It really blew through
Who wouldn’t want a new start? Well, according to the calendar, we all get one starting Sunday morning.
The year 2023 holds promise and excitement. With 2022 providing us its final days of a year that saw us finally return to normal – mostly, and what does “normal” mean anymore, anyway? – it’s a great time to look back on the stories and headlines that had our attention through the year.
St. Cloud gets a new top cop, city manager Douglas Goerke became the new St. Cloud Police chief on Jan. 1, following the retiring Pete Gauntlett. Like Gauntlett, Goerke came from the Orlando Police Department.
“(Pete’s) been such a visionary in St. Cloud and leaves big shoes to fill,” Goerke said. “Pete’s a well-known and highly-regarded subject matter expert in police circles, so I plan and hope to keep him around for his sound advice and to help me see the progress of this agency.”
Over the past year, Goerke has been a visible and highly-approachable leader throughout the agency at many community events.
“I aim to build to this department’s unique strengths,” he said in January. “My goal is to meet with every employee, in order to see where we want this organization to go.”
It wasn’t the only change within city administration. City Manager Bill Sturgeon, who had been the city’s fire chief before moving over to City Hall, retired on Sept. 2. Longtime employee and Assistant City Manager Veronica Miller took over, just in time to manage Ian and Nicole – more on them later.
NeoCity investments
The Osceola County tech farm got its first political shot in the arm in January, when the state presented a $6 million grant to build NeoVation Way, which will connect to Neptune Road and provide direct access to the south. Then in September, the county’s partners working to etch out a domestic semiconductor manufacturing sector were awarded a $51 million Build Back Better Regional Challenge grant.
Boys & Girls Club coming to St. Cloud A grass-roots campaign to bring a third Boys & Girls Club of Central Florida to Osceola County. A group led by Robert Bass and Raylynne Ketchum helped secure a former Osceola County School District office at 10th Street and Virginia Avenue, and then secured $600,000 – three years of operating expenses – and it is set to open soon.
School Board discord Twice, district 3 Board member Jon Arguello was reprimanded and censured for breaching Board rules, and the Board forwarded each matter on to Tallahassee for Gov. Ron DeSantis to review.
An independent investigator ruled Arguello “engaged in intimidating and hostile acts against a vendor’s business interests that appear to be beyond his scope as a Board member of oversight of School District contracts and funds.”
In February, an independent investigator ruled Arguello had harassed a District lobbyist and some of his business clients after his vehement opposition to a District $5,000-a-month lobbying contract. Then in May, an independent arbitrator ruled Arguello violated district policy when he harassed a community member whose charity partners with the schools.
No-cost local tuition available to county’s Class of 2022 – and ’23 Back in the spring, Osceola County provided its high school seniors, who had to deal with the upheaval of the coronavirus pandemic as underclassmen, one heck of a graduation present free tuition to Valencia College or Osceola Technical College.
The county used $12 million in American Rescue Plan relief funds for “Osceola Prosper” in order to “build careers, not jobs,” County Commissioner Brandon Arrington said, in order to slow the “brain drain” process of the county’s brightest students leaving for school – and never coming back.
“Keeping our community afloat during these tough times meant investing in our youth, and there’s a lot of working class families who hope their students will graduate and get right to work,” he said.
Just this month, the County Commission announced Osceola Prosper would also extend to the Class of 2023 who graduate this May. It wasn’t the only big education investment made by the county.
In June, more ARPA funds were allocated to fund a $2.1 million Manufacturing Career and Technical Education Academy at Liberty High School, an underrepresented campus since opening in 2007.
“This provides the training and education opportunities that mesh with market demand and create sustainable future employment for individuals,” said Arrington.
Todt found guilty of murdering family and pet On April 14, after over six hours of deliberation, a jury found Anthony Todt guilty on four counts of murder and one count of animal cruelty in the 2019 death of his wife Megan, children Tyler, Aleksander and Zoe and family dog Breezy in their Celebration townhome. At one point, the jury returned to the courtroom deadlocked on at least one of the five counts. Sentencing occurred shortly after the jury rendered its verdict; with life in prison with no possibility of parole. This was not a death penalty case, as former State Attorney Aramis Ayala took that off the table days before leaving office in January 2021. As Carsten rendered the verdict, he told Todt that he “destroyed the world” of his now deceased family members.
While prosecutors spoke of how Todt, 46, killed the children — suffocating them and stabbing two of them – he maintained his wife Megan poisoned the three children with a “Benadryl pie,” that Megan “killed them in order for them to reach the afterlife.” He maintained the children were dead when he returned from a trip to the family’s nearby condo to retrieve items, and that Megan was stabbing herself in suicide. But, prosecutors showed jurors Anthony’s recorded account of how each child, Megan and the dog were killed, and believed that.
Target theft became shooting death An Osceola County Sheriff’s Office incident outside a west Kissimmee Target that started out as a shoplifting arrest ended with one person dead, another with injured hands and the police agency under scrutiny.
The person killed was one of four occupants of a black Audi that rolled up to the store on April 27. Sheriff’s deputies, who Sheriff Marcos Lopez said were conducting an unrelated exercise in another part of the parking lot, responded when a store loss prevention agent notified police that two males shoplifted a pizza and Pokemon cards, and they were observed getting into the Audi. When trying to stop the vehicle to apprehend the suspects, reports told a story, and video later shared confirmed, the Audi tried to leave the parking lot, unmarked police cars with lights on boxed it in, and during the melee at least one deputy shot into the car. Jayden Baez, 20, was shot and killed. Outside of all that, Lopez remained steadfast in not sharing any details, instead leaning on FDLE report to do an “independent, unbiased audit of my deputies’ actions.”
Orlando attorneys Mark NeJame and Albert Yonfa, representing all four occupants of the Audi, spoke of a lawsuit regarding the matter, saying the agency’s account was “riddled with falsehoods.” The case has yet to come up or reach a final resolution shared with the public.
School safety reviewed after Uvalde, Texas school shooting With the deadly Texas shooting occurring a week before Osceola County’s graduation ceremonies, local law enforcement responded with extra patrols at campuses by all three local law enforcement agencies.
“I talk to members of their staffs daily,” School District of Osceola County’s Director of Safety, Security and Emergency Management Yeates said. “We address threats on a daily basis to detect them before they’re a threat on campus.”
After the 2018 deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School less than three hours south of Osceola County, the state mandated certain school safety and security levels, which Yeates said the Osceola district surpasses on many levels.
Local students’ science experiments nearly in space Seven NeoCity Academy students had experiments chosen to fly onboard an unmanned Blue Origin mission on Sept. 12 to study the effects of microgravity on ultrasonic sound waves. But the rocket, with over 30 other scientific payloads on board from schools, universities and other scientific groups, experienced a booster failure “anomaly” and was only in flight for about two minutes, failing to reach microgravity. The group’s understanding is the experiments could go up on NS-25, the Blue Origin mission following the next one — no dates have been set yet for the next two.
Elections bring new faces to the dais In elections held Aug. 23 and Nov. 8, new members of the Kissimmee City Commission, St. Cloud City Council and Osceola County School Board were elected.
In August, Erika Booth won election to the School Board, and Janette Martinez defeated incumbent Jim Fisher for a Kissimmee seat. Then in November, Shawn Fletcher, who first endured an August primary, and Ken Gilbert were elected in St. Cloud, and Heather Kahoun made up a 1,000vote primary deficit to earn her School Board seat.
Storm season – more like “Hurricane of the Month Club” And boy did we ever want to give up our subscription.
All the preparations possible couldn’t prepare Osceola County for the onslaught of Hurricane Ian on Sept. 29. While wind impacts were low considering the storm hit Southwest Florida as a Category 4 beast, the rains – up to 16 inches in a matter of 32 hours — caused incredible flooding impacts. Roads were closed for days, homes near lakes and canals saw damage, but the biggest effects were seen in Good Samaritan Village.
The community southwest of downtown Kissimmee built in a Shingle Creek floodplain, flooded to the point of forcing a mandatory evacuation that stayed in place into November. And, even when some residents were able to return, village officials announced several homes and apartment buildings could not be deemed livable again.
“Good Sam,” along with parts of Poinciana, St. Cloud and Kissimmee all flooded to the point of temporary closure and voluntary evacuation. An Orange Blossom Trail supermarket just north of Vine Street remains closed due to flooding damage.
Then, more noteworthy than the damage for its arrival after Daylight Saving Time ended, Hurricane Nicole struck near Stuart Nov. 10 and brought more tropical storm conditions to the area. The two storms’ path created an ‘X’ across the southern part of the county.
In memoriam
Don Smallwood, longtime and popular Kissimmee City Attorney, Jan. 20, age 68.
Stephanie Davis, former Tohopekaliga soccer star and freshman for Jacksonville University, April 10 in a van crash, age 18.
Robert “Backup Bob” Tarr, downtown Kissimmee icon, May 16, age 76.
Jim Swan, former Osceola County Commissioner and Kissimmee Mayor, Sept. 10, age 74.
Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor – Queen Elizabeth II – Sept. 8, age 96.
Ken Smith, former Osceola County Commissioner and Kissimmee Mayor, Oct. 8, age 79.
