Thursday night’s regularly scheduled Fruitland Park Commission meeting has been canceled, which means Rick Ranize and Ray Lewis have attended their final meeting as commissioners.
The commission’s next meeting is set for Nov. 8 – two days after the Nov. 6 general election. That means the next time the commission gathers at city hall, two Villages residents will make history by becoming the first representatives from Florida’s Friendliest Hometown to serve on the governing body.
At that historic meeting, Patrick DeGrave, of the Village of Pine Ridge, will replace Ranize as the District 1 commissioner. DeGrave has 39 years of local government experience, four college degrees and has been an adjunct faculty member at Concordia University in Wisconsin for the past 24 years, now exclusively in the online program since retiring to Florida.
The District 2 seat will be filled by one of two Villagers – Fred Collins, of the Village of Pine Ridge, or John Mobilian, of the Village of Pine Hills. Those two will battle it out at the polls on Nov. 6 to see who will replace Lewis.
Mobilian and Collins advanced to the general election after garnering the most votes in the Aug. 28 primary election. Mobilian received 47.77 percent, while Collins tallied 40.82 percent. They both defeated a third candidate, August Kellerman, who received just 11.41 percent of the votes cast.
Mobilian is a four-year Air Force veteran and a former Federal Express pilot. He has campaigned on bringing his “fiscal conservative” values to the commission.
Collins retired to The Villages three years ago after many years in corporate management and civil and highway engineering. He has vowed to make police protection a top priority if elected.
Neither Ranize or Lewis were eligible to run for those seats again, as neither lives in the district they represent. They both were elected in 2014 at the same time voters overwhelmingly approved an amendment to divide the city into five districts. That decision made them one-term commissioners in their respective districts.
The final meeting for Ranize and Lewis, which was held Oct. 11, was a monumental and sometimes heated gathering that saw the commission officially end the city’s tenure with Police Chief Michael Fewless, who was forced to temporarily leave his post in August over an issue with the Florida Retirement System (FRS).
Fewless, who retired from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and had been lauded for his performance as chief on many occasions, was hoping to come back under a third-party contract.
Ranize made a couple of impassioned pleas to bring Fewless back, saying the mistake that was made with originally hiring him and allowing him to partake in a different retirement plan – a breach of FRS rules – was a “clerical error” that “sits squarely on the shoulders” of the city.
“What we did with the chief tonight is just shameful,” Ranize said after that meeting. “He came here knowing all the problems from the past and he changed the culture of our police department. He brought us to where we now have people wanting to come work for us.”
Lewis, who was attending his first meeting after suffering a heart attack in September, cast one of three votes against bringing Fewless back. He praised him for his performance as chief but expressed concerns with the amount of money the city might have to pay back to FRS as a result of the mistake.
Lewis said City reasurer Jeannine Racine had suggested that amount might be in the neighborhood of $140,000, but City Manager Gary La Venia said the final number wouldn’t be known for some time, adding that so far, the city has received a bill for $69,000 connected with retirement money Fewless received from 2011-15. And he added that the city’s insurance carrier had advised him not to pay the bill until the issue is completely sorted out.