Black leaders in Seminole want county to listen - Activists seek change in how officials are elected

Oscar Redden is angry about the growing drug and crime problem in his community and what he considers an anemic police response to it.

So when Seminole County leaders asked him and other voters to support a property-tax increase in part to build recreational trails, it seemed to him to be a frivolous expense when so many pressing needs were going unmet in the black community.

Redden said he wasn't about to vote to raise his taxes so that people could take an idyllic walk through nature when he couldn't walk down 13th Street in Sanford without being harassed by drug dealers.

He wasn't the only one to feel that way.

From church pulpits to e-mail blasts, word spread quickly through Seminole County's black community to vote down the trails measure. And on Election Day, 70 percent of voters in 10 predominantly black districts did just that, helping deal trail supporters an unexpected defeat.

Redden, who runs a program for recovering addicts, and other black community leaders say the vote was about more than trails. It was intended to send a clear message: Blacks in Seminole County demand to be heard.

"There's an old saying that, where there's smoke, there's fire," said Francis Oliver, a longtime black activist. "Well, there's a whole lot of smoking going on right now."

For the first time in more than a dozen years, black leaders are actively organizing to get county and city officials to take notice of their needs.

They say they are frustrated with a system that treats blacks like second-class citizens. Multimillion-dollar pedestrian bridges are being built in generally affluent areas while black communities are left to deal with poor drainage, crumbling or simply dirt roads and lax policing, they say.

Even when improvements are made, they are more likely to be funded with federal block-grant money, not local tax dollars, they say.

"We're considered to be a second-rate community and get second-rate funding," said Turner Clayton, president of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People of Seminole County.

If the referendum denial was a warning shot, blacks are now taking aim at the very system they say produces white elected officials who aren't responsive to the black community.

"Their constituency is well-represented," Clayton said. "We tend to be well-overlooked."

What's needed is a change in the way Seminole County commissioners are elected, Clayton said. Now, the five commissioners are elected countywide; single-member districts would provide the best chance for blacks and other minorities to have a voice, he said.

NAACP members are gathering information on single-member districts from surrounding counties, including Osceola, where a federal judge ruled the current system of countywide elections violates the U.S. Voting Rights Act because it dilutes the county's Hispanic vote.

A plan for Seminole County will be presented soon, Clayton said, and he hopes his group can work with county officials to get a single-member-district plan on the ballot.

That may be a formidable challenge.

Seminole County Commission Chairman Carlton Henley said he thinks single-member districts would be a mistake. Instead of improving minority representation, he said, they would encourage more parochialism and lead to less money for needier communities.

"You end up with an old-fashioned ward system," he said.

Clayton said he would rather see the issue put on the ballot voluntarily, but he did not rule out seeking changes through the courts. It wouldn't be the first time.

In 1992, Seminole County minority leaders sued for single-member districts, complaining that minorities were cut off from Republican-dominated county politics.

The suit was dismissed, however, on a technicality -- the wrong plaintiffs were named -- a problem that might have been easily corrected. It never was.

Fourteen years later, little has changed in the county's political landscape. White Republicans hold every seat on the County Commission, School Board and four of the five constitutional offices. The lone minority is Tax Collector Ray Valdes, a Hispanic Republican.

In the meantime, the county's black population has grown by 18,000 to more than 42,000, or about 10 percent of the population, according to the U.S. census.

Working in the system

Velma Williams is Seminole County's only black elected city or county official. She represents a predominantly black district in Sanford, which is the only city in the county that has single-member districts.

For the past eight years, she said, she has tried to effect change from within the system. "I traded in my civil-rights modus operandi when I took this job," she said.

But Williams and other black leaders concede she hasn't succeeded in getting enough done for her district. For example, a long-abandoned icehouse at the entrance to the Goldsboro community remains an eyesore and potential environmental hazard, they said.

They blame the current city administration for being unsympathetic to the community's needs, but they also blame themselves for not pushing the city to do more.

The mistake, Oliver said, is that they stopped pressing once Williams was elected. That is going to change.

"We've got to stand behind her," she said. "But somebody else has to step up, as well. The squeaky wheel gets the oil."

Oliver, Clayton and others are intentionally vague about what they have planned, but they hint that it won't be business as usual.

"I don't know; you might see them on the streets," Oliver said.

Leaders deny charges

County and city leaders deny black communities are treated differently.

At the county level, the lion's share of nearly $25 million in federal Community Development Block Grants since 1995 has gone into projects in the historically black communities of Midway, Goldsboro, Lockhart and Bookertown in and around Sanford and in Winwood near Altamonte Springs.

Sidewalk construction, drainage projects and a new community center in Midway speak to the county's commitment, Henley said. Officials are hoping to do the same in Bookertown, he added.

But black leaders say there's still a disconnect with elected officials who don't know their black constituency.

"Right now, we don't have anyone to take our issues to the table," he said. "No one is reaching out to our community."

Henley blames any disconnect on black community leaders, saying they have not contacted him with their concerns in the three years he has served as commission chairman.

"Come in, sit down and let's talk about it," he said. "If they've got an issue to put before the commission, I'll make sure they get heard."

The one thing both sides agree on is that issues of concern to the black community must be heard.

"The only time we get anything accomplished is when we complain," Clayton said. "From now on, instead of getting a pinch of the pie, we want to get our fair share of the pie."