By Ken Jackson and Fallan Patterson
Staff Writers

The two seats for Kissimmee City Commission heated up after the incumbents for seats 1 and 3 chose to pursue other political avenues. With six candidates for seat 3 and four individuals vying for seat 1, voters have many choices at the ballot Aug. 14 for the primary, when these seats will be decided, unless it goes to a run-off in the November election.

The next Kissimmee city commissioner for seat 3 will come from a six-way race that will be decided in Aug. 14’s election — or in the November general election if none of the six gets 50 percent of the vote.

They are vying to fill the seat of Jerry Gemskie, who is running for a spot on the Osceola County Commission.

Of the six, only one has run for an elected public office before — Jaime Matos ran for the commission in 2006 and 2008.

His opponents this year are former corrections officer Hector Rodriguez, community activists Druvonda Woods and Carmelo Garcia, ministry advocate Mike DeLong and lifelong resident and business owner Sara Shaw.

Matos, who has been working to start up his own private investigation agency after many years spent in municipal services in Orange County overseeing construction projects, said his biggest concern in the community is the recent struggle small businesses in Kissimmee have to survive and remain open without moving.

Raising the profile of the U.S. Highway 192 corridor is high on his priority list. He favors creating themes in zones, like gearing the stretch from Valencia College to Michigan Avenue toward student-based retail, and linking the area between Orange Blossom Trail and John Young Parkway to the medical industry and clients of nearby Osceola Regional Medical Center.

“I hope to work with the county to connect 192,” he said. “I would like to see my city gleam.”

Matos gave an example — trying to build a shed on his property and needing two months to complete the permit and licensing steps — as to how city services can be improved.

Matos advocates revising city codes and services to lure new industry to the area.

“I am the only candidate looking to overhaul all of that,” he said. “Our city can be more competitive and competing to attract business.”

Other tenets of his campaign include adding development to Martin Luther King Boulevard, along the Oak Street curve south of U.S. Highway 192 and in the old Hansel power plant.

Rodriguez said his career in law enforcement helps connect him to those he hopes elect him.

“I can relate to the citizens,” he said. “What I want to give to this city has no price; if I’m elected I will lose one of my pensions, so this isn’t about Hector Rodriguez.”

He said his service to local services pension board, allocating millions in retirement funds, gives him insight on the city’s budget. To save money, he’s for consolidating services with Osceola County, including police and fire services.

“If you can work out a way, without prejudice, who has jurisdiction in an emergency, we can save taxpayers a lot of money.”

Rodriguez sees Kissimmee’s Gateway Airport as an untapped resource and a “gold mine as a targeted industry area.”

Woods listed wealth of experience serving citizens on boards including the local Community Development Block Grant steering committee and housing and community redevelopment advisory boards.

“I know the mechanics of our the city and system works, and I feel I’m the best informed citizen,” she said. “The city has done well — Mark Durbin did a great job grooming Mike Steigerwald — but it could use a fresh point of view. I know what it’s like to want to be included without being exclusive.”

Woods said the key to changing the professional face of the city is to bring in sustainable businesses, and making that possible by, if feasible, easing the permitting process and offering temporary impact fee amnesty to new business.

“We must diversify from the service industry,” she said. “I’d like to see us lean on the medical community going into all that new construction in Lake Nona.”

DeLong, who works professionally overseeing the Kissimmee Area Ministerial Association (formerly Daily Bread), said that observing how city and county commissions act made him realize that his opportunity to get involved in the process is now.

“I already work with a pretty broad cross-section of the community,” he said. “Churches move just as slow as government.”

His main tenets involve creating Community Redevelopment Associations in the Orange Blossom Trail and 192 corridors to manage their needed face lifts.

“West 192 has to be well thought out,” he said. “In many areas we have to ask who we are as a city to encourage the expansion of business development.”

He also favors reducing the roadblocks standing in the way of businesses to start up in those areas, and working to keep utility costs low in the newly created CRAs to give Kissimmee a competitive advantage over other communities for job creation.

“I feel like the game-changer for Kissimmee is the Beaumont area,” DeLong said.

Garcia, who runs the local Chaplains in Action outreach group and works with the Keep Our Kids Safe initiative, said he’s running to “Be the difference, not make a difference.”

“I bring fresh, new, innovative ideas and a younger perspective,” he said.

His ideas for the city budget include streamlining city services rather than consolidating them with the county, and lowering property taxes while slightly raising gas taxes.

His solution for the 192 corridor, aside from offering temporary breaks on impact fees, rents and taxes in that area is to offer exclusivity to Kissimmee-based contractors for contacts on work based in that area.

“Fire the rest,” he said. “We have sitting commissioners with companies outside of the county. This community is suffering.”

Shaw’s local claim to fame is serving as the impetus for changing the Kissimmee Utility Authority’s policy of assessing a second deposit on perceived at-risk residents, and making paying that unscheduled deposit contingent on keeping electric service turned on. Much of her platform involves making and keeping KUA more transparent, like making its board meetings televised via Access Osceola and amending its Board of Directors selection process, which currently involves nominating themselves to the City Commission and getting its approval.

“I’m one person trying to make a difference; there needs to be transparency in how they spend the money we give them,” Shaw said. “We need for them to be more accountable.”

She serves on the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board, which have directed the near-completion of the Lakefront Park project ahead of schedule and under its $30 million budget.

Shaw is in favor of relaxing permit standards and some of the red tape involved in putting businesses into the many empty storefronts in the city.

“It is so hard to start a business right now. We need Toho Water Authority and KUA to work with them,” she said. “We can offer incentives for improving businesses and work with the signage ordinances to make it easier for businesses to advertise.

“I’d also like to go to the banks holding these empty buildings about their upkeep, and see if it’d be feasible to knock them down after a certain time.”

All of the candidates favored replacing outgoing Kissimmee Police Department chief Fran Iwanski with an internal candidate already in the organization.

“To not do so is a slap in the face to the best of the best in KPD,” Matos said.

“Identify the shining star in the department. I would view that person as the first candidate,” Rodriguez said.

“NYPD promotes from within,” Garcia said. “I think it’s a bad idea to bring someone in from outside.”

All candidates view the city’s new red light cameras as a great deterrent, but opinions vary on how the ticket program works. Matos and Rodriguez mention the vast amounts of money that leave the city to keep up the network and fund state-mandated programs, but Woods and Shaw don’t mind that.

“The focus needs to be on safety and getting people to obey the lights,” Woods said. Shaw, who said she was hit on her bike by a red light runner in downtown Kissimmee as a teen, thinks the system works fine.

“If you save one life, it becomes worth it,” she said. “The city doesn’t need to profit.”

DeLong and Garcia favor lengthening yellow lights as an alternative.

“I just think there’s other issues to deal with first,” DeLong said.

Seat 1

Unemployment, economical development and other factors effected by the economy concern Dave Scherer, Jose Alvarez, Debra Rosado and Robert Secrest, who each want to see more medical and manufacturing companies make Kissimmee their home.

Their focus, however, remains on existing businesses who they said need support and lower regulations to flourish and expand, allowing them to hire more employees.

“We owe it to the existing businesses to help them any way we can as long as it doesn’t take away from taxpayers,” Scherer said.

Alvarez and Rosado want to speed up signage regulation and the permitting process and look at the city’s codes for possible updates while Secrest wants impact fee reform.

“That’s a pretty big check to come up with,” Secrest said of impact fees. “It’s a discouraging factor.”

Scherer is the only candidate against red light running cameras, which he called “intrusive,” adding he’d rather see the city employ an extended red light system similar to Europe where all lights are red at the same time, rather than immediately switching between the directions.

“Too much of the money goes back to the company so we (the city) get a small percentage,” he said. “Eventually people are going to forget they’re there.”

Alvarez agrees with the city’s decision to install the cameras since he said they are additional eyes for police.

“They’re needed because people tend to forget red means stop,” he said. “They could kill someone and we can’t put law enforcement officers on every corner.”

Rosado was the only candidate who emphasized rebuilding the U.S. Highway 192 corridor to make it more pedestrian friendly while restoring the city’s tourism reputation by enticing larger hotels with conference rooms to come to Kissimmee, attracting a variety of clientele.

“We’re kind of sitting on something big here,” she said. “It hurts me to hear the way people talk about Kissimmee now, calling it ‘cowtown’ and ‘ghost town’.”

All candidates were open to the idea of consolidating services with the county but which services they were willing to partner with varied.

Secrest wants to see better partnership between the Kissimmee Fire Department and Osceola County Fire Rescue, citing how some boundaries make better sense for the closer fire department to respond, if possible, if they are closer and bill the other entity.

Scherer, Alvarez and Rosado agreed the building departments could be merged for financial reasons and faster services, Scherer is also interested in exploring streamlining the emergency dispatch systems.

“If they’re closely related, I think it would be good budget-wise,” Rosado said.

Alvarez, a realtor; Scherer, a commercial real estate appraiser; and Rosado, who runs a family services company, all own their own businesses and track their own budgets. Secrest, a college student planning to attend law school next year, previously handled the budget as treasurer of the Student Government Association at Valencia College.

All are confident of their abilities to understand and move the city’s budget forward.

“Just because we have a larger amount of money we’re working with doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tighten our belts,” Alvarez said.

However, none of the candidates would readily agree to a property tax increase if it was recommended in the near future.

“That definitely wouldn’t go over with most people,” Secrest said. “Raising property taxes would hurt people because they’re not making more money. I basically promise not to raise property taxes.”

Early voting for the election primary runs from Aug. 4 to Aug. 11 with the primary scheduled for Aug. 14.