Feasting on Chick-fil-A emails

We interrupt our Sunshine Week of scintillating public records chat for a word about Chick-fil-A.

First, a little history about emails and me.

We media types started to see early on how valuable these things could be. But it wasn’t until the Brown Schools debacle that I really saw their potential.

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Brown Schools of Florida was a residential treatment facility for kids, mostly teenagers, having trouble with gangs, drugs, fighting, and mental illness. Brown Schools, headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, bought an old psychiatric hospital in Beverly Hills adjacent to Black Diamond. 

Without getting into the weeds, we received a fair amount of documentation that showed the school wasn’t doing right by these kids. I began requesting and receiving documents from the county and state showing all sorts of trouble, including teens busting through the ceiling tiles and escaping to the roof.

While we had a lot of documentation, emails kept the story fresh. These were emails between Department of Children & Families inspectors and their bosses.

Well, that turned into quite the story. It went on for months and once concluded, Brown Schools closed shop in 2004 and went back to Fort Lauderdale. The state changed its rules about handing out contracts for these programs, and the Chronicle won a couple of very cool journalism awards for our coverage.

(By the way…the former Brown School is now the Citrus County Resource Center. Feel free to use that as a conversation starter.)

I was hooked on emails.

Sometime later, I picked up the County Commission beat from another reporter. He had an arrangement with the county administration to review emails each week that were printed out and placed in a folder.

Shortly after taking the beat, the county hired its most colorful administrator, Anthony Schembri, who allowed me to shadow him on his first day on the job. I told him about the email paperwork and asked if there was a way for me to get emails forwarded to me.

He went a step further. Schembri set up a system where emails he sent and received were automatically blind-copied to me. Boy. Talk about a kid in the candy store. I sat at my desk and didn’t move for two solid weeks reading Schembri’s emails.

Irony: Schembri lost his job due to something at his homeowner’s association meeting, which I learned by — you guessed it — reading the administrator’s email. The new administrator dropped my email arrangement in his first minute on the job.

Scott Adams got me on my latest kick of reading commissioner emails. Adams was elected to the County Commission and created quite a ruckus, so I started requesting his emails every week. That morphed into getting the chairman’s weekly emails and then, with Just Wright Citrus, a random commissioner of the week. This year I’ve added Chairman Holly Davis’ batch each week with the random commissioner.

They are a treasure trove of information. Like the one I saw Monday about Chick-fil-A.

A company wants the County Commission to approve its planned unit development (PUD) on C.R. 491 next to the Tidal Wave car wash. I’ve written about the politics of this particular site, and there’s an application pending to divide the property into individual commercial lots.

One of those lots is a “proposed” Chick-fil-A. The developer wants a deviation on a parking rule to allow for fewer spaces and arranged in a way that the county staff doesn’t support.

Chick-fil-A and the developer sent letters to the county last week. 

“We are excited about the potential of bringing Chick-fil-A to Lecanto and look forward to the positive impact we can make in the community,” a restaurant official wrote.

But they made it clear — give us the parking we want, or no Chick-fil-A.

“As it stands, the Chick-fil-A site plan is not currently before the Commission — nor will it be if the PUD that is before you is not approved as requested,” the developer wrote.

Ignore the jargon. The message is clear: It’s a demand.

I don’t know whether Chick-fil-A deserves a break on parking spaces or not, but this shakedown approach is insulting.

Someone should write an email about it.

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