Make commissioners own Conservation Collier decision

The home on Shady Lane was the neighborhood centerpiece.

The lawn was green and tidy. The silver maple by the driveway was trimmed by professionals. The gorgeous red leaves it displayed each October were raked and bagged before they turned brown and blew across the street onto the neighbor’s yard.

The driveway was regularly pressure-cleaned. The window screens had no tears. The windows went smoothly up and down, and the couple who had lived there for 30 years could open them and sleep naturally each spring and fall.

When needed, their furnace fired up. The air conditioning blew cold because it received regular servicing.

The home’s owners took pride in the fresh paint, the creosote-free chimney, the firewood stacked well away from the house where it wouldn’t attract termites.

There were no cobwebs in the corners, no dust bunnies under the bed, and no surprises in the mail because the couple managed their finances the way they maintained their home. When they moved in, they set up a budget. A small piece of each paycheck went into a fund to pay for the paint and the furnace and the tree surgeon and everything else that kept the little house on Shady Lane the envy of the neighborhood.

Then the husband died. The couple had been frugal, and never dipped into the house fund for nights on the town or more car than they needed or vacations they couldn’t afford. So the widow was able to keep the house up, but she grew lonely.

Along comes Bill,  silver-tongued and quick-stepping. He made her believe in possibilities.

So she married him.

He told her that taking money out of the home fund to honeymoon in Branson made perfect sense.

He told her that putting less aside for a few years to buy a motorhome for the trip was worth it.

So they went to Branson, and the wife agreed that the trip was fun, although she wished she’d gone years earlier when she could have seen Conway Twitty instead of the Baldknockers.

And she wished, when she got back and found the maple tree had knocked off the corner of the house when the storm had come through, that there had been more money in the home account to cover what the insurance didn’t.

And she wished the next year that she hadn’t agreed to put less into the fund to cover maintenance because there were holes in some of the screens and the paint was beginning to peel, and when they turned on the furnace for the first time that October it blew cold air.

She began to blame Bill for robbing from something that was supposed to be untouchable, and putting in less than she knew, in her heart, that they needed to keep up with the changes time and wear bring.

He promised they’d catch up, but they never did. And she began to hate him for that.

The four commissioners who voted to rob Conservation Collier of the money residents decided to save to keep their home a source of pride have more than a little in common with Ol’ Bill.

They, too, promise to pay it back. They, too, say saving less is temporary. They want us to forget that they gave $15 million to the corporation building the Great Wolf Lodge here and tell us they needed the money to pay lifeguards.

I think we should look at them the way the nice lady on Shady Lane looks at Ol’ Bill. Make them own what they did, no matter how much they try to spin it.

Collier County Waterkeeper Ray Bearfield is a former newspaper editor, environmental writer and fishing guide whose focus today is helping Southwest Florida residents keep their water drinkable, swimmable, and fishable. Contact him at ray@collierwaterkeeper.org

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Make commissioners own Conservation Collier decision