Winter Park residents may be surprised to learn our city is flush with cash. There are many opportunities to reallocate money we have been wasting. The reality is we can avoid tax and fee increases for years to come without impacting essential services!
One place we have lots of money (there are many) is in the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA). The current CRA fund balance includes about $9,000,000 of our tax dollars intended for projects that do nothing to help our residents. The CRA board (our city commission plus one member appointed by Orange County) can end CRA projects and the CRA itself, returning about $9,000,000 to the General Fund right now. Further, terminating the CRA would return more than $80,000,000 over the next 10 years to support our residents, instead of special interests.
As an example, the CRA just wasted about $1,000,000 on “Memorial Corner” with a life sized statue of MLK that has been panned nationally. A simple plaque would have been sufficient.
This is only one example of millions of wasted CRA tax dollars, leaving our residents exposed to tax increases to fund basic services while special interests get coddled.
Click here for the City website page to learn about the CRA.
Tell the city commission to terminate the CRA now.
Click the links below to understand why the CRA is a waste of our tax dollars that should be available to support essential services for our residents rather than special interests.
Commission Wants $84,000,000 of Your Money
CRA Projects in the Big Money Grab
Repeal CRA Expansion and Extension
This is a very serious issue Winter Park residents need to understand. Candidates for the March 2026 city commission election should make ending the CRA a key element of their platform.
The MLK statue in Winter Park is hideous. The “artist” intentionally created a disproportionately huge head, hand, and feet that are cartoonish. Could you imagine the outrage if Tom Brady’s new statue had one huge arm twice as big as the other, or Dale Earnhardt’s statue had a giant right foot? Memorial statues should be lifelike images so we can relate to one another as human beings. Winter Park commissioners need to wake up and understand that this statue may promote art, but turning Reverend King into an art object distorts and dishonors a hero.
The CRA law was designed to promote the clean-up of “urban blight” (slums) by laying the groundwork of future investment to replace the presence of substandard or inadequate structures, a shortage of affordable housing, and inadequate infrastructure. Can you find one example in the WP CRA in 2025 that is blighted? Our CRA has a Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Ruth’s Chris and on and on and on. Maybe the CRA bureaucrats, vendors and wannabe pols who benefit from the CRA consider a Nordstrom Rack, the off-price division of upscale Nordstrom’s Department Store, to be our version of urban blight.
The CRA has turned into self-perpetuating money machine that supports a bureaucracy, staffers and outside vendors. It’s a high-priced back scratching club.
While it has been a semi-success, (don’t ask Black Winter Parkers who live/lived on the West Side what they think about it) its day is over. In my opinion, it’s turned into an obscene scramble looking for projects to launder the tax receipts….. while staff and elected officials warn that a tax increase will likely be necessary next year. Maybe the CRA is THE reason we are facing a tax rate increase next year.
Exactly! I add that the incremental tax revenue contributed to the CRA over the years is purely a function of zoning changes that permitted New England Avenue improvements, Morse Blvd improvements and various condo, and apartment projects, etc. Those tax increments have nothing to do with the money the CRA has spent over the years. The same will be true of the expanded CRA area as there is no blight to improve. We already improved Fairbanks with sewers, underground electric, and road improvements.