MILT THOMAS

If our beautiful city’s forefathers were looking down on us today, I wonder what they would think?

Yes, back in their day, servicemen training to become pilots came here and took our original slogan, “Where the tropics begin,” adding “…and civilization ends.” Then there is the term “Zero Beach.” It’s been around a long time, possibly first uttered by Vero Man and his prehistoric hunting party as they sat around a fire eating mastodon steaks and swatting mosquitoes.

But those negative characterizations never bothered the pioneers who built our town out of a swamp. They wanted to create a better life for themselves and their children and they did a mighty darn good job of it. Each successive generation carried the idea of Vero forward, building on the work of those before them.

Vero Beach has always been an example of what can happen with good management. The county that Vero created (yes, it was Vero Beach city officials who lobbied the state legislature to form a new county) has grown from 18,000 when I came here to 140,000 plus people. And Florida has grown in that time from the 17^th largest state, to now approaching the third largest.  Yet, people still move here for the same reasons my family moved here more than 50 years ago.

People today don’t move to Ft. Lauderdale for the same reason they did back then. In fact, they move to Vero from Ft. Lauderdale to recapture the charm of those days.

I was up in Melbourne the other day and driving from I-95 into downtown I noticed it was almost solidly commercial. Then coming to the Vero Beach exit, driving to downtown, I saw much more balanced development. You might ask, why is that? The answer is good planning. It is also because we took part in the comprehensive planning process, whereas Melbourne’s zoning occurred before that process began back in the 80’s.

Getting back to our forefathers looking down at Vero Beach today, if I were them, I would be awfully upset. Our government now is in the process of slashing budgets and literally gutting what those people built. The cemetery where most of them are buried looks neglected and the slashers are talking about even selling it.  Have you visited our once immaculate city parks lately? Morale among city employees is probably at its lowest point in our history. It is difficult to do a job with great pride when the slashers are looking to eliminate that job.

Vero Electric was once a source of great pride, an ingenious way to provide income to the city so it could maintain the high level of services our residents have grown to expect. Now it is being sold, slashing that source of income, in a deal the details of which have only been revealed in this publication. The newspaper we once called our own, the Press Journal, is now a regional paper, a daily with less local news than the many years it was a weekly in a much smaller town.

Some of our current community’s leaders are more famous for their desire to tear down our forefathers’ legacy, not for building onto it. They even scoff at attempts to plan where our city and county will be in the next 50 years.

If I were to pinpoint when this change in attitude occurred, I would be inclined to say it blew into town after the 2004 hurricanes. That’s when opportunists came to Vero Beach to make their fortunes in real estate speculation, not interested in preserving or improving what is unique about our community. They pushed for changes in prohibitions against short-term rentals, turning dog parks into boathouses and promoting commercial development on the waterfront. Sure, change is inevitable. We all change as we get older. But while some changes are part of the aging process, others are signs of disease.

We can’t let this disease destroy the decades of good management by people like  the Giffords, the Holmans, the MacWilliams, the Schumanns, the Barbers, the Loys, and so many more, all contributing to a dream of building a unique community for future generations.

It’s raining right now as I write this and I can’t help but think of all those great people watching what is happening to their city, shedding tears over what once was.