complicated charts. The audience members begin to have a glazed-over look. He moves quickly, and the many numbers rapidly blend into one another. Every so often, there’s something recognizable that I try to hold on to, such as “bond debt,” “impact fee,” and “amenities fees.” But mostly it’s a slew of puzzling terms like “adjusted taxable revenue” and “ad valorem.” He proceeds to explain an algebraic equation where “assessments equal total costs times the number of acres in the unit divided by the number of assessable acres in the district.” Women look to their husbands, but several of the men are already asleep. “I bet you all are ready to get out of here and go golfing, aren’t you?” Rohan asks cheerfully.

  To break up the monotony, somebody asks Rohan a question: “Are you elected to your position?” “Uh, no,” he responds. “I’m an employee.” Rohan then takes out a seven-foot aerial photograph of The Villages with a clear plastic overlay identifying the development’s ten districts, which together are big enough to encompass two zip codes. The color-coded districts are oddly shaped, much like gerrymandered municipal wards. In the middle of the photograph, which is devoid of color-coding, there is a large empty area as big as any district. It corresponds to the white space in the middle of the map I bought from the chamber of commerce. I ask Rohan why the area is left blank.

  “Oh, that over here? Uh, that’s private property.”

  “Whose private property?” I ask. It’s a sizable chunk of real estate in the heart of the development, and yet it’s outside any of the development’s districts, which means that it’s not governed by any of the rules or additional fees that every other resident must adhere to.

  “Uh, uh, that’s the developer’s property,” Rohan manages. “It’s a private gated community.”

  “So that’s where Morse lives?” I ask.

  “Uh, yes.” Rohan turns back to the flip charts. The next one is covered with so many calculations that it resembles a financial prospectus, or perhaps a classroom exercise for MBAs.

  What Rohan is trying to explain is the rather unusual legal structure underlying Morse’s mega-development, which grants him enormous powers. It’s called Chapter 190, referring to the Florida statute’s numerical designation. The legislation is nearly three decades old, and its origins date back even farther, about half a century ago, when Walt Disney brought his vision for a Magic Kingdom to sleepy Orange County, Florida. After a cross-country search for the right location—one that would give him maximum flexibility but still be near an interstate highway and a population center—Disney found himself circling in a small plane over a swampy, alligator-infested wasteland several miles outside Orlando, a small city that served as a hub for Florida’s citrus industry. To ensure that he could buy the land dirt cheap, Disney kept his intentions secret for two years as he acquired more than 25,000 acres.

  Disney lobbied the Florida state legislature for the creation of a wholly independent district, free of state, county, and local ordinances and land-use laws, and empowered with the ability to float its own tax-free bonds—and even to build its own airport and nuclear power plant if it so wished. When Disney described the $400 million investment he planned to make, and the thousands of jobs his new theme park would create, the legislature was happy to oblige. It was called the Reedy Creek Improvement District, and despite its inherently controversial and despotic nature—some people have likened it to an imperial land grant from the king of Spain—it is still in existence today.

  In 1980, the Florida state legislature decided to help spur development by formalizing portions of Walt Disney World’s special status, so that it could be imitated easily across the state. The ensuing legislation was called Chapter 190. There are now hundreds of communities in Florida governed by these special districts, and similar legislation now exists in more than thirty states.

  From what I can tell, this peculiar form of government works as follows. A developer encounters a number of challenges regarding infrastructure when working with raw land. He needs to clear the land, grade it, and build—among other things—roads, sewers, and storm water retention ponds. This can cost a lot of money, particularly when the local government doesn’t have the means to help with roads, electricity, and water treatment. A developer can finance this burden in a number of ways.

  The most common method, which Del Webb used when he built Sun City, is to borrow money from a bank. Webb earned the money back when his homes were sold because the infrastructure improvements were included (front-loaded) into the price of the houses. Chapter 190 provides another way for developers to fund these infrastructural improvements without help from the county, by allowing the builder to create his own quasi-government with its own “community development districts” to help govern the development and pay for its infrastructure.

  This financial structure affords a developer many advantages, such as the ability to obtain tax-free bonds, which are ordinarily available only to traditional governmental bodies, such as municipalities and school districts. This process makes it unnecessary for a developer to persuade a private bank to lend him a large sum of money, usually at higher interest rates. Rural counties generally give Chapter 190 projects their approval because the local government reaps all the eventual tax benefits from the new development (more people mean more gross tax revenues), without having to spend a penny.

  The developer doesn’t have to repay these bonds himself; he can pass them on to homeowners. Instead of paying for the infrastructure up front, Villagers theoretically pay a reduced rate when purchasing their homes; but upon closing, they must accept their portion of the bond’s repayment. Because the costs are back-ended, the homes can appear to be less expensive than they are.

  The Villages’ ten mini-districts (or CDDs) are each governed by five supervisors, who for the first several years are appointed by the developer at will. These supervisors are often family members, friends, and business associates of the developer. It is during these first few years of existence as a governmental body that the CDDs borrow millions of dollars and set up conditions for repayment. By the time homeowners are allowed to elect their own representatives, most decisions of consequence have already been made. Residents are basically empowered to doll up roadside flower beds and repaint streetlights.

  Morse began tapping into Chapter 190 financing when The Villages spilled across the county highway that borders Orange Blossom Gardens. This financing covered many infrastructure costs, but Morse was still left paying for his golf courses and recreation centers.

  Morse created two special “central districts” (one for Spanish Springs and one for Sumter Landing), which govern the other mini-districts. The central districts encompass only the development’s commercial areas, but they still govern the rest of the community. Not only did their creation help reimburse Morse for additional expenditures; they also ensured the family’s control over the community for years to come.

  Unlike the mini-districts, which eventually enfranchise their inhabitants when they revert to civilian control, the central districts are structured in such a way that no residents of The Villages live inside their boundaries. Hence, as t
he majority landowner in the central districts, the Morse family rules them unchallenged. Once again, the boards are filled with friends, business associates, and family members.

  When Gary Morse wants to be reimbursed for his recreation centers and golf courses, he sells them to these central districts. It’s important to remember the mantra of most developers: “Build; sell; leave.” Maintaining pools and golf courses to the exacting specifications of demanding residents doesn’t fit that model.

  The central districts buy the properties—recreation centers, golf courses, swimming pools, etc.—as well as the amenities contracts connected to these properties. Consequently, a recreation center that the county tax appraiser values at $5 million could be sold to a central district for $50 million, because the central district is also buying future revenue. Villagers collectively owe several hundred million dollars for their community’s infrastructure and amenities, and that number is likely to increase in coming years as the community continues to build out. Sixty percent of every monthly amenity fee goes toward debt service.

  In the past, when evaluating the developer’s asking price, the central districts have used a consultant who has also worked for Morse. The Villages refuses to acknowledge any conflict of interest. But even if such a conflict was acknowledged, it wouldn’t much matter: Chapter 190 exempts these districts from Florida’s laws governing conflicts of interest. And although the residents of The Villages pay the developer for these properties and contracts (and assume liability for them), they don’t actually “own” them in the way they own their homes; the central districts (over which they have little control) own them. Residents are free to complain about these financial arrangements, but they have no leverage in the matter. And yet, to many residents, such details amount to splitting hairs. As far as they are concerned, the central districts, whose primary functions are to administer their recreational amenities for the benefit of the residents, are doing a fine job.