Time to Party!
Celebrate Community & Greenspace at the Winter Park Land Trust Kickoff
Feb. 28 – Farmers Market – 6 pm
The Winter Park Land Trust inaugural kickoff event at the Farmer’s Market on Thursday, Feb. 28 at 6:00 pm promises to be one great big party. There will be music, refreshments and something for everyone. Everyone is welcome – so come on out!
What’s a Land Trust?
Learn how land trusts work around the United States and hear about the Winter Park Land Trust’s vision to help plan, expand and protect urban parks and green space throughout Winter Park and surrounding communities.
Featured speakers from the City of Winter Park, the City of Orlando, the Alliance of Florida Land Trusts, the Nature Conservancy and, of course, the Winter Park Land Trust, will be joined by 15 groups at information tables, where representatives will be on hand to discuss their visions for urban parks and greenspace in Winter Park.
Participating Groups at Information Tables
City of Winter Park
City of Orlando
Nature Conservancy
Alliance of Florida Land Trusts
1000 Friends of Florida
Rollins College
University of Central Florida
Stetson University
Winter Park History Museum
Mead Botanical Garden
Audubon Society
Florida Native Plant Society
Winter Park Garden Club
IDEAS for Us
Winter Park Land Trust
Please forward this announcement to everyone you know who has an interest the future of parks and green space in Winter Park.
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By: Anne Mooney
Anne Mooney has assumed the editorship of the Winter Park Voice from founding editor Tom Childers.
Mooney got her start in New York as a freelance line editor for book publishers, among them Simon & Schuster and the Clarkson Potter division of Crown Books. From New York, she and her husband and their year-old toddler moved to Washington, D.C., where the two ran a newswire service for Harper’s magazine. “We called it Network News,” said Mooney, “because it was a network of the Harper’s writers, whose work we edited into newspaper style and format and sold to papers in the top U.S. and Canadian markets. We were sort of like a tiny UPI.”
The newswire ceased operation with the death of Mooney’s first husband, but Mooney continued to write and edit, doing freelance work for Williams Sonoma cookbooks and for local publications in D.C.
In 2005, Mooney moved to Winter Park, where she worked as a personal chef and wrote a regular food column for a south Florida magazine. She took an active interest in Winter Park politics and was there when the Winter Park Voice was founded. She wrote occasional pieces for the Voice, including the Childers bio that this piece replaces.
The Winter Park Voice is one of a large number of “hyper-local” publications that have sprung up across the U.S. in response to the decline of the major daily newspapers and the resulting deficit of local news coverage. The Voice’sbeat is Winter Park City Hall, and its purpose is to help the residents of our city better understand the political forces that shape our daily lives.
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The words “Land” and “Trust” do not go together on the Winter Park City Commission.
Why then is the newly formed private land trust associating themselves with the land robbers? And not only associating, but INVITING them to speak?
Is the Land Trust merely a front for Winter Park City Commission’s take parks from the residents and give it to developers scam?
Great comment. Even Randy Knight is speaking.
Many thanks to Sandy Womble for her latest investigative reportage at WPV on FB – incredible documentation of one of the candidate’s desire to sell the library to Rollins and also to sell the City Hall site.
WP politics seems like variation of Arthur Miller’s “Some Kind of Love Story,” adapted as a film “Everybody Wins” in 1990 — about small town corruption in which almost every elected official, officials of local institutions, lawyers, judges, and many residents residing in the town all part of a deep web of corruption.
Looking at other film noir and real life histories of local corrupt politics to try understand what has happened to WP. It is astonishing how it has transformed from the WP of the gracious Keatings to a contemporary Tammany Hall.
Compared to L.A. and Las Vegas, WP corruption seems superficial, but there’s an obvious “pay to play” pattern, and a few payer/players dominate the city’s boondoggles and zoning decisions, to a degree that has become widely observable.
Correction: Meant to write the “gracious McKeans,” not the “Keatings.”
The timing could not be more awkward. The WPLT should have chosen a kick off date following the election and any potential run-off. Events such as this should be auspicious, not events of extreme political theater. It has been years in the making, six weeks later and there would less potential for political opportunism.
Voters who do their homework should be able to easily spot the real deal despite the timing.
All candidates will profess to love park space, open spaces, tree canopies, and connectivity. But if a candidate does not live what he professes to love, has never had dirt under his nails, ridden a bike or taken a kayak tour- anywhere- ever-look closely. Examine all of the available information.
The Land Trust is a good thing and a long time in coming. But there are wolves in sheep’s clothing out there to be sure. Embrace the land trust, not the wolves.