Jobs, Woods, Waters, and the Truth — We Can't Protect Any of It While We're at War With Ourselves

The future of this county is still ours to write — but only if we put down the noise and pick up the real work while there’s still time

The world outside Citrus County is not slowing down and it is not being gentle. Forces that were set in motion far from here — in state capitals, in corporate boardrooms, in global markets — are bearing down on this community whether we are ready for them or not. They will shape our economy, our environment, our quality of life, and the opportunities available to our children. And here is the hard truth: how we respond to those forces depends almost entirely on whether we can get on the same page about what we are trying to protect and what we are willing to build. Right now, we can't. We are too busy fighting each other over stories that were never fully told, too distracted by noise manufactured for clicks and outrage to focus on what actually matters. That has to stop — because the window for getting this right is not staying open forever, and this community is too important to lose to its own dysfunction.

The only way through what's coming is together — and that requires something we are currently in short supply of: honest, reality-grounded consensus about what we're actually trying to build and what we can protect.

A community cannot survive on good intentions alone. It needs jobs. Real ones. Ones that pay enough to cover rent and groceries and a car repair and a doctor's visit without choosing between them. Jobs that give people a reason to get up in the morning, a place to be, a sense that they are building something — for themselves, for their families, for this place.

That is not a political statement. It is a statement about how human beings work. When people have meaningful work, families are more stable. When families are stable, children do better in school. When people have economic footing, the rates of addiction, of alcohol abuse, of domestic violence, of untreated mental illness — all of the things that quietly drain a community of its energy and hope — those rates go down. Not because work is a magic cure, but because dignity and purpose and a paycheck are load-bearing walls in a person's life, and when they're missing, everything else becomes harder to hold up.

Citrus County knows this. You can see it in the communities that are struggling and in the families quietly holding on. We don't need a study to tell us. We live here.

That's why construction matters so much here — and why we feel its absence so acutely. We lost Duke Energy and we have not replaced it. That was not just a facility closing. That was thousands of direct and indirect jobs, millions of dollars in local tax revenue, and an economic anchor that had held this community steady for decades — gone. The hole it left has never been honestly reckoned with, and we are still living in it.

A framing crew, a plumbing contractor, an electrician pulling wire on a new job site — these are Citrus County people earning real wages that go straight back into this community. Construction jobs are skilled, they pay well, and they cannot be sent overseas. Every responsible project built here is someone's mortgage, someone's stability, someone's reason to stay.

But construction alone is not the whole economy of this place and it never has been. The fishing fleets working these waters, the farms keeping land open, the small businesses that have served their neighbors for decades — these are not background scenery. They are the foundation. Their dollars stay here. Their owners live here. A shrimper still making a living on these waters, a farmer still selling at the local market, a family hardware store on the same corner for thirty years — these things matter in ways that don't show up in an economic development report but that every longtime resident understands in their bones.

We can have both. Growth and clean springs. New construction and working waterfronts. New families and old ways of life. But only if we are honest with each other and only if we are paying attention to what actually matters.

And right now, we are not. Too much of what passes for public debate here is built on fragments — a piece of a public record stripped of context, a question posed without an answer, speculation spread across social media before anyone involved has had a chance to speak. The gotcha lands first. The truth, if it comes at all, arrives later to a fraction of the audience. And in that gap, neighbors turn on each other, trust erodes, and energy that should be solving real problems gets burned up on noise.

The decisions being made right now — about what gets built, what gets protected, who gets to participate in this economy — will shape this county for a generation. Those decisions deserve serious, fully-informed conversation. Not half-truths. Not public records with no context weaponized to score points. We need to get back on track.

This county — its workers, its fishermen, its farmers, its families — deserves that. Let's get to work.