Catchlight Crossings was a “throw in” from Universal way back in 2019 for Orange County granting them $125 million dollars for a new road. This was a pre pandemic makover for one of the most poorly advised expenditures of your tax dollars in recent history (story HERE).
And this week, they broke ground. Almost four years later.
During that span of time, hundreds of families have lost their homes (including myself) while the tourism industry continues to hoard the money you earned working in their hotels to pad their pockets.
Our children don’t have a place to live. But we’re getting a new convention center. We made sure to put that issue to bed before we broke ground on this overdue necessity.
And mind you, we’ve just broken ground on this project. We’ve still got a long time to go before there are people actually living in these homes.
While the construction is occurring, many of our lawmakers will be working with big tourism and real estate to continue to make this environment as inhospitable as possible to working Orlando families.
They’ve done so by fighting against fair rent measures. They’ve tried to raise your taxes to pay for your own public transportation improvements while the special interests that would also benefit contribute nothing.
Meanwhile plane load after plane load, in an airport also staffed by us, big tourism continues to profit with an outdated revenue structure that keeps us from spending the tourism development tax dollars that we are responsible for in the first place.
So, don’t fall for the fake heroics of those championing Catchlight Crossings. This was a distraction for a $125 million dollar gift you awarded them before the pandemic arrived.
And it will still be a long time before any of our neighbors can call that place home. How many more families will be homeless before then?
If you appreciate this message and want to support the blog, you can below.