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Editor, The Beacon:
Thank you, Greg Heeter, who submitted a letter in the May 6-12 edition of The Beacon regarding quality of life in DeLand. I totally agree with his comments.
I relocated to DeLand in July 2019 from Sunrise, Florida, which is in Broward County. It was a city of maybe 13,000 when I moved there in the early 1970s as a teenager. It is now a city of about 95,000 residents with expensive cookie-cutter homes, high rents, crime, traffic, and rude, obnoxious residents.
It is a city surrounded by Fort Lauderdale and many other overcrowded cities with the same issues, creating a toxic environment to live in. Mayor Apgar and City Commission and Planning Board, please do not allow that to be the fate of DeLand.
This is a great city that I enjoy being a part of. Its award-winning Downtown area and beautiful Stetson University campus are what attracted me to move here.
Sure we have our issues as all cities do, but don’t allow the quality of life for our residents to degrade over the years with uncontrolled excessive growth to make a buck. I have seen the traffic increase and wonder how the infrastructure can handle it all.
The Lincoln Oaks homes being built on Plymouth Avenue are a great example. How many more of those communities can we expect to see over the years? Goodbye to all the animals and great green space we have, I am afraid.
So Mayor Apgar and City Commission and Planning Board, wake up and please rethink how we grow the city before it’s too late, or else shame on you.
Tracey Colton
DeLand
