Avon Park's Debate Far From Finished - A Very Good Read

Published Sunday, August 6, 2006 by The Lakeland, FL Ledger

By BILL HUTCHINSON
New York Times Regional Newspapers

AVON PARK -- History-minded residents of this little citrus town at the center of the state like to point out that the rocky ridge on which their community rests is the original Florida, the part of the peninsula that first rose out of the sea eons ago.Pockmarks along the Highland Ridge created numerous small lakes here, including what some say may be the oldest in the northern hemisphere, Lake Tulane.

Until last month, its lakes and its elevation -- 154 feet above sea level, the highest point in Southern Florida -- were the slender foundation for whatever reputation Avon Park had beyond the borders of its 4.4 square miles.In July, however, Mayor Tom Macklin stepped forward with something he called the Illegal Immigration Relief Act, and all hell broke loose.

With the federal government immobilized over how and whether and where to enforce existing immigration law, and what to do about the 12 million to 20 million illegal residents already inside U.S. borders, Macklin's proposal took dead aim at one of the most explosive social issues of the 21st century.

City Ordinance 08-06 would have heavily fined and/or suspended the business license of anyone hiring, renting to, or otherwise conducting any business whatsoever with an illegal immigrant, knowingly or not, inside the city limits or anywhere else.

Avon Park's 8,900 residents are not much given to controversy of any kind. The last time the community's feathers got seriously ruffled was more than a decade ago, over whether alcohol should be sold on Sunday. (It is, after 1 p.m.)

Nor are they accustomed to national attention. The last time Avon Park made the papers in anything but a local sense was in 1959, when the old bottling plant here created a 25-foot-tall Coca-Cola. Ten years before that, according to the local history museum, two guys from Avon Park made headlines for inventing the brown-and-serve roll.

"La tempestad," as the local Spanish newspaper called the immigration debate, put Avon Park on international television, side by side with Lebanon and the "American Idol" concert tour.

The final City Council vote was made for TV: 3-to-2 against the ordinance, but right down to the wire it could have gone either way.

That was nearly two weeks ago now. The reporters from The New York Times and at least a dozen other newspapers, eight TV stations, Fox and CNN are gone, for the most part.

The Broward County socialist who preached revolution to the council meeting audience is gone, as is the gentleman from up the ridge who suggested that Adolf Hitler may not have been such a bad guy after all.

The Sunday afternoon drinkers at the Village Bar on Main Street are talking bass fishing again, not politics, and the politicians themselves have returned to the pocketbook issues that dominate next month's School Board elections.

"I'm over the immigration thing," said Avon Park Councilwoman Sharon Schuler at the end of last week, weary after siding with the majority against the Macklin ordinance. "We need to move on.

"As they'll tell you at the Village Bar, and pretty much everywhere else in Avon Park these days, don't bet on it.

AN EPIPHANY

Sunday is Tom Macklin's day to cut the grass.

The three-term mayor of Avon Park believes "very deeply in Christian values," he says, but he is not a churchgoer. That gives him the morning to tool around on his riding mower at home in the east end of town.

He's gotten up to 75 mph on that mower out at the Avon Park Mower-plex, which, he notes with pride, is "the only purpose-built mower-racing track in the country.

"Macklin's campaign on behalf of the Illegal Immigration Relief Act continues to occupy so much of his time and energy that the only mowing he gets to do lately is out in the yard.

He has a new bill in the works: new wording, new ways to approach what he calls "the problem.""Once you've gone this far down the track," he says, "you don't go back. The issue is out there. People on both sides realize that something has to be done.

"What needs to be done, in Macklin's opinion, is no less than whatever it takes "to stop the bleeding, the daily invasion into the United States of illegal immigration.

"Like much of the country, Avon Park has officially ignored the illegal immigrants in its midst for more than 20 years.

Every autumn, a thousand or so migrate into town, mostly from Mexico, pickers in the citrus groves and farms that have been the economic foundation of Highlands County since the late 19th century.

Each year, some illegal immigrants stay on, disappearing into a Latino population that long ago eclipsed blacks -- a community with its own illegal immigrants from Haiti, Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean -- as the county's largest minority group.

Now a flourishing one-third of Avon Park's population, the Latino community includes not only Mexicans but also a significant number of Puerto Ricans and lesser numbers of Dominicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Cubans, most of them here legally, some not.

The legal year-round Latino residents have provided an economic shot in the arm for Avon Park.The busiest places in town are the used-car lots that advertise "se habla espanol," and the Taqueria Merlo, a Main Street Mexican market and restaurant that draws a varied crowd all day, every day.

It is the illegal immigrants, Macklin says, who have become a problem, not only for Avon Park but, he says, but for "just about every small town in America.

"His ordinance read, in part:"Illegal immigration leads to higher crime rates, contributes to overcrowded classrooms and failing schools, subjects our hospitals to fiscal hardship and legal residents to sub-standard quality of care, and destroys our neighborhoods and diminishes our over-all quality of life.

"The wording, like the idea for the law, came to Macklin via talk radio.Twice in one day, on two different stations, he heard the mayor of Hazelton, Pa., talk about the illegal immigration ordinance his council had passed 4-1.The second time, Macklin says, "was like an epiphany."

In other interviews, he has said it was like hearing a sermon.These church-pew allusions have brought Macklin support from the God-is-on-our-side social conservatives who inhabit every Florida town.

And his ordinance has drawn solid backing from those of his constituency who object to Latinos for essentially racist reasons.

But "this is not a hate-based proposition," says the mayor. "I will argue that for as long as I have breath left in my body and days left to waste it."I thought everybody would be for it, to tell you the truth," says Macklin of the ordinance.

Over nearly 10 years in city government, he has fielded an increasing number of complaints from residents who feel their lives, and their property values, are being compromised by the presence of illegal immigrants.

"It just seemed like the right thing to do."

With his shaved head and Bruce Willis grin, Macklin has stage presence, acquired in the spotlight. Before he ran for office for the first time in 1995, he and his wife had a karaoke business, and spent a little time trying to crash the music business in Nashville. The training shows.

"I've been very impressed with Tom, I have to say," says the woman who runs the migrant-assistance program at South Florida Community College just outside Avon Park.

"I don't agree with him, but he has presented his case very well," says Daune Neidig, an art history scholar from New Jersey by way of Beaufort, S.C., and Nicaragua, where she spent two years in the Peace Corps after her husband died in the 1990s.

"He's a smart guy," says Neidig of the mayor, "and he knows what he's doing. He's got people talking. And he's obviously touched a nerve.

"With that nerve still tingling from the ordinance debate, Macklin intends to keep prodding.

"There's no going back to Mayberry," he says.

CITY OF CHARM

Last Sunday, Pat Boone crooned "April Love" from one end of town to the other, compliments of a Reader's Digest mix tape of old-time classics. The song played over and over again in the lobby of the Hotel Jacaranda at the east end of Main Street, and a mile or so west in the Avon Cafe.

A sign on the side of a building in Avon Park’s downtown reflects the old — brick buildings built in the 1920s — and the new — Taqueria Merlo, a Main Street Mexican market and restaurant that draws a varied crowd all day, every day. Many doubt the illegal immigration issue ended with last month’s vote.

The Chamber of Commerce promotes Avon Park as "The City of Charm," meaning heartland charm as it was defined in 1950s America, when every star was a wishing star, as Boone sings, and nobody locked their doors.

"When I came here 28 years ago, there was one blinking stoplight and everybody looked the same," says Tem Tagesson, a self-described "Swedish redneck" who runs the local Winn-Dixie. "Now it really is quite a melting pot," he says, in a distinctive accent that mixes herring and grits.

Stick around long enough and you can hear smatterings of a dozen languages along Main Street: Russian to French to Farsi, with a heavy dose of several Caribbean patois.Within so diverse a community, everybody has an opinion about the Illegal Immigration Relief Act, and every one is different. But they all start the same way, with a sigh at the enormous complexities of the issues that the ordinance has raised.

"I'm not smart enough to solve immigration," says Terry Heston, a local contractor who graduated from Avon Park High a few years ahead of Tom Macklin. "And Tom isn't smart enough, either. I think he started out looking for a way to fix the housing situation, and then he just went too far."

Of the three basic elements of the original ordinance, the section dealing with migrant housing -- imposing a minimum $1,000 fine on anyone who knowingly rents to illegal immigrants -- gets almost universal support around Avon Park.

"The situation is way out of hand," says Maria Sutherland, a grant writer and project manager for the city.

"You've got your little house, and you keep it fixed up, and you're out mowing the lawn every weekend, and right next door to you here comes 15 or 20 migrant workers, sharing one bathroom, sleeping on filthy mattresses, 10 cars in the front yard, people coming and going all night. How would you like it?"

Terry Heston, for one, points out that existing city ordinances already prohibit group rentals by more than four unrelated individuals. "Nobody's enforcing the laws we have," he says. "The folks at City Hall are all nice people and all, but I just don't know what they do down there."

Still, if it takes another law to make the point, OK, says Heston, who has invested heavily in gentrifying once-blighted neighborhoods. "Do what you have to do, but just get 'r done."

The part of the ordinance that would have made English the city's sole official language has support, too.

"When I came to this country, I did not ever think, `Well, they should all learn Swedish to be able to talk to me,' " Tagesson says.

"I don't understand this idea that you can live in this country and not learn the language," says Maria Sutherland, originally from El Salvador. "Where did that come from?"

"Of course anyone coming into this country to live needs to learn English," says Neidig, whose migrant program at the college provides language lessons and other services to legal workers. "I mean, duh."

But it's not that easy. It's not like they're just being stubborn, you know."The section of the ordinance dealing with undocumented workers generated the most intense controversy.

Under the proposed law, any employer who hires or otherwise "aids and abets" anyone without verifiable eligibility papers would have been subject to fines and a suspension of their license to do business in the city, among other penalties.

The earliest and loudest opposition came from agricultural interests, particularly citrus growers, who argued that their businesses would suffer profoundly if they didn't have access to illegal labor willing to pick oranges 12 hours a day for 60 cents a bushel.

Eventually, the Avon Park Chamber of Commerce sided with the growers, which still rankles Macklin, who says, "These are some of the same people who are telling me on the phone they're behind me one hundred percent."

It was the business community, he says, that fostered various public misconceptions that eventually did the ordinance in.

One rumor was that a business owner would be open to punishment for doing no more than selling a Coke to an illegal immigrant.

You can still hear around town that Wal-Mart threatened to pull out of its plan to build a store in Avon Park if the ordinance had passed, an allegation that Wal-Mart denied almost two weeks ago.

"I heard so many things, it all got me confused," says Tylene Gandy, who works full time in a local nursing home and runs a taxi service with her husband.

Terry Gandy, though, has no confusion on what side he's on.

There's a Mexican cab service in town, he says, that can undercut his fares because they're not paying insurance and taxes.

"The cops know about it, but nobody wants to do anything about it.

Anybody who's doing something illegal, or living here illegal, the law's the law, as far as I'm concerned."