MediaUpdate

​By Morgan Watkins
Staff writer

Dignity Village, the homeless campsite beside Grace Marketplace, has grown organically without rules for over a year, but in less than two weeks, the city of Gainesville will change that in hopes of bringing order to the area.

After the City Commission recently voted to take over managing Dignity Village, a team comprised of city and county government personnel, among others, devised a set of rules covering issues from violence or smoking inside tents to how to handle sex offenders.

The rules require anyone staying at Dignity Village, located off Northeast 39th Avenue, to be 18 years or older and prohibit them from having weapons or having, selling or making illegal drugs. Violent crime and destructive behavior also are prohibited and will result in an individual’s immediate removal.

Former Alachua County Manager Betty Baker, now the city’s project manager for Dignity Village, said the rules will go into effect around Aug. 27. Those dealing with violent crime, weapons and drugs will be strictly enforced. There will be flexibility in enforcing other rules, such as bans on generators and overnight guests.

People eventually will be issued renewable 90-day permits to stay at the campsite, and potential residents are subject to an arrest warrant search before getting one. People with active arrest warrants will not be able to live there.

Already, however, the proposed rules are generating some pushback.

A prohibition on registered sex offenders or sexual predators, for instance, has raised concerns and is now under legal review, Baker said.

During a joint commission meeting last week, Gainesville city and Alachua County commissioners heard from residents who singled out provisions against generators, bathing and overnight guests as problematic.

One man pointed out that there is a medical need for generators to run equipment like Nebulizers and also questioned the wisdom of the rule against overnight guests.

“My fiancee’s a long-distance trucker and it’s kind of concerning to me that she can’t come to my home and spend the night with me,” he said.

A woman living at the campsite said some of the rules are ridiculous, such as requiring people to park their cars in the entrance parking lot instead of beside their tents.

“We consider these our homes, not a campground, OK?” she told the commissioners. “Maybe campgrounds have these rules, (but) this is a community, not a campground.”

Another man asked, “Where’s the humanity? Where do you draw the line in saying that you do not have the right to set your own agenda as a human being and you, as the powers that be within this community, are going to set them for us?”

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Attorney Kirsten Clanton, director of the Homeless Advocacy Project at Southern Legal Counsel, questioned what the mechanism will be for determining rule violations and appropriate punishments as well as whether there will be a way for people to contest things.

“A landlord doesn’t just get to say, ‘Oh, you didn’t comply with this lease term. You’re out right now,’” she said.

She also wondered whether there will be a mechanism for sorting out disputes where it’s one person’s word against another.

Rather than putting up barriers to Dignity Village, Clanton said she hopes the city will focus on how to remove them.

Drugs and other issues that have resulted in a lot of police calls to the campsite are a problem, but Clanton wondered how they can address those in a targeted way without unnecessarily infringing on individuals’ dignity and self-worth.

She also suggested developing a more formal self-governance model to get residents involved in the process.

The action team is still figuring out how best to enforce the rules, Baker said, but there will be a distinction between rules like the ones against violence, which will result in immediate removal, and rules such as having quiet hours from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.

Mayor Ed Braddy said the goal is to get the rules implemented soon and see how they do. There’s no reason they can’t be changed quickly as needed, he said.

Randy Stacey, executive director of Helping Hands, said he thinks people in Dignity Village generally are glad to see rules being set, but he said it would help to know the rationale behind some of the provisions, such as the ban on overnight guests.

“It’s not like it’s high school church camp or something,” he said. “I think the whole guest thing is kind of questionable, truthfully.”

As for the makeshift showers Helping Hands recently upgraded to improve their drainage, Stacey said he’d hate to see those go because there are only limited hours when people can use Grace Marketplace’s indoor showers.

The rules do allow people 21 and older to consume alcohol on the premises, he pointed out. Banning alcohol would have been the biggest thing that would prompt Dignity Village residents to leave, he said. With these draft rules, some people will depart, but he doesn’t know that there will be a big exodus.

“I think overall it’s going to be a good change,” he said.

City Commissioner Helen Warren said she identifies more layers of complexity every time she walks around Dignity Village, and these rules are a first step toward addressing the complicated issues involved.

“I don’t like the idea that if you have rules you’re eliminating some people, because by not having rules you’re going to eliminate people who don’t like the chaos,” she said.

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At the recent joint meeting of the city and county commissions, a Dignity Village resident who introduced himself as Matthew Brown stepped up to the microphone to talk about the rule banning sex offenders from residing there.

“I am a sex offender. I am benefiting from being out there. Y’all are taking this rule and just throwing it at us where I have already been in jail, in prison, for my crime,” he told commissioners. “I have been trying my best to stay out of trouble. This place has done that with me by working with me, letting me volunteer, letting me feel like I’m somebody.

“Now, where are y’all going to put us? Think about that. Where are we going to go?” he asked. “I need a place to stay and ... this is my home right now.”

Jon DeCarmine, operations director for the Alachua County Coalition for the Homeless and Hungry, which runs Grace Marketplace, said sex offenders are allowed to stay under the pavilion or in Grace's indoor shelter.

“If they stick with the no sex offenders rule, the impact is not going to be on Dignity Village,” he said. “The impact is going to be on the rest of Gainesville.”

Stacey of Helping Hands said he doesn’t see a problem with sex offenders being out there since there aren’t children staying there.

“It’s a tough one,” he said. “It’s a question of where do they go, you know?”

Braddy said he isn’t convinced the alternatives are either staying at Dignity Village or living anonymously in the woods.

“I know there are support organizations that deal with sex offenders and re-acclimating them into society because obviously that’s a very challenging background to have,” he said. “I think we start a dialogue on how we can show that there’s a way that that can be addressed without suspending the rule.”

Warren said it’s important to recognize that a wide range of behaviors allow someone to be labeled a sex offender, from situations where teenagers of different ages are in a relationship to “sad and horrific cases.”

City Commissioner Craig Carter said the Dignity Village rules are “easy to speak and hard to enforce” and that he thinks all the rules have to be a little flexible.

Carter said he thinks the city’s approach should be to deal with the sex offender issue on a case-by-case basis and look at what a person’s offense was before deciding whether they should be barred from Dignity Village.

Carter pointed out that everyone has rules to follow, whether they live in a tent or a $5 million estate.

“You can’t cookie-cut a right answer for a vast group of people,” he said. “But I think we need to have rules and we need to enforce the rules.”

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People have worked for over a year with Dignity Village residents to help that community develop and that effort largely has been successful, said DeCarmine, the coalition’s operations director. People are taking care of each other.

“But it didn’t prevent the kinds of problems that have popped up,” he said. “Rules are a part of the world we live in. There’s no reason that should be the Wild West.”

DeCarmine thinks laying down rules will work, although it will be a little rough at first because people have been operating on an "I’ll do what I want" basis for so long.

Ultimately, he said, the current rules are likely a bit more severe than they'll be in the end.

“I’m mostly relieved that the city is doing something,” he said. “I think it’s in everybody’s interest for that place to be as safe as possible and as humane as possible.”

The rules weren’t pulled from midair and were created with input from Dignity Village residents, Baker said. Although the rules will go into effect soon, the action team is reviewing some provisions, such as the bans on generators and bathing, in light of residents’ concerns.

The reason for including the bathing prohibition was related to health and safety concerns the Florida Department of Health in Alachua County had about the makeshift showers, she said.

As for the overnight-guest ban, Baker said there will be some flexibility on that for Dignity Village residents’ significant others and family members with advance notice.

“We’re not trying to get into the moral police issue,” she said. “The goal is just to know who’s staying in the village.”

There is also an effort to better organize Dignity Village under a long-term site plan, and the action team is looking into how best to transition to the new campsite layout, she said. No wooden structures will be allowed and the eventual goal is to have tents raised off the ground to protect them from flooding.

“When you ride through there, it will be a tent city that the residents are proud of,” she said. “It could be cutting-edge for Florida.”

Dignity Village was quiet late Thursday morning as some chatted around a table while others remained zipped up inside their tents.

As Alicia Chavez walked out of one of the makeshift showers and headed back to the tents, she lobbied against the no-bathing rule.

“Those are the only thing we have for the heat,” she said. “I wish y’all would have mercy on us and let us have showers.”

Meanwhile, Top-40 tunes wafted from the open windows of 73-year-old Levi “Slappy” Dexter’s gray Mazda truck, which he was fixing up after recently buying it from another Dignity Village resident.

Dexter didn’t know the details of the city’s recently drafted rules, but did support bringing more order to the campsite.

“I’d like to see people come together. I hate fights, I hate arguments,” he said.

“They’ve got no organization ‘round here,” Dexter explained as he leaned against his truck. “You’ve got to organize it to keep the peace.”

​Gainesville city commissioners met for more than nine hours on Aug. 6, yet still lacked the time to discuss a proposal to shrink the commission.

The agenda included some other big issues, so perhaps the the commission's unwieldy size wasn’t the main reason for the discussion being bumped to this week. But shrinking the commission to five members from seven might certainly make for shorter meetings.

The Sun has editorialized in favor of a five-member commission, calling for the idea to be paired with a plan to move city elections from the spring to the fall. I subsequently heard from some former elected officials who were supportive of a five-member commission if an additional change was made.

Commissioner Craig Carter’s proposal would eliminate two at-large commissioners and keep four district seats and the mayor’s at-large seat. He says the plan would ensure each area of the city has equal geographic representation among commissioners.

But a counterargument is that district seats cause more polarization. An alternative would be having each of the commission members be required to live within the district they represent, but face citywide elections.

The Alachua County Commission operates this way. There are advantages to having commissioners accountable to all county voters, but critics see some downsides. Local conservatives have long fought for single-member districts for the County Commission, saying they would create more ideological and geographic diversity on a body that has tended to be liberal and Gainesville-centric.

Residency requirements should help address the issue of geographic diversity, but have been flouted in the past. The Sun reported in 2011 that two of the County Commission’s five members at the time — Susan Baird and Paula Delaney — listed residences within their districts but had primary homes elsewhere.

Other problems include potentially reducing minority representation. During the Jim Crow era, single-member districts were used to ensure all-white elected bodies in parts of the South and beyond. Starting in the 1970s, some of those cities were charged with violating the Voting Rights Act and forced to return to single-member districts.

A study of more than 7,000 cities found that single-member districts typically help minorities get elected, but only in highly segregated areas and tend to help minority men more than women. Another study, this one focusing on a shift to single-member districts in Norfolk, Virginia, found that returning to districts led to a more decentralized and contentious form of politics.

For his part, Carter opposes the idea of having four at-large seats on the City Commission. Even with residency requirements, he said, commissioners would be less likely to advocate for the priorities of their district if they faced a citywide vote. He used District 1 Commissioner Charles Goston as an example of someone focused on his district’s needs.

It should be noted that there are political implications for either choice. While single-district seats help conservative members get elected, liberals usually fare better in citywide elections.

Some conservatives oppose moving elections from spring to the higher-turnout fall because that favors liberal in Democrat-dominated Gainesville. Perhaps that provides reason to combine single-member districts with fall elections, canceling out the political advantages for both sides.

​Improving the quality of life in Gainesville and Alachua County will make our area into an even more attractive place for residents and businesses. The trick is figuring out exactly how to do that.
 
Residents often cite the area’s natural beauty, opportunities for outdoor recreation and cultural offerings among the things they like most about living here, so enhancing those characteristics is a good place to focus. Gainesville’s Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs Department can help address all of these issues.

The department manages some quality parks, but facilities built decades ago are showing their age and need to be upgraded. There is a lack of athletic fields, cultural programs and facilities, and access for people with disabilities. Parks and community centers are spread unevenly around town, while there are gaps in bike paths. Citizens Field, owned by the city and leased to the schools, is in dire need of renovations.

Nearly three years ago, the City Commission adopted a long-term plan for its parks department that included addressing these needs as well as more ambitious ideas such as an outdoor performing arts center. But the current funding levels for the department fall well short of being able to achieve these goals.

Residents showed they were willing to pay more for parks and conservation land in passing the Wild Spaces & Public Places voter referendum in 2008. The half-cent sales tax increase ran for two years, providing funding for projects such as new community and senior recreation centers, a new track and basketball courts at Cone Park, and the heating and cooling of Northeast Pool for year-round use.

Now local officials are considering another initiative that would pay for much of the long-term parks plan to be implemented. Ideas include a half-mill property tax increase for city residents, which would cost the average homeowner about $36 a year. Another possibility is another half-cent sales tax that would fund city initiatives as well as projects spread throughout the county and its municipalities. An advantage would be that a third of sales tax revenue collected comes from people who live outside of the county.

The discussion comes after voters rejected a sales-tax increase in November that would have paid for road improvements and other transportation projects. Voters seemed to be saying that they expected basic road maintenance to be paid through existing taxes.

There’s a much stronger case to be made that parks and natural areas are deserving of additional public funding. Parks provide environmental as well as economic benefits. They improve air and water quality, while boosting the value of nearby property.

Parks, bike paths and recreational opportunities help attract retirees and workers in the kind of high-tech businesses being recruited here. Increased recreational opportunities make for a healthier population, while cultural offerings create a more vibrant community and spur the type of creativity that leads to innovations.

If residents want to make Gainesville and Alachua County into even better places to live and work, parks are a good place to start. Our existing parks are well used and appreciated, but the community could have a truly great parks system with additional funding for new and improved parks, programs and facilities.

Last week, city and county commissioners took the first step toward a ballot initiative by creating a committee to consider options. But if such an initiative is going to be a success, the energy can't come from the top.

It needs to start with average residents. If you care about creating a better community, start expressing your support for investing in our local parks system.

​Writers to The Sun and Commissioner Robert Hutchinson have stated that Gainesville Regional Utilities’ proposed electric rate structure would benefit “affluent” customers. They define the affluent as those whose electric usage is in the top usage tier.

Somehow the miniscule adjustment to the top-tier rates is supposed to discourage that group from conserving. All GRU is trying to do is bring the charges a little closer to actual costs.

My wife and I are top-tier users. We have changed out our air conditioning to a high-efficiency unit. Almost all of our lights are compact fluorescent.

We are also fixed-income retirees on Social Security. We do not have an abundance of wealth, and with property taxes and electric rates among the highest in the state, we do not need any more incentive to conserve.

Please stop the class warfare and help everyone with lower utility and tax rates.

Richard Wilcox

Gainesville

​By Anthony Clark
Business editor

While 10 young summer campers in blue city recreation department T-shirts pecked away at computer games in a room down the hall, city and county officials Thursday celebrated the start of free high-speed Internet service at three recreation centers in east Gainesville during a wire-cutting ceremony at the Eastside Community Center.

At the request of citizens concerned that lack of accessible or affordable Internet service is leaving students behind as schools move toward more computerized learning, Alachua County government partnered with Gainesville and its GRUCom Fiber Optic Communications operation to offer the service.

City Commissioner Charles Goston, whose district covers most of east Gainesville, said each center targets a different demographic. The Thelma Bolton Senior Activity Center will allow seniors to learn computer skills such as how to use email, research their ancestry, or use Skype to connect with family, he said. The Martin Luther King Jr. Center will allow residents to connect to the Internet through their smartphones without using their own data plans and allow businesses to do presentations. The Eastside center will allow children in the after-school program to complete homework assignments and others to take GED or financial literacy classes.

He acknowledged the Plum Creek Foundation for providing a $2,000 grant to buy 10 new computers.

Kevin Smith, director of information and telecommunications services for the county, said materials cost less than $500 for each center. His staff ran fiber optics to the buildings and GRUCom is providing the Internet service for free.

He said the speed at each is 10 Megabits per second download speed and 1 Mbps upload speed, the basic level of service needed to perform modern functions, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

With all 10 computers using the network, County Commissioner Robert “Hutch” Hutchinson ran a speed test on his smartphone showing available download speed between 3 and 4 Mbps.

Deshawn Johnson, 10, was waiting for a Thomas & Friends game from pbskids.org to download in the computer lab while attending the city recreation department’s summer camp Thursday. He said the computers are a lot faster than the old computers that used to be at the center and with 10 stations, more kids will be able to use them.

“We had the Wii and the Xbox in either corner and the people who didn’t want to do either just sat there and had nothing to do,” he said.

Evelyn Foxx, president of the Alachua County branch of the NAACP, has spearheaded a Digital Divide Task Force that is trying to bring high-speed Internet to more people. She and others grew concerned after realizing how much of students' education requires digital access.

In 2011, the state Legislature passed a law requiring at least 50 percent of instructional-material expenditures go to digital textbooks, starting this school year.

Last year, the Gainesville Housing Authority opened computer labs at three public housing complexes with support from Cox Communications. GHA Executive Director Pamela Davis said children are using the computers for after school and summer camp programs and adults are using them to learn job skills, work on their resumes, look for jobs and apply for benefits.

Foxx said the goal is to expand Internet service to all public housing complexes throughout the county and then into rural communities that lack service.

Smith said the city wants to expand service to more community centers.

Mayor Ed Braddy called Thursday’s announcement the first step in a longer journey.

“If Gainesville is truly to reach its goal of becoming the preeminent center for innovation in North Florida and a city of opportunity for everyone, then we must provide our citizens with greater access to services such as video on demand, video conferencing and virtual classrooms,” he said.

​By Arek Sarkissian

Staff writer

Alachua County leaders voted Thursday to trim Sheriff Sadie Darnell's budget by $252,000, after learning she may have 10 fewer deputies working as school resource officers this year.

Amid heated discussion between Darnell and county commissioners, the board voted 3-2 to reduce her $71.7 million budget in response to the Alachua County Public Schools' plan to use police officers from municipalities within the county, rather than deputies, to provide security in some of its schools.

ASO’s budget for the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, is $70.8 million, which includes money to run its law enforcement branch, the jail and the combined communications center. County Manager Lee Niblock promised all county departments and constitutional offices money to cover increases for health insurance and the Florida Retirement System.

The 10 fewer deputies needed for the school resource program means less money the county needed to give ASO, commissioners said, and after giving the sheriff money to pay for three new positions, including a crime analyst, a jail support specialist, a jail release coordinator and a training program, they decided to reduce the amount of county funds going to Darnell's budget by $252,000.

Commissioner Mike Byerly says that cash should be left for the commission to spend on other services. For instance, part of the money will likely go to the Alachua County Environmental Protection Department.

At the beginning of the budget season, Niblock, the county manager, had instructed constitutional officers, including the sheriff, to find money within their own budgets to provide the same 3 percent raises proposed for county employees. ASO’s budget included money for raises through an internal salary increase program that rewards longevity and service, which covers a good chunk of its employees, but did not include raises for employees not covered by that program.

However, there is still time for commissioners to make changes, with a vote on a final spending plan expected next month.

After Thursday’s meeting, Darnell said she was frustrated by the board’s decision.

“To eliminate 10 law enforcement positions from a budget is inappropriate, it’s out of the scope and purview,” she said. “I disagree with it entirely.”

Darnell said she hopes her request for raises will be included in the final budget.

“But I won’t know until we finish up the budget meetings,” she said.

As for raises, Byerly said salary increases have been funded by making spending cuts. Darnell already had provided raises within her budget through the agency’s salary-increase program.

“Instead, she’s coming to the board asking for additional money and she doesn’t want to make the cuts she really must make,” Byerly said. “It can be argued that she has the largest budget with the most discretionary spending and it should have been easy for her to provide that.”

Still, ASO stands to see an increased budget this year, even with the $252,000 cut.

"That’s a real reduction and the services that are no longer being asked for or paid for,” Byerly said. “When that part of the school resource officer program went away, I think it’s appropriate for us to reallocate that money.”

​Gainesville, FLA.-- The digital divide is getting smaller for some residents in Gainesville.

Community leaders met at the Eastside Recreational Center for a "wi-fi wire cutting ceremony," celebrating unlimited wi-fi access in three community facilities.

Residents can now come into any of these facilities and connect to wi-fi on their smartphones and computers.

Leaders say this marks a tremendous addition to the area, and will help kids in the area with performance in school.

"For our children, it meant that they were at a disadvantage. If they needed to study, they had to make sure they had someone that could take them to a library or somewhere where wi-fi or the internet was available. Now, they have the opportunity to have labs in their communities," says Pam Davis, Executive Director for the Gainesville Housing Authority.

Mayor Ed Braddy spoke to the issue of the Digital Divide, which is the level of accessibility each person has to resources like basic cable or wi-fi.

In the past, getting these services to residents in east Gainesville was an issue.

Now, he says providing the free wi-fi is a step in the right direction to narrowing the gap.

"When we talk about the Digital Divide, it's not just an issue for the present, it is an issue for the future because we've got to equip and empower the people we serve with the skills they need to compete in the 21st Century economy," Mayor Braddy said.

Mayor Braddy told TV20's Alexandra Rivera this is just the start of expanding wi-fi and other types of technology throughout Gainesville.

Alachua County is also working closely with Gainesville's IT department, along with the University of Florida and Santa Fe College, to see what technology they can implement going forward.

Click to watch this story.

​By Arek Sarkissian
Staff writer

With a cautiously optimistic recommendation from its fire chief, the Gainesville City Commission agreed Monday night to see if plans by Alachua County Fire Rescue to increase its fleet of ambulances would help with the city's growing number of fire rescue calls.

Gainesville Fire Rescue Chief Jeff Lane told the City Commission a plan by ACFR to deploy three more units would temporarily alleviate stress from more 911 calls, which mostly come from within the city limits. However, the new units also would conduct revenue-producing nonemergency rides for patients headed to locations outside the county. The hybrid approach would not directly deal with the 33 percent increase in emergency calls the county and city have seen over the past decade, but it was a good start, Lane said.

“We’re cautiously optimistic because the plan doesn’t exactly cover the 911 piece, but it indirectly addresses it with the way that it is set up,” Lane said.

As a result of the increase in emergency calls and out-of-county transfers, ACFR has resorted to using a practice known as "move-up,'' where units from outlying areas of the county move closer to much-busier Gainesville to cover for ambulances that are tied up on other calls.

A move-up is not uncommon in the ambulance industry, but continuing demand for emergency service has left the county without an available ambulance 28 times from November 2014 to March, a Sun investigation showed.

Added to that is ACFR's foray into the lucrative practice of transporting patients from the county's three major medical centers to facilities elsewhere in the Southeast.

In response to the deficit, County Manager Lee Niblock included in next year’s budget plans to bring on three more ambulances that would both respond to 911 calls during peak call times and transport patients throughout the region. ACFR Chief Bill Northcutt said one of the new ambulances would always stay within the county to field emergency calls, and two of them would conduct out-of-county transfers. ACFR already has one ambulance, Critical Care One, which exclusively transports nonemergency patients outside the county. Currently, one of the 12 emergency call ambulances is reassigned to transport nonemergency patients as well.

But that will change with the three new ambulances.

“Those 12 rescues will stay in town,” Northcutt said of the emergency-responding ambulances under the new plan. “And the other one will stay right here as well.”

The three new ambulances already have been ordered and the new positions required to staff them will be funded when the County Commission approves its annual budget next month. The new ambulances should be ready for the road by January. Because the ambulances generate revenue, they will not greatly impact ACFR’s modest reliance on the county’s general fund, Northcutt said.

A group, Strengthen Gainesville, sought to encourage the City Commission to start its own ambulance service through GFR, and embarked on an online petition campaign that had collected 98 signatures as of Monday night. However, the commission was pleased by Chief Lane’s recommendation.

“I’m delighted the county is getting results,” City Commissioner Helen Warren said. “I’m also delighted the city and county fire department staff are working together and I’m hoping the vehicles soon to be in place will resolve that.”