A yearlong look back at Osceola County

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A yearlong look back at Osceola County

County News

Friday, 28 December 2012 16:22

By Ken Jackson
Staff Writer
Osceola County celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2012. That’s 125 years of new growth, new industry and new construction projects.
As 2012 closes, here’s a look back at the hustle and bustle, the movers and shakers and the ups and downs the year provided … School Board follies
The year started with the release of a School District employee survey of the job its leadership was doing. While opinion was split on whether the School Board promoted a healthy positive image, the consensus was that then-Superintendent Terry Andrews was doing a strong job.
Eighty-seven percent agreed with a statement that Andrews “is a leader who clearly supports employees”; 85 percent said he “cared for the well-being of employees,” 70 percent said his team “made positive changes for employees’ working environment and 81 percent said his team “respects classroom instructional time.”
All of that would become moot on June 19, when he moved up his planned retirement and left a board that he said, addressing former board member Cindy Hartig, “will go to any lengths and will not stop until she has ruined me and in that process, ruined the forward progress the district has made to date and continue to hurt innocent people.”
Melba Luciano was named interim superintendent on July 2, and earlier this month had her contract extended through the first School Board meeting of 2014.
Board members continued to create tumult through the year, as Tom Long and Cindy Hartig were both accused — and cleared — of ethics charges and Jay Wheeler was censured for some of his behavior and accused Hartig and Barbara Horn of breaches of Government in the Sunshine Law before being named as board chairman after the Nov. 6 election.
That election and the Aug. 4 primary may have served to quell some of the board’s bad blood. Tim Weisheyer defeated Hartig for seat 3 in August by more than a 2-to-1 margin, and Kelvin Soto was elected to seat 2 to replace the outgoing Julius Melendez. The newcomers vowed to bring civility back to the board.
Lower fees mean business
At the county level, the year 2012 would become synonymous with the repeal of fees. The County Commission first extended a moratorium on collection road and park impact fees in January, then would eliminate them completely in September.
The cities of Kissimmee and St. Cloud would vote later in the year to repeal or hold the line on the same sort of impact fees.
The convenience store chain Wawa, which would open two of its stores in the county later in the year, supported the move, saying the moratorium helped them to decide to move forward with their building in Osceola County.
Commissioner Frank Attkisson said impact fees are a “fundamentally flawed’ way of generating funding for infrastructure, specifically roads.
“We are undergoing intense study and research now on how to fund roads,” he said, adding that the solution will be a variety of fees and mechanisms that, once in place, would promote long-term growth.
Wawa would open its location on U.S. Highway 192 on Aug. 1, and a Kissimmee location at Orange Blossom Trail and Donegan Street opened a week later, to much fanfare and big crowds awaiting its made-to-order deli menu and lines of fresh coffees and Tastycake dessert pastries.
Campaigning and
voting
With Florida a key component of the 2012 presidential election as a swing state, the major combatants would make a few stops in the area. The first was in January, when President Barack Obama visited Walt Disney World and declared he wants the United States to be the world’s most popular tourist destination.
“It makes sense, we have the greatest country in the world,” he said. “Tourism is the number one service that we export and that means jobs.”
He returned on Sept. 8 to the Kissimmee Civic Center to pump up his supporters for the election, and allow him to continue his work. He spoke of “achievable goals” of exporting more products, outsourcing fewer jobs and reducing the county’s $16 trillion deficit “without sticking it to the middle class” but by asking households earning $250,000 or more to pay “a little bit more” in taxes.
Opponent Mitt Romney appeared at the Ranger Jet Center at the Kissimmee Gateway Airport on Oct. 26, the first day of early voting. He touted his 5-Point Plan that would add 12 million new American jobs to ease unemployment.
County Republicans went to the polls on Jan. 31, the first of three times they’d do so in 2012, to vote in the presidential Republican primary. Romney won all the state’s electors by getting 42 percent of the vote, beating out Newt Gringrich and his 35.9 percent. A total of 34 percent of the county’s Republicans cast a ballot.
That was more than double the 15.68 percent of county voters who turned out for the August primary. It was largely uneventful, but it defined the combatants for the November General Election, setting in motion a crazy season that led to campaign signs for local candidates springing up on roadways and in front yards like mushrooms in a damp climate.
When the dust settled, all incumbents running were re-elected, and Sara Shaw and Jose Alvarez won election to the Kissimmee City Commission. Jeff Rhinehart won election to the St. Cloud City Council, and Armando Ramirez became the Clerk of Courts.
Election Day itself brought more tumult than the election. Two-thirds (66.8 percent) of registered voters turned out, taxing voting precincts and leaving some Nov. 6 voters standing in line for up to three hours. Election officials said a “perfect storm” of a long ballot with 11 verbosely-worded amendments and the state Legislature’s reduction of early-voting days led to the problems.
Furious February, and more growth
In February, ground broke on the Poinciana Medical Center, with an expected opening in 2013. When complete, the $65 million facility will be a two-story, 90,000-square-foot building with 24 private medical-surgical beds and an intensive care unit and support a full range of acute care services.
“The hospital is a necessity,” then-Osceola County Commission Chairman John Quiñones said. “Unless you live it, unless you’ve had to drive 45 minutes to the nearest hospital, you wouldn’t know.”
The first phase of the project — an 11,000-square-foot freestanding emergency department housing 12 examination rooms — is expected to open first and include a CAT scanner, radiology and fluoroscopy room, ultrasound facility, laboratory and a pharmacy.
The county began to reap the benefits of the Medical City development near Lake Nona when the county and city of St. Cloud agreed on Feb. 13 to provide more than $1 million to assist Herzing University of Wisconsin to develop a two-year nursing program in the city.
Commission Frank Attkisson said in a News-Gazette letter to the editor that 400 to 500 graduates trained for professional jobs paying double that average salary in Osceola County “is priceless in my calculator.”
February also marked the beginning of a turbulent 2012 for Osceola County Clerk of Courts Malcolm Thompson. The once-decorated police officer was removed from office on Jan. 30 by Gov. Rick Scott once misdemeanor battery and assault charges were levied against him by two of his female staffers. He was cleared of all charges and in May was reinstated to the clerk’s post by Scott.
Questions also arose about the taxpayer money he spent on gold-embossed business cards. And a no-bid contract he offered to the web design firm that designed his campaign website to redesign the Clerk’s Office’s site.
His misery ended in the August primary election when he lost the Democratic primary to eventual winner Armando Ramirez.
On March 1, the city of Kissimmee was added to the list of municipalities to install red light cameras when the “infraction” phase for its cameras at Main Street/Broadway and Neptune Road began. The $158 fine went out to motorists caught by the camera running the red light after a month-long warning period. Other lights would soon be added.
The first of two new museums to open along U.S. Highway 192 was unveiled on March 31, when the 10,000 square foot Museum of Military History opened, showing off its displays and interactions from all wars between the Civil War and the Gulf War and recent military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The other opened on Oct. 18 in a refurbished Longhorn restaurant. The Osceola County Welcome Center and History Museum includes 8,000 square feet of exhibits, interactive displays and historical artifacts that give a vibrant nod to the county’s history of cattle, logging and nature, along with its place in Florida, considered “the last frontier east of the Mississippi.”
Spring turns to
summer
In mid-May a collaborative effort of the State Attorney’s Office and law enforcement agencies that included the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office and the St. Cloud Police Department helped bust and dismantle a militia-style white supremacy group that had built a training camp between St. Cloud and Holopaw.
Police arrested ringleader Marcus Faella and eight accomplices, who formed a group called the American Front, which viewed itself as “protectors of the white race.”
At the start of the summer in June, community leaders unveiled plans to revitalize downtown Kissimmee through the new vision of the Community Redevelopment Agency. The ideas included facing business toward Lake Tohopekaliga and adding a parking garage behind the Kissimmee Civic Center and residences to downtown.
“All this plays into the grand plan to redevelop downtown,” Kissimmee City Manager Mike Steigerwald said.
St. Cloud development also took a step ahead during the summer with the August opening of the entire stretch of Nolte Road, from Hickory Tree Road to Old Canoe Creek Road. The project was completed on time and under its $19.5 million budget by just over a million dollars. The east-west road runs south of U.S. Highway 192 and is an alternative to that road and allows for better access to St. Cloud’s ramp to the northbound Florida’s Turnpike at Kissimmee Park Road.
On July 31, the 15 board members of city and county governments agreed to form a cooperative partnership to bolster county-wide economic development. It got a name in September: the Greater Osceola Partnership for Economic Prosperity.
Other prosperity arrived in August, when the National Senior Games Association agreed to move into the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau old location at 192 and Bill Beck Boulevard, and bring its national games to the area beginning in 2015. The CVB, now called Experience Kissimmee, is moving to space in Celebration.
New leadership
The county was rocked by the Sept. 23 allegations that Mike Horner, a Republican state legislator and the longtime chairman of the Kissimmee/Osceola County Chamber of Commerce, was a client of a home-based brothel in east Orange County.
Horner wasn’t criminally charged in the State Attorney’s case against the Orlando man running it, but he stepped down from his Legislature seat immediately, and would later resign as Chamber president, effective Jan. 31, ending his 15-year run in that role.
Horner was replaced on the Nov. 6 election ballot by Celebration Realtor Mike La Rosa, who easily defeated Democrat Eileen Game in the election for the right to represent the county in Tallahassee for the next two years.
On Oct. 1, Kissimmee got a new police chief when Fran Iwanski stepped down after 25 years with the KPD.
“There’s not one division in this agency I haven’t touched. That’s in a lot of ways, unheard of,” she said. “I’ve always been in supervision. I’ve only been on the road one year in my 25-year career. I’ve always been responsible for other people.”
Her retirement wasn’t completely seamless, as she was reprimanded for her handling of an internal case involving a KPD officer who was having affairs with the wives of two Osceola Sheriff’s Office deputies.
The city tabbed Lee Massie, a longtime member of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office and the interim police chief of Windermere, as the new chief.