By Fallan Patterson
Staff Writer

The St. Cloud City Council has three openings on the dais for the Nov. 6 election – mayor and seat 2 and 3 – with the two incumbents vying against former councilmen. The positions will be for four years, rather than the previous two-year terms.

Mayor Rebecca Borders is running for her second term against former councilman and deputy mayor Jarom Fertic.

Borders is looking to continue work on programs that will promote the city as a destination to both tourists and businesses.

“There are a lot of things still left to do. I’ve started a lot of programs and I want to continue to monitor others,” she said. “Getting St. Cloud on the map is important. We’re not as fortunate as Kissimmee, our main road is not downtown.”

She’s working with the Department of Transportation and the St. Cloud Greater Chamber of Commerce to post signage informing travellers when they enter the city and steering them toward downtown.

Additionally, Borders wants to continue to promote St. Cloud in Lake Nona and to employees in Medical City to visit the city and choose to live there.

“You can buy the same home for about $20,000 less just by crossing that county line,” she said. “We do see them coming in.”

Fertic said the city government has shifted from council-driven to more staff-driven, drawing him to run for the council again and promote more discussion and transparency for the public. He plans to run the meetings fairly, focusing on providing answers to the public and eliminating the individual briefings for council members with staff to ensure items are discussed in a public forum.

“I’ve been to some of the meetings as a regular citizen and seen how you’re voice isn’t heard,” he said. “The council is elected by the people. They should be directing staff. The meetings, some people think that they’re over before they’ve started.”

Fertic also wants to promote the city to businesses, starting with a billboard stating “Welcome to St. Cloud. We want your business.”

Additionally, Fertic plans to aggressively approach helping new and existing businesses by looking to eliminate or drastically reduce transportation impact fees, opening the door for expansion and growth.

“Since the county doesn’t have impact fees, how can St. Cloud compete?” he asked.

Borders said eliminating impact fees “sounds ideal” but claimed the city lacks the initial revenue the county had to finance such a program. Rather, she said, the city has other incentive packages to lure businesses to the area.

“We look at other avenues to assist businesses coming to our area,” she said. “We’re not bogged in, we’re not land bound. We have so much potential.”

Borders hope to pursue educational institutes in the city to help residents gain higher-paying jobs and hire a real estate agent to solely promote Steven’s Plantation to commercial businesses.

She doesn’t want to see an “explosion of growth,” however.

“We need to grow sensibly. We can still maintain that small town feel because it’s more of an environment,” she said.

Fertic agrees, calling for “common-sense growth” with a focus on industries the area is already known for such as agriculture.

“We need to keep versatile because food is always what people need,” Fertic said.

He’d like to see an technical school built in St. Cloud that offers degrees in agriculture, technology and medical.

Fertic also wants to keep the city’s heritage and small town feel during the growth, which includes luring new residents to St. Cloud.

“It’s a bedroom community but we don’t want transient people. We want long-term roots,” he said.

Seat 2

One of the seat 2 candidates – Jeff Reinhart, a contracting consultant, bar owner and daycare investor, and Ron Caswell, a recently retired St. Cloud police officer – will replace long-time Councilman Tom Griffin, who dropped out of the race to focus more on his private business.

Both Reinhart and Caswell are running on platforms of smaller government while promoting business growth.

Reinhart wants to cut regulations on small businesses and eliminate impact fees; his inspiration to run for office came in 2010 when he was required to pay the city $8,000 in impact fees for an $8,000 bathroom to his downtown business Solider City Saloon.

“It’s double taxation. Impact fees squash small business,” he said. “They’re fighting a battle just to get the capital to get started.”

Caswell wants more staff available to help businesses open and expand in St. Cloud but wondered where the impact fee revenue would be made up in the city’s coffer.

“It has to be replaced somewhere. There’s got to be a happy medium,” he said. “We’re all working for the same purpose: to open a business as soon as possible.”

Caswell compared how quickly Wawa convenience stores opened in Kissimmee and in Osceola County compared to St. Cloud because of the roadblocks he said the city throws up in the face of new businesses. He wants to see chain restaurants and big box stores as anchors to small businesses to keep residents employed and spending money in the city.

“As much as I want St. Cloud to be where it used to be, it’s just not going to happen. We’re right at the point where we’re moving into a medium-sized city,” Caswell said.

However, he wants to see the city streamlined, ensuring everyone is working efficiently to his or her best potential.

“I think the city can do a more efficient job in the way they run things,” he said. “I want to be a model for other cities.”

Reinhart is pleased the city will be working on an interlocal economic development agreement with Kissimmee and the county to help bring business to the area but is concerned St. Cloud lags behind the other entities in terms of what it is willing to offer new businesses.

“We’ve got a lot of room for expansion and government needs to step out of the way,” he said, adding his concern about businesses choosing to build outside the city limits inside the county because of incentives but using St. Cloud’s “top-notch” water and sewer facilities.

“Osceola County has some options out there that we do not,” Reinhart said. “We’re all in the same boat. It’s common sense. We need to be proactive in dealing with people.”

Seat 3

The candidates vying for seat 3 are incumbent Russell Holmes, local business owner and former councilman Jay Polachek and recently retired St. Cloud building maintenance supervisor Cecil “Pete” Jones.

Holmes is proud ideas he had such as the city trucking their own garbage and implementing the recycling program, both of which is providing revenue for the St. Cloud, and wants to continue working toward starting programs that keeps the city’s taxes low.

“It’s still tough economic times,” he said. “It’s what I ran on last time.”

Polachek ran for mayor against Borders two years ago and lost. He took time from politics and decided to run again for the council after residents asked him to reconsider.

“There’s been an outpouring from the community asking me to get back into it. There’s some good things we did while I was up there,” he said. “I think the council is taking a step back. I think the directors, from the city manager trickling down, need to take direction from council.”

He’s concerned the council is leaning toward becoming staff-driven, taking cues from staff rather than the will of the people.

“Too many of our sitting council members are rubber stamps, including my opponent,” Polachek said. “I believe we need some more independent thinkers.”

Jones said he is running as the “watchdog over the budget” because he knows the inner workings of the city after 20 years of employment.

“We’re going to need a council who’s not afraid to ask questions and knows which questions to ask because the administration won’t give them all the information they need,” he said.

All three candidates want to improve the city’s impact fees structure without eliminating them completely.

Jones wants to implement a six month moratorium on the fees and started a delayed payment plan.

“In the last few years, we haven’t had a lot of income from impact fees and we’ve survived,” he said. “When you open a business, it seems everyone is standing there with their hand out. Small businesses are what’s going to get our residents back to work.”

Holmes called impact fees “kind of a broken system” and wants to look at other incentives for new and expanding businesses.

“We need to be really careful but I’d like to see (transportation impact fees) gone,” Holmes said. “Hopefully if we get rid of them, (contractors) will pass it (the savings) on to people building houses.”

Polachek wants incentives for both residents and businesses but acknowledged its “not completely feasible” to eliminate them altogether.

“We can’t become a stagnant city. It needs to be a collaborative effort and we need to have a goo relationship with staff,” he said. “There is a plan for growth but that plan needs to be a living, breathing documents. It’s got to be something that is updated constantly and adapted.”

Polachek doesn’t see Medical City as the “golden nugget everyone within 25 miles thought it was going to be” although he hopes St. Cloud sees some growth from the development.

Polachek considers the downtown corridor more of a historic district with downtown shifting south to the Canoe Creek area.

“You can keep St. Cloud small but you need to be progressive. St. Cloud has not been that sleepy little town in a while,” he said.

Jones wants to see St. Cloud’s downtown more like Kissimmee with a higher draw for both residents and tourists.

“Kissimmee has it together; our downtown doesn’t get a lot of foot traffic,” he said. “They don’t have a reason to go downtown. You’d be surprised how many people don’t know where Pennsylvania Avenue is.”

During the beginning of this term, Holmes tried to start a marketing campaign for St. Cloud using fliers, videos and aspects of social media to entice both visitors and tourists to St. Cloud but failed to get the “buy-in” he expected from city staff. He now hopes economic development will be proactive with a similar project.

“I’m ready to get that going,” he said. “Economic development, getting jobs here, I think that’s going to be the priority. We’ve really got to work on that.”

The general election is Nov. 6.