Rebroadcast: The Villages Crush a Grassroots Revolt

Deconstructed

The Intercept

News

4.8 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2023

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In honor of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s lousy performance in the first presidential debate, we are rerunning our episode on his intervention in wild politics of The Villages, Florida.

In 2019, residents of The Villages, an iconic retirement community in Florida, were suddenly hit with a 25 percent hike in their property taxes. In the master-planned community of 130,000 across the state’s Sumter, Lake, and Marion counties, many residents are on fixed incomes. The tax hikes were intended to subsidize new developments south of the community, rather than cover new amenities or upgrades for current residents. The entity known locally either as “the developer” or “the family” benefited from the tax hike and could then escape paying fees associated with the expansion of their development. This week on Deconstructed, host Ryan Grim takes us to The Villages to meet residents who banded together to rollback the tax hike but who were ultimately blocked by powerful players. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the local political machine run by The Villages fought the residents, leading to one of their champions being thrown in jail.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give, where your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey, I'm Ryan Grimm. Welcome back to Deconstructed. I'm off this week.
0:03.5	And so in honor of Ron DeSantis' lousy performance in the first presidential debate,
0:07.6	we wanted to rerun our episode on his intervention in the wild politics of the villages, Florida.
0:13.5	Now, after this episode was published, listeners and intercept readers flooded the legal
0:17.7	defense go fund me of Orrin Miller with tens of thousands of dollars, and he was able to file
0:21.9	an appeal to his conviction, which is now pending. He also announced a new bid for county commissioner,
0:27.6	although he won't legally be able to run unless his conviction is overturned. We'll continue to
0:31.7	follow this story. But for now, thanks for listening, enjoy the episode, and I'll see you next week.
0:42.8	And over here, I see a bunch more people on golf carts. Is this the, what kind of
0:48.5	what area of the villages are we in now? Is this the, this is the wealthy, this looks like a wealthier
0:54.3	area. The villages. I mean, you've got, yeah, you've got the big screened in porches,
1:01.9	looking out at golf courses. Obviously, the palm trees.
1:08.8	Hey, it's Ryan Grimm here, and on this episode of Deconstructed, I'm taking you to the villages,
1:13.1	a gigantic retirement community in central Florida owned by the Morse family.
1:18.1	Though the descendants of the patriarch Howard Schwartz, who founded the community
1:21.6	in the 1970s as trailer park, and they draw a lot of water in central Florida today.
1:30.8	So you can't tell if the golf carts are golfers or
1:35.0	current golfers are on their way to golfing, or just the way that they get around here.
1:38.7	What's over there is at a giant pickleball assemblage.
1:42.3	I'm driving around with my brother. Our dad is a snow bird in the villages,
1:46.4	which has passed a huge sign describing the villages as, quote,
1:49.5	a Florida's friendliest hometown with a nice little exclamation mark.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Intercept, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Intercept and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.