For the second year in a row, former mayor Chris Bell voted against having Chris Cheshire lead the City Commission.
Cheshire was selected by the majority of his fellow commissioners on Thursday night to serve a fourth year as the city’s mayor. Vice Mayor John Gunter, who has been on the commission for 25 years, also was reappointed and said he was honored to serve because it might be his last term on the commission.
Bell, who also has served on the commission for 25 years and was a longtime mayor until redistricting took place in 2014 because of the expansion of The Villages into the city, said he voted against Cheshire again this year because the commissioners are supposed to take turns serving as mayor.
“It’s nothing against our current mayor,” Bell said. “I talked to quite a few people and assured them that the mayor was going to be selected on a rotating basis. So sooner or later, their district would actually be represented by the mayor.”
For his part, Cheshire said he’s honored to serve a fourth year as mayor and will continue to push for continued growth, commercial expansion and lower taxes. He said he believes there are plenty of opportunities ahead for the city, which can prosper with the correct kind of growth.
“I’m happy to continue serving the citizens of Fruitland Park and continue the way the city has been running,” Cheshire said. “Hopefully, we’re going to catch up with the growth and keep going. It’s a good streak and I want to make sure it continues. “
Cheshire is a longtime advocate of transparency in government and has been at the helm of the commission as it put the city’s checkered past behind it. Those past issues included costly lawsuits, accusations of corruption and police officers with alleged ties to the Ku Klux Klan, among other things.
“The city is looked upon a lot more highly than it was five, eight years ago,” said Cheshire, who was first elected in 2012. “For the police department, for the fire department and for the city in general, the level of respect is just much higher.”
Cheshire, a doctor of Oriental Medicine who owns Mulberry Integrative Medicine and Faeve Plant Therapies in The Villages along with his wife, Meredith, also led the commission through tumultuous budget hearings in 2018 that saw large crowds of Villagers raise issues about how the city was spending money, especially when it came to the millage rate and the budget for the new library. At two different meetings in September 2018, Cheshire spent quite a bit of time educating the audience on the city’s budget and why decisions were being made.
This past July, Cheshire oversaw the grand opening of the $3 million, 12,000-square-foot library as a large crowd gathered for the official ribbon-cutting ceremony. He said that having such an outstanding library facility would make the city an even more desirable choice for families moving to the area. And he expressed thanks to everyone who came out to welcome the new library to the city.
As vice mayor in December 2014, Cheshire unveiled an aggressive agenda for the coming year in a speech that took some commissioners by surprise. In that meeting, he made it clear that his priorities would center on the County Road 466A corridor, the city’s inadequate sewer treatment system, upgrading the volunteer fire department to professional status, improving public works, making changes in the police department as it geared up to provide protection in The Villages portion of the city, upgrading recreation facilities and programs to attract more working families and improving the city’s code enforcement efforts.
