News
Tony sticking up for us in the Gazette
A visit from
Tony Ferentino
At our last meeting on September 7th, we closed our meeting and let Tony Speak, like we always do for candidates that are running for office. We do not let them use time of the official Oaks Watch time because we are not a political venue.
But Tony is a very interesting man that is running for commissioner in Osceola County,for our district against Rick Arrington. He has some fantastic ideas and spoke about some of those ideas at the end of our meeting. Here is an article that appeared in a local news paper. He was very concerned for the item of the Funeral Home in this artical.
The statistics on the Osceola economy are looking dismal at best.
The light at the end of the tunnel has been continuously fading.
Unfortunately the County Commissioners have not paid
any attention on job growth or anything else to boost the Osceola
economy.
The problem lies on the Economic Development Department. They have
been ineffective in job creations and the commissioners know this. Imagine giving
$100,000 of our money to a company coming into our county that will
produce a whopping 20 jobs in three (3) years. Does
anyone see anything wrong with that? What about the existing companies
that have been here for decades and financial facing disaster?
Where is their help?
Can we blame Maria Toumazos for 100% of the problems? The answer
is NO!
The commission is the culprit. Chairman Arrington of the
BOCC should have taken the reins and addressed the economic issue our
county is facing. Instead he's concerned about how we are going to
pay for the infrastructure without collecting impact fees but yet, on
the other hand he wasn't concerned how we were going to fund Sun Rail.
He's very knowledgeable when it comes to burning the candle on both
ends, with no solutions to the problems we the residents are facing
today with no future plans in sight.
The ineffectiveness of Mr. Arrington as a chairman and as a commissioner
are being felt throughout the whole County.
We need someone that can take us to the next level and address the
economic issues. We don't need the same old rhetoric that has been
fed to us day after day.
Mr. Arrington has had issues with listening to his constituents.
He had a full house on the day the commission was addressing the issue
of the funeral home to be built across the street from
The Oaks subdivision. The
residents were telling him not to vote for it and he did the total
opposite. Putting a funeral home in between to restaurants
McDonalds and KFC is not a wise thing to do. Imagine taking your
children to McDonalds and while playing in the playground a coffin and
grieving family members come out. What do you do? How do you
explain that to children? They shouldn't be exposed to death at an
early age, they should just have fun. I feel that the residents of
the Oaks were NOT represented by their commissioner. I’m definitely
not against anyone opening up a business, but I’m sure there were other
properties available that weren’t next to restaurants and a subdivision
that was totally against it that could have been utilized.
I also believe that business at McDonalds and KFC will most likely have
sales decline when the funeral home is in full operation.
Next, look at the library situation. The county thought that if
they privatized the library system that they would save the taxpayers
$2.5 million annually. All of a sudden we find out that the
savings would be a mere $800,000 annually. Originally it was going to be
a savings of $12.5 million over a 5 year period. Now they
guesstimate $4 million over 5 years.
Why wasn't the study done earlier? What is the BOCC doing, playing
a guessing game? They should have done the study a lot sooner
looking into LSS.
Bottom line is do we need 4 more years of ineffective leadership?
Tony Ferentinos
Osceola County Commission Candidate
District 3