Leisureville Page 12

  As Rohan’s presentation winds down, a resident from Michigan asks if it’s true that The Villages is planning a third downtown with a western motif. The Villages filed for permission with Sumter County years ago to build a third downtown, and for most people the information is common knowledge.

  “A third downtown? Gee, I don’t know,” Rohan says. “But I would encourage you to keep yourself up-to-date the same way we do—by reading the Daily Sun.”

  I look over at the two reporters from the Daily Sun. One of them is staring out the window, and the other is impatiently jiggling her leg. Neither has asked a single question. At exactly noon a secretary comes in to remind Rohan that he has a lunch date. “Wow! It’s noon already?” he says, then hastily hands out gold-stamped certificates of completion. Outside, I invite the two reporters—Mark and Kim—to lunch. They readily agree.

  Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the Daily Sun is its ability to masquerade as a real newspaper. It’s printed on state-of-the-art presses and carries local, regional, national, and international news, much of it from legitimate wire services. The hefty Sunday paper resembles that of any other mid-size city.

  The Daily Sun is unabashedly conservative—not surprisingly, given Morse’s political affiliations. Public records indicate that Morse, his family, and his associates have donated more than $1 million to the Republican Party, including at least $100,000 to President Bush’s two campaigns, thus earning Morse the status of “pioneer.” He was also a strong supporter of the former governor, Jeb Bush, who visited The Villages many times and even borrowed Morse’s private jet. More recently, Morse handed the Florida Republican Party its largest single donation ever—a check for $500,000.

  The Daily Sun won’t run “Doonesbury,” but it does print a slew of conservative columnists, including Oliver North and Ann Coulter. Although most of the local news is unusually sunny, one gets the distinct impression that just enough bad news (drugs, crime, juveniles misbehaving) is sprinkled on top to make one feel relieved to live inside the gates.

  My former neighbor Betsy Anderson tells me she is impressed with the Daily Sun because it concentrates more on cheerful profiles of fellow Villagers than on hard news. “It’s nice to read about good news for a change,” she says. “I like reading about all these peoples’ accomplishments. It’s the sort of thing most newspapers ignore. And the Sun only costs a quarter. The paper back home was twice as expensive.”

  The paper has a ninety percent penetration rate, something unheard of in the real world, and has thus cornered the advertising market, including the highly profitable classifieds. Morse’s paper has another unique advantage: few residents appear to have an interest in other local newspapers or in the hard news they provide about surrounding communities. I spoke with a number of Villagers who even believed that deed restrictions prohibited home delivery of other papers. They were mistaken, but competing papers are hard to find. By comparison, the Daily Sun’s vending machines are everywhere, even though many residents opt for home delivery: the newspaper lands in thousands of driveways every morning.

  Mark, a former bartender, is a rookie reporter, and Kim has about three years of experience. Mark tells me he didn’t know where The Villages’ government building was until now, and he’s not sure why he was required to take today’s course. “I can’t see how it relates to what I’m doing,” he says.

  Because of their age, the two reporters necessarily live outside the community they cover. Both were hired after posting résumés on an Internet job site, and they suspect that their lack of training and experience helped them get a foot in the door. “I didn’t even have any clips,” Mark explains. “I’m not sure why they hired me.”

  “Me neither,” Kim adds. “I was hired as a crime reporter, but there’s no crime. I get the sense they don’t really want me covering anything, so I spend a lot of time doing nothing. I see this being a better place to end a career.”

  “We’re not allowed to cover anything even remotely controversial,” Mark adds. “I wanted to write about the 1,000-person waiting list for new homes. I thought that was a good thing. But the editor told me I couldn’t write about it. He wouldn’t even let me call public relations for a quote.”

  “Look, every newspaper is owned by somebody, and that person usually exerts some editorial control,” Kim says. “But this is extreme. The Morse family owns everything and controls everything. It’s a true company town.”

  “All the businesses are linked,” Mark says. “I’ve been told that I can’t tend bar at any of the country clubs after work, because then The Villages would have to pay me overtime.”

  Like the owners of a theme park, the Morse family caters to the needs of a captive audience. From what I can tell, they own liquor stores and liquor distribution rights, a mortgage company, several banks, many of the restaurants, two giant furniture stores as well as a giant indoor furnishings arcade called the “Street of Dreams,” a real estate company, golf cart dealerships, movie theaters, and the local media. You name it; they probably own it. They own so many different businesses that’s it’s nearly impossible to tell which are theirs and which aren’t. And what they don’t own outright, they often lease. The Morses own hundreds of thousands of square feet of retail space. In addition to rent, many businesses also pay the family roughly seven percent of their monthly gross.

  Mark tells me about an orientation for new employees he recently attended. The other participants were restaurant workers, engineers, personal trainers, real estate agents, and liquor store cashiers. “They wanted to teach us the philosophy of the company, to let us know we don’t work for the newspaper so much as for The Villages itself,” Mark says. He shows me the back of his company identification card. It reads: “The Villages’ Dream-Maker Passport. We’re dedicated to building a retirement community where people’s dreams come true.”

  “How does the Daily Sun cover bad news?” I ask.

  “They don’t,” Kim responds.

  I ask her if she could help me obtain some back issues. “I can’t,” she says. “We don’t keep old newspapers on file. We don’t even keep our notes. We are supposed to destroy them after a story is run. Taped interviews, too. And every few months somebody from the company goes through our computers and deletes all our files. I think legal counsel suggested it.”

  Mark has an epiphany. “I should change my résumé to say that I write public relations and marketing materials. I’m really just writing free advertising.”

  “This place isn’t normal,” Kim says. “I keep waiting for everything to just unravel.”

  The Villages is not entirely without homegrown opposition. Relations between homeowners and management first soured years ago, when residents accused Gary and his father Harold of reneging on promised free cable television and trash pickup.

  Residents banded together, took the owners to court, and won. In anger, father and son refused to acknowledge the scrappy group, which named itself the Property Owners Association (POA). Gary and Harold then sponsored the formation of a competing organization. To this day, there remain two resident groups: the Village Homeowners Association (VHA) backed by the developers, and the feisty POA.

  I meet with Joe Gorman, the current president of the POA, over a cup of coffee in downtown Spanish Springs. Joe, a mergers and acquisitions analyst for a Fortune 100 company, opted for early retirement, and for The Villages as the place to spend it. “I liked it immediately, and I still do,” he tells me. “This place is ninety percent great. Not merely good—but great.”

  Joe says he “woke up to the issues” about five years earlier, when the Orlando Sentinel ran an investigative series about Chapter 190. It explained how Morse sold common property assessed at $8.8 million to the central district for $84 million. “When I saw that, I thought it was a typo at first,” he tells me. “I later learned that the business valuations weren’t completely off base, but what concerned me was that there appeared to be very little arm’s-length negotiating. I’ve
been in business long enough to know that you never give someone exactly what they ask for. We had to make repairs to the Savannah Center not long after purchasing it.”

  When Joe talks about Morse’s ability to levy fees on residents with near impunity, he uses language borrowed from the American Revolution. “It’s taxation without representation,” he says. “If the central districts are going to tax us, then residents should be able to serve on the board. If there were just one thing I could ask for, it would be to open up these districts to fair representation.” The POA’s ten demands, incorporated into its “Residents’ Bill of Rights,” are actually quite modest. The document is filled with basic requests that most of us take for granted, such as “a local government that is free of conflicts of interest.”

  But few requests are too rudimentary in dealing with Morse’s autocracy. Although the First Amendment ensures that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech … or the right of people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” Morse and his central districts recently tried to do away with that protection.

  They instituted an “Activity Policy,” which outlawed the gathering of two or more residents for the purpose of protesting against The Villages’ policies without first filling out a lengthy application to gain permission from the central districts, and obtaining a $1 million liability policy. Even then, there was a ten-day waiting period, and protesters were still forbidden to demonstrate near areas with high traffic. When the POA called the American Civil Liberties Union and the local independent press, The Villages quickly backtracked.

  Joe says the Activity Policy originally slipped by without anyone’s even noticing it. “There’s hardly any discussion at central district meetings. The board recites the Pledge of Allegiance and then votes on whatever is presented to them by staff. There’s never a dissenting vote. The whole thing lasts maybe twenty minutes.”

  Technically—and company officials are quick to remind you of this—the mini-districts and central districts don’t “belong” to the developer; employees of these districts don’t work for the developer directly; and the company is a separate entity that must petition the districts just like anyone else. But it’s difficult to ignore the obvious: the family owns the company that controls the government.

  The family members themselves rarely speak with residents. Gary Morse’s son Mark, who now runs the company’s day-to-day operations, gives an annual “state of The Villages” address sponsored by the VHA. Several Villagers describe it to me this way: the younger Morse jumps onto the stage and delivers a quick speech. He doesn’t take questions from the audience, insisting instead that all queries be submitted in advance. This past year, they say, he didn’t even respond to submitted questions.

  I ask Joe how much support he thinks the POA has in the community. “It’s kind of like during the American Revolution,” he tells me. “About one-third support the king, one-third support the rebels, and one-third are generally more concerned about the annual Christmas parade.”

  Later that night, I attend a campaign rally for U.S. Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, a Democrat, in one of the recreation centers decorated to give a feeling of the old South. After delivering a basic stump speech to a crowd of 200, Nelson takes questions from the audience.

  A man wearing sandals, shorts, and a hearing aid is passed the microphone. “Senator, are you aware that the developer of The Villages is abusing Chapter 190?” The man is clearly nervous: his voice trembles, his eyes water, and his hands shake, but he soldiers on. “The developer controls everything. If he wants to sell residents an outhouse for $50 million, his people on the central districts say ‘Sure!’ He has sold property to us at ten times assessed value.” The audience erupts into applause, but Nelson shows little interest in the issue.

  “As a member of Congress, I get all sorts of calls like, ‘Can you help me get my cat down from my tree?’” the Senator responds. “Now what can I do about that? I have no jurisdiction over that Chapter 190, or whatever it’s called. One thing you can do is demand accountability from your local elected officials.”

  Several audience members shout out, nearly in unison: “We don’t have any!”

  After the rally, I meet one of the few residents elected to a mini-district, Rich Lambrecht. He is trim and clean-cut, and looks almost too young to be living in The Villages. Like Joe Gorman, he has a financial background.

  “Once we finally got a majority of residents sitting on our five-member CDD board, the developer’s two appointees simply stopped showing up,” Rich tells me. “They weren’t used to the sort of issues we brought up, like competitive bidding.”

  Sinkholes—and the resulting liability—have become an issue in Rich’s mini-district. These impromptu ponds dot the landscape all over this region of Florida. Until recently, it wasn’t an issue; a sinkhole in a cow pasture isn’t exactly big news.

  In the middle of Rich’s district is the Nancy Lopez championship golf course, which Morse decided to retain rather than sell to the central districts. The golf course has a complex drainage system that includes retention ponds. Not long ago, one of these disappeared down a sinkhole. Given the fact that the retention pond is on Morse’s property—you can’t reach it without first walking across the golf course—you might assume that Morse would be footing the bill to repair the damage. You’d be wrong.

  When Morse first built the golf course and the surrounding residential area, he had the mini-district approve the building of a storm management system, and then assume debt and liability for it, even though portions of the infrastructure are located on his private property.

  Although the retention pond serves Morse in many ways, he left Rich’s mini-district with the bill for repairing the sinkhole, which ran well over $150,000. When Rich dug a little deeper, he also found that Morse made residents of the district financially responsible for landscaping a nearby strip mall owned by The Villages, costing residents of the mini-district another $50,000 a year.

  “Somehow I keep expecting Mr. Morse to pull me aside to see if we can find some common ground,” Rich says. “But he won’t even show us his face.”

  A few days later, I attend a meeting of the developer-friendly VOA—the Village Homeowners Association. The meeting is advertised as a question-and-answer session with representatives of The Villages. Gary Lester, Morse’s spokesperson, sits at a table facing the audience. Several colleagues join him, including Pete Wahl, who manages The Villages’ entire quasi-governmental system. All questions have been submitted ahead of time.

  I sit beside a veteran member of the VHA, and he volunteers to fill me in. “Pete Wahl’s the old-timer. He knows what the hell’s going on. You’ll see him and Gary Lester clash a bit because Lester works for the developer, but Pete doesn’t; he sort of works for us. He won’t speak for the developer because he wants the developer to speak for himself. Pete doesn’t want there to be any conflict of interest. He’s basically paid by the developer, so it’s a real delicate line he walks.” I nod in agreement.

  The questions are all innocuous. “Why are folks driving so fast in their golf carts? It should be illegal!” “Will the developer widen the golf cart paths near Spanish Springs?” “When’s the new golf course going to open?”

  “People shouldn’t be driving so fast; I guess that’s just human nature,” Lester philosophizes. “But it’s not right. And it’s not safe.” When he is asked about any construction plans in The Villages’ near future, Lester pleads ignorance. “I don’t really know. We’re just so busy doing what we’re doing. That’s about all I can tell you.”

  Wahl addresses the next question, about the nine-hole golf courses, which are owned by the central district. He then passes the microphone to Lester to speak about eighteen-hole championship golf courses, which are still owned by the developer. My seatmate nudges me. “See how Pete didn’t answer for the developer? See the difference? Pete’s a very knowledgeable guy, but a lot of p
eople still don’t like him. They say he should be elected, and that if there were an election, he’d never get voted in.”

  The next question is about the possibility of making the church in downtown Spanish Springs off-limits to visitors without passes. I’ve heard other Villagers express outrage that their downtowns are inundated with local families. Another church congregation also considered limiting its parishioners to those age fifty-five and over; children under nineteen would be able to attend the church only as guests. The question makes Lester a touch uncomfortable. He pauses, then says he doesn’t think placing age restrictions on the church downtown is such a good idea.

  Lester then ends the meeting with an impassioned sermon about “truth and cow doo.” The Villages uses millions of gallons of water a day, and the regional water district has recently expressed concern that the water table is dropping. Lester is clearly pissed off because several local newspapers had the temerity to report these preliminary findings as news.

  Much of Florida sits atop a giant aquifer, but it’s not big enough to meet the needs of endless growth. After years of bruising water wars, every county and municipality in Florida has adopted stringent standards that regulate water use. Regional water districts use these standards to establish minimum water levels in order to ensure that the state’s aquifers don’t dry up.

  The Villages is challenging the way the water district collects its data and then applies the data to establish minimum water levels for the surrounding area. By negating the water district’s methods and findings, The Villages is potentially unraveling Florida’s water policy.

  Water, or the lack of it, is The Villages’ Achilles’ heel. Restrictions on water use are one of the few things that could prevent Morse from building thousands more homes. The Villages makes a good faith effort to irrigate with reclaimed water, but this still covers only a small fraction of total water use. The possible overuse of water has some very real consequences: dropping water levels could lead to an epidemic of sinkholes, and put the regional ecosystem and economies under enormous strain.