By MACY V. BUTLER
The Ledger, 4/30/2000

The Ledger published comments from Dr. Frank Fischer, implementation chairman of "Our Future By Design: A Greater Winter Haven Community," in a guest column April 23.

In the column he writes about "Future By Design," a visioning effort started by some of the higher-profiled individuals in the Winter Haven community and partially funded with tax dollars.

He further states that the visioning process brought together citizens from every neighborhood and walk of life. As one of the original members of this process, I must differ with some of his comments.

I, too, was excited about the prospect of Winter Haven actively developing plans to make this a community inclusive of all residents. I attended four of these meetings with the hope that it would be a wholistic activity that would truly include everyone. I did not see that.

I have since talked to many others, who also stopped attending, about this process. Virtually all of us had reached the same conclusion: That this process is a farce.

They prepared a vision statement, which if it was true, would be a beautiful document. The vision statement refers to a diverse group of 150 "stakeholders" representing a cross-section of our community and articulating a broad range of perspectives, ideas and expertise.

I guess I don't know what they mean by a diverse group of stakeholders, because one of the reasons I stopped attending was because I didn't feel that the community was adequately represented and I stated that fact.

What I saw was basically the same group of individuals who already control what happens in Winter Haven, going through what I interpret as another self-serving ego trip of our local politicians.

What groups I did not see at the tables were the Asians, the Hispanics, the Haitians, the Indians and other diverse groups who live or work in Winter Haven.

The only Asian I saw was the hired consultant. How can they truly say this is diverse representation? Go to the schools or the department stores, there you will see just how diverse a community we really are.

When you have 60 to 70 white people and 25 black people sitting around tables planning the future of a community, how can you say that it is fairly represented? These are the very same people who are already in control. If they haven't made any substantive changes in the past 20 or 30 years, what makes you think they are interested in doing something now?

Dr. Fischer is probably a caring person, but he does not fully grasp what really needs to occur in Winter Haven. He mentions the establishment of two Community Redevelopment Agencies (CRA) in Winter Haven and the Front Porch Initiative in the Florence Villa community.

None of these will occur if the city commissioners do not put the required revenues in place to create opportunities for the CRA or Front Porch Initiative to succeed.

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Macy V. Butler is president of the NAACP Winter Haven branch.