On July 11, I held a press conference with 3 other candidates whose districts overlap with my own. The topic for the press conference was the removal of two van accessible disabled parking spaces by one of the largest developers in our community, leaving no disabled parking spaces in proximity to any of the business entrances at one end of a shopping plaza. This was an absolute, blatant disregard of law at every level of government. This sent the message to people with disabilities, disabled veterans, and the elderly that they are not valued and their business was not wanted at this location. Why would a business take such an action? They wanted to put in a decorative fountain where the disabled parking was located. Yes, that’s right. They literally bulldozed over people’s civil rights for a beautification project.
I followed this process from beginning to end. While getting dinner one night, I noticed the parking spaces being taken out. This was actually a problem for me personally. While I use a chair sometimes I can walk. However, having had somewhere in the ballpark of 20 knee surgeries steps and I are not great friends. When the parking spaces were taken out so was the ramp causing me to have to step up onto the curb and completely denying access to chair users. At the time, I thought the spaces were being repaved, and while I was annoyed at the lack of temporary accommodations during the process, in Florida we have far bigger accessibility issues.
It wasn’t until I returned to the same location a month later that I realized that the removal was not temporary. The area had been repaved with a new ramp, but instead of new disabled parking spaces there was now an area of grass with a water line for what I learned from a business owner was going to be a fountain. Business owners in the plaza were upset because they were getting complaints about the removed parking spaces. This was an issue that affected thousands within my community, not to mention the tourists that visit the area, so I decided to take action.
There were a number of ways I could have gone about this. I went though the formalities of reaching out to the developer and got nowhere, so if I wanted to do some political grandstanding here for the sake of my campaign I could have filed a complaint at either the state or federal level. The problem with either option is that I would still be waiting for either of those complaints to go to mediation and thus still waiting for the parking spaces to be replaced. Instead, I went for what I knew would be a quicker, albeit less attention getting, remedy. I knew there was no way this developer had acquired a permit from the county to remove the parking spaces. If they wanted to relocate them then they would have had to first put in new spaces before taking out the old. A permit requesting to relocated disabled parking spaces through any other process would be denied. I was correct. When I checked with the county no permit had been obtained. This is when we scheduled the press conference and we held it directly on the location where the parking spaces had been and where the fountain would be.
As it turns out, the media, at least our local media, doesn’t care too much when the civil rights of twenty percent of our population are violated! We had one news channel show up. In the report they called the press conference a protest; it wasn’t. They didn’t cover any of the speakers at the press conference. They didn’t play any of the clip of my interview as the person who identified and was working on addressing the problem. Oh, and who organized the press conference. They included a small clip from an interview with a volunteer in attendance. Our local paper didn’t cover it at all.
I, however, livestreamed the event. Between Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube the press conference has received over 1,200 views. Within 2 weeks of me reaching out to the county and the press conference the disabled parking spaces were replaced. Yet very few people within my community know what I did for them.
I didn’t do this for recognition. I did this because I identified an injustice affecting potentially thousands of people in my community and I wanted to rectify it. I am, however, a candidate and I am in a manner of speaking applying for a job to serve my community. This was an example of that and it was an act of gross negligence on the part of our local media not to inform the community of the work I had done on their behalf
There’s also another factor at play here. I technically did this as a private citizen. There were elected officials responsible for addressing this issue as part of constituent services and they failed to do so. The state Senate seat for this district is vacant. That is the seat I am running for. However, the State Representative for this district still occupies this seat until November. He had an obligation to address this and didn’t. The U.S. Representative for this district had an obligation to do the same. The U.S. Representative is running for another term and the Florida House Representative is running against me, but to do what is the question? To serve their communities which they both failed to do here? Shouldn’t that have been a question the media should have been asking? Doesn’t my community deserve better?
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