Chris Cate: Welcome to the Fluent in Floridian podcast, featuring the Sunshine State’s brightest leaders talking about the issues most important to the people of Florida and its millions of weekly visitors. In this episode created by SalterMitchell PR, our executive producer, April Salter, the CEO of SalterMitchell PR, talks to Orlando Mayor, Buddy Dyer.

Chris Cate: Please be aware that this conversation includes details about the Pulse Nightclub shooting and may not be appropriate for a younger audience.

April Salter: Mayor Dyer, thank you so much for joining us on the Fluent in Floridian podcast today. We’re glad to have you.

Mayor Buddy Dyer: My pleasure. Thank you, April.

April Salter: You were born in Orlando and raised in Kissimmee. So, what was it like for you growing up in central Florida during the 1960s? Are there memories from your childhood or something that you can recall, and reasons that made you want to come back to Orlando after college, and call Orlando home?

Mayor Dyer: I was born in 1958, and if you lived in Kissimmee at that time, you had the choice of either coming to Orlando if you wanted to be born in a hospital, or you were born at home, so my parents chose to come up to what was then Orange Memorial Hospital. What’s been interesting for me, or fortunate, I served in the state senate, and the hospital that I was born in was in my senate district, and of course I’m Mayor of Orlando and that same hospital’s in the city of Orlando, so all of the elected offices that I’ve held, I actually was born within the district of the city.

That’s just coincidental, but I grew up in Kissimmee largely pre-Disney. My house was actually on State Road 192, which is the main drag that’s about seven lanes across now, when it was two lanes back then and not much traffic. There were 7500 total residents in the county, so about 3500 in Kissimmee, and 1200 – 1500 in St. Cloud, and there were only two towns. You pretty much knew everybody back then, and it was largely cattle country in Osceola. Osceola and Brevard really until you got over to the beach. And the Mormon property was the largest producer of calves in the country, still is.

My dad was a cattle trucker when I was growing up, and my mom eventually owned a small western wear store right on 192. My first job growing up was shoveling manure out of the back of my dad’s cattle truck. I got paid $2.50 for each bag, and I’ve used that line a long time about how it would be very well for life in politics, shoveling manure at a very young age.

But we experienced substantial growth. Disney opened when I was in the 9th grade, and we’ve had substantial growth from then until now. I went to Osceola High School, and that’s Kowboys with a K, and that was back when we had 276 graduates in my 1976 class. I was captain of the baseball team and MVP of the football team, so I was very involved in sports and social clubs. I was the president of the key club, and I don’t know why there weren’t that many kids from my high school that actually went to college, but I had this ambition to get to an Ivy League school. I always thought I’d try to go to Harvard, and when I got to be a senior I started looking at schools and decided that I would apply to Brown University, and I did, and I got in, and it was about as much of a cultural change or shock maybe, as you could possibly have.

Think about growing up in Kissimmee, a very small town in central Florida. People in the North look at Florida as pretty much one state, but we all know that Florida is many different states to different people, and central Florida was certainly more of the south than Miami was, and I was the only one from that part of the state that went to Brown that year. There were a number of guys that I got to know from Ft. Lauderdale and Miami, but to go to an Ivy League school from basically the background that I have, which was to say, lower middle class, was eye-opening.

I eventually hung out with John John Kennedy, he was on my rugby team, and people like Joanna DuPont, Vicky Cartier, so there were interesting people there, that’s for sure. And it really opened my eyes a lot. All of us that are in my age bracket, we only had three TV stations or three channels growing up, so there wasn’t any Internet, Al Gore hadn’t invented that yet, so you just didn’t have the type of worldwide exposure that our kids have now.

So it was just a great experience to interact with the people that I did.

April Salter: I can imagine. Did it help your reputation, coming from a small town like Kissimmee, that it was also home to Disney World?

Mayor Dyer: Well, I think that’s how everybody from the time it opened, cause when I travel now, it doesn’t matter, I could be traveling to the farthest corner of the earth, and I say Orlando, and people know what I’m talking about and where I’m talking about. They might not know Florida, but they know Orlando, so certainly that’s been a great benefit to me and to our community as a whole.

April Salter: Mayor, in 1992, you won the seat in the Florida senate, and that was actually the last time that the Democrats held the majority in the senate. You must have an interesting perspective from the years that you served in the senate, watching the Democrats go from majority to minority party. What was that like and what are your thoughts about the future balance of power between the Democrats and the Republicans in Florida.

Mayor Dyer: Let me, April, fill in one blank. So after Brown, I came back to Orlando and worked as a civil engineer for four years, civil environmental engineer, and eventually worked for a mining company up near Ocala, in the middle of Florida, that had the largest share in the capital market in the country. They mined a product called Calcium [inaudible 00:06:35] and I was their environmental engineer doing applications of that sort. But I saved enough money to put myself through law school, so I’m a University of Florida grad and I met my wife there, and we both came back to Orlando to practice law.

And I had the good fortune in 1992, you’ll recall, was a reapportionment year, so previously Orlando had largely had two state senate seats, and Tony Jennings and Rich Crotty were in those seats and during reapportionment, the population had grown so much in central Florida that they added a third seat. And they largely drew them in a fashion that two of the seats had a substantial majority Republican populations, the third seat, the new seat, had a largely democratic population, and I was fortunate enough, at 32 years old, to run for that new senate seat, and I was successful. So I went and was sworn into the senate in ’92, and that was the year that the senate was tied 20-20.

So there were 20 Republicans, there were 20 Democrats, the House was still slightly Democrat and of course, Governor Chiles was governor, so that was the first time that the Republicans had any sort of real power in Tallahassee. And the other interesting thing about the senate that year, because it was a reapportionment year there was a lot of change. There were 19 freshmen, so think about that. There were 19 freshmen out of the 40 members, and there were 20 Republicans, 20 Democrats.

So you know what though? It turned out it was probably the best two years I spent in Tallahassee because there was so much compromise and working together because of it being tied 20/20, you couldn’t do anything without agreement or consensus between the parties, and the house couldn’t do much. They could send stuff over but if there wasn’t agreement between Republicans and Democrats in the Senate, it simply didn’t happen. So we were the more important of the two bodies during that year and then in ’94 the Republicans gained a couple more seats and the Senate went Republican. I think that was then the last year that the house was Democrat and then the house went Republican the next go around.

The saving grace, at that point, was Lawton was still Governor, so we had a democratic governor and both houses Republican, which I happen to think, in my opinion, that having a split government works better than having it all in the control of one party, whether it’s Democrats or Republicans because generally, it forces you to work together. That isn’t happening in D.C. necessarily, but generally at the state or even local level having some representation and power from both sides, I think, is important.

One thing that’s interesting, I became the minority leader while Lawton was still the governor, and I did the last year of his term and then I did the first two years of Jeb’s terms, and it was a totally different situation because when I was the minority leader, we had enough Democrats in the Senate to sustain a veto. So we were 17 or 18 to 22 or 23, so when you have a democratic governor backing you up and telling the president of the senate, “Hey, have you checked this out with Buddy before you pass that?”

It made a huge difference and then when Jeb became governor, we became somewhat irrelevant in terms of party politics, but in that decade, it was still, people worked together or crossed party lines. I was a committee chair with a Republican president three of the years. I wasn’t when I was a democratic leader because that, you have to press for the opposition, but the other years, I was a committee chair, and the Republicans ran the senate.

April Salter: Yeah, how do you see the parties now in terms of the potential for the Democrats at some point to come back into power? What are your thoughts on that?

Mayor Dyer: You know, with the courts getting involved with drawing the senate and senate seats and the house seats and the fair districts legislation or constitutional amendment that was passed, I think that there is a lot better chance that Democrats are going to continue to make gains. They’ve got a long way to go in the house, but the senate is something that could go Democrat in one of the next two elections.

April Salter: Certainly interesting times, and going back, you became, in 2003 you won the Orlando Mayoral Race after three term Mayor Glenda Hood was appointed to Florida Secretary of State. Let’s talk a little bit about your work at the city of Orlando and what it’s like now to work on the local level for such a growing economy, such an important part of Florida versus looking at the whole state.

Mayor Dyer: It’s very gratifying. Working at the local level has been the best opportunity that I’ve ever had. It’s very, very rewarding. I was termed out in 2002 and I ran for Attorney General. I lost to a guy you may know, Charlie Crist, in a very difficult year for Democrats, and Bob Graham had asked me to come be his general counsel. He was gonna run for president and then he had some heart issues and eventually did not run, but I finished that race in November and for basically the month of November, most of December, I was a flag football coach for my six-year-old’s flag football team so I worked on creating plays and practicing with those guys, and took it easy and after the first of the year, I was gonna go to D.C., and Jeb appointed Mayor Hood to be Secretary of State so it created a vacancy. She had a year left in her term.

There were seven other people that had already geared up campaigns because she’d announced she wasn’t gonna run for re-election in 2004, but they had not anticipated that there would be a special election in 2003. So the Orlando City Council called a special election, let’s see, she resigned just before Christmas and they set the special election for the third week in January. So it’s a really short time period and I had been, at that point, in City Hall, I think, one time, and a lot of people started telling me that I needed to run for Mayor and I, never been in my game plan, never thought about local government, never been involved in it, like I said, I had been in City Hall once. But I had carried a lot of the city of Orlando’s legislation and watched out for their interest because 90% of the city was in my senate district. Not a lot more than the city of Orlando, but I was very comfortable and familiar with the city and the neighborhoods in the city.

So one morning at 6:30 AM, the minister of the largest African-American church in the city called me and said we just spent the last 30 minutes at our prayer rally praying for you to run for Mayor of Orlando. You’re the only person that we know that can walk in the west side of Orlando and just as easily in the east side of Orlando, and we’re in this together as a community. So that made a pretty big impact on me and I decided to run and I won the primary but not by enough to avoid a runoff and I won the runoff pretty handily.

So I’m going on a Tuesday, and I took office on a Wednesday, and you’ll remember that I didn’t have much local government experience, like none, zero. So I hit the ground with a very steep learning curve and didn’t get to do a formal transition. We transitioned while we were in office and I did have a transition team that worked for three months to make some recommendations, but I was doing a lot of on the job training during the course of that time, and I set up a, I read Rudy Giuliani’s book and set up a kind of cabinet form of government where all the department directors acted as cabinet members and I met with them two times a week to just understand what they were doing and I started this thing, modeled after Graham’s work-alongs, and after his work days, and I called them work-alongs, and every few weeks I do a work-along.

Work-along with the city employees to learn their job, so I really spent that whole first year learning how the city operated, what the jobs were that people do, what each of the departments did. So I didn’t travel anywhere, I didn’t do anything except keep my head in the city and learn from that, and it served me pretty well over the course of the next 16 years.

April Salter: That must have been a great experience. Were there any jobs that you did work along with that you thought gee, that’s a pretty great job, I’d like to do that if I weren’t mayor.

Mayor Dyer: Well, I figured out that all of my employees can do their job better than I can, and they enjoy that aspect, too. But the first thing I did was I rode the back of a garbage truck for a full day and it was before we had the mechanical hands, so it was jumping off and actually picking the garbage cans up and loading them in, putting them in the truck, and what I learned from that, it’s not the picking up the can that’s the thing, it’s the getting on and off the back of the truck several hundred times. So my hamstrings and glutes and stuff were sore after that day.

But I can tell you this, transitioning from being one member of 40 and then having a second body and not being able to immediately see the outcome of the things that you’re working on. It’s so different being at the local government level because I can just look out my office window where I’m sitting right now and see a lot of things that I’ve worked directly on to influence. The Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts is straight outside my window and I can see the cranes operating, building the second stage of that facility right now.

So it’s a lot more hands on and then I always tell people you can tell a good major if he’s willing to go to the local grocery store and not worry about all his constituents being there to complain.

April Salter: It takes a lot longer to shop. Mayor, you mentioned the Phillips Center and that is certainly one of many just dramatic improvements to the city of Orlando. Over the last decade or so we’ve really seen Orlando emerge as a truly world class city more than just Mickey Mouse, more than just Shamu, that people tend to think of around the world. We know in Florida that Orlando is just a hopping city with so much economic potential.

As you look at the specific venues that have been created, things like Camping World Stadium, the Amway Center, the Phillips Center, and even the growth of EA, why do you think that those venues are important for Orlando and for its future?

Mayor Dyer: We think that we have everything a really big city has now, we just don’t have it quite the same quantity. So when I first became mayor, the publisher of The Orlando Sentinel told me that she thought our community as a whole had a bit of inferiority complex and didn’t necessarily strive to be the best that we can be, and a number of years later, she came back and told me “I think things have changed.”

Everything we’re doing here in Orlando is world class and we expect to be world class and part of that is quality of life for residents, certainly, but it’s also an economic development strategy. There’s great mobility among young people, young smart entrepreneurial type of people and they can live pretty much anywhere they wanna live. So we wanna have a city where they wanna live and you have to have those types of amenities. If you put us up against a city that has a great performing arts center and professional sports and a great arena that attracts concerts and we didn’t have all that at the time, we aren’t gonna win a lot of the competitions to get the smart kids to come to our community.

So now we have the best arena in the country and I’d put our performing arts center up against any performing arts center, when we finish this next phase, in the world. Our football stadium, we did a 200-million dollar renovation and it’s NFL quality. We have the Pro Bowl now, every type of event you could think of to have and we have a major league soccer stadium, and it’s all within about a mile and a quarter along Church Street. So having a great sports and entertainment district in our downtown that is extremely attractive to downtown living. We’ve added SunRail so we have a rail system. A lot of the people that are a little bit younger than me don’t even have cars anymore. They use Uber, Lyft and whatever the public transportation is. So that’s important to have but it’s quality of life but it’s also making us an attractive community for people to either stay here after you graduate from UCF or move to our community.

April Salter: You know, thinking about those kind of wins that Orlando has had and the connecting of the dots that you’ve had to do in order to bring Orlando to where it is now, what do you think made those wins possible and what do you think other cities could learn from Orlando’s experience?

Mayor Dyer: So April, I would say that the unique character that Orlando has, or Central Florida has, is our ability to collaborate together. So all of those wins were made possible not by me, but by our community coming together and deciding we needed to have a medical school or deciding that we needed to have these three community venues, or that we needed to have SunRail and we put aside partisan differences, we put aside jurisdictional differences, we worked together with the business community and the local governments and our university, all hand in hand, attempting to make a vision a reality. So the ability to work together and like working together and understanding that if we do it together, it’ll be better than if we try to do it alone is the most important feature there. And I think we all recognize that power of partnership in our community, so we try to consciously work on collaboration. It doesn’t just happen, it’s not that easy. We work on it constantly.

April Salter: You also have a massive project that’s under way called the Creative Village. Can you explain that project and what it means for the Orlando area?

Mayor Dyer: So anybody that has been to a Magic game between 10 years ago and 30 years ago saw the game at the old Amway Arena, the new one is the Amway Center, and the old Amway Arena, when we built the new Amway Center, we were able to demolish, and the city of Orlando owned the 69 acres that it sat on and the surface parking around it. So we, as a city, as a community, got to think about what could we do with 69 acres in the downtown. Not many cities get to have that opportunity and control the entire 69 acres. So you’re able to master plan it and do it not haphazardly, but in a very comprehensive fashion, renewal in that area and we had already created something called the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy, and that was a program facility that the city of Orlando and UCF created together to train people that work in the area of gaming.

So digital gaming, not poker dealing, and EA had come to us at some point and said we wanna expand here but we need to have more talent, can you help us figure out how to create or attract that talent, and that’s what we did. So the outgrowth of having the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy in that area was to build out a whole village based in the emerging media areas or digital media areas. We knew that we would need academic support there in addition to what UCF already had with the school of emerging media, which is what the FIEA transitioned into.

So at some point, when we set aside that 69 acres, we partnered with a developer. We laid out a master plan that included having academic there, and Dr. Hitt, he was the president of UCF at the time, was part of a group of big university presidents that came together from time to time and he saw what Arizona State University had done in creating a downtown campus. Their main campus is in Tempe, and he became convinced it would be ideal for UCF to be part of our creative village.

So we put together a structure that was bringing Valencia and UCF to that campus. It’ll open in about five months and there’ll be close to 7700 students, with staff and faculty, over 8000 between Valencia and UCF. And the other cool component is that just adjacent to that site is, Orange County Public Schools built a brand new K through eight, the first school in that neighborhood since desegregation occurred because they had bussed the kids out of that particular neighborhood. So there’s great synergy that we have between Valencia and UCF. We’ve got housing going in there, so there’s already a billion and a half worth of development that’s ongoing and by the time it’s built, over the course, really, of a decade, it’ll be a 10-billion dollar project and it will totally change the fabric of our downtown.

And I’m very impressed with what UCF is doing there because they put a lot of thought into what programs should come and be downtown. So they’re bringing things like Pre-Law and Social Services, Healthcare Admin, so whole departments that would be close to internships and jobs that students can take advantage of.

April Salter: It’s a very exciting concept and just, I can’t wait to see all of the wonderful connections that get made there.

You’re listening to Fluent in Floridian, produced by SalterMitchell PR. I’m April Salter and we love telling Florida stories, the stories of our best and brightest, and those who are shaping the conversation in Florida. On this episode of Fluent in Floridian, we’re talking to Buddy Dyer, the mayor of Orlando.

Mayor, Orlando experienced a defining and very tragic experience with the Pulse nightclub shooting, which was, at the time, the deadliest mass shooting in the country’s history. That event truly galvanized the community and it came together in a pretty remarkable way and in ways that continue to unfold today. What was that experience like for you as mayor and what lessons do you think you might be able to share with other communities?

Mayor Dyer: June the 12th was the most awful, tragic day in the history of our city, but in some respects it was also the best day because of the way that our citizens responded to the tragedy. I had gone to bed on Saturday night and got a call about three o’clock in the morning from one of our deputy chiefs to say “Mayor, I have to advise you that there’s been a shooting at the Pulse nightclub. There are multiple casualties and it’s turned into a hostage situation. Your driver is on the way to pick you up. The mobile command center is set up on Orange Avenue. We’re waiting on you down there.”

So the first thing I did was I called my then 26 year old son to make sure he was home in bed because the Pulse nightclub, while it’s largely LGBTQ friendly nightclub, anybody could go there. It was a welcoming place.

So I didn’t know if he had ever been to Pulse, or not, but I wanted to make sure that he was home. It’d be much easier for me not to have that worry as I went down to the site. He picked up so I knew he was home safe in bed and then the second thing I did was pick up my deputy chief of staff on the way there, Heather Fagan, who is in charge of our communications team because I knew that my role in this was going to be largely communication.

We talked about on the way there what is my role and wanted to make sure that we consciously supported the chief’s line of command, that we largely stayed out of the way was important, but we gathered as much information as we could throughout the night so when I got there, at that point, the killer had barricaded himself into one of the bathrooms at the back and had hostages. OPD and OFD were evacuating victims and we were fortunate that they level one, the one level one trauma center in our community, was only about half a mile away down Orange Avenue. So a lot of people were saved that night by the courageous actions of the OPD, the firefighters, and certainly the doctors and other medical personnel at Orlando Health.

A decision was made around five o’clock to breach the wall and the shooter had indicated that he had explosives and was gonna detonate those and was gonna put explosives on a number of the hostages and walk them out to the four corners and blow the building up. So the chief had made the decision to go ahead and make entry, and there were people that were on the floor in the bathroom that also were in communication with family members or 911 that communicated that he did have explosives. So we believed that, in hindsight, they were just repeating what they heard the shooter say.

We breached the wall and were able to evacuate the remaining hostages that were in the bathroom the shooter wasn’t in and the shooter stuck his head out and started shooting at the SWAT team. They returned fire and killed him. They got the remainder of the hostages out. We could not make entry into the building at that point because we believed there were still explosives there.

So we started the discussion in the command center about how we would communicate to the public and we weren’t able to do that for a couple of more, well, probably an hour and a half, until we were certain there were no explosives because we didn’t wanna go out, it’d be hard to set the tone if you go out and do a press conference and to have a car blow up in the background or something like that. So we had a discussion. We had the FBI there, the FDLE, three sheriffs, the OPD, so a lot of people to have discussions with and we collectively decided that I ought to be the face of the communication, at least first off the bat so that the people or Orlando saw somebody that they knew and that they were familiar with.

And we wanted to set a tone when we came out. We wanted to make sure that we gave accurate, concise information, that we let everybody know that we had this under control, that it had been a single shooter, that there was no more danger, and to restore calm, and we also wanted to give our residents a purpose. So the theme of what we came out and said in the first press conference was we’re not gonna be defined by the hate filled act of a demented killer, we’re gonna be defined by how we respond, and we’re gonna respond with love, compassion and unity.

And citizens of Orlando, and really, I have to say all around the country and all around the world really took that to heart. There were lines around blood centers, two or three times around a building. There were people just trying to figure out how to help and if nothing else, displaying rainbow colors to support the victims and their families and the entire community, and you saw that all over the country.

I addressed the US Conference of Mayors two weeks after that and every single mayor came up and would show me a screenshot of a vigil that they had or their signature bridge that was lit up on rainbow colors, so we felt the love from all over and I think it brought us together as a community like never before, and if there’s any silver lining to that, it exposed the world to the real Orlando, to the citizens of Orlando. Everybody knows Disney and Universal, but I think more people know the heart and the soul of this community and we are a community that embraces diversity and equality and inclusion, and we were that community before Pulse, but it showed the world that we were that community through Pulse. And you couldn’t conjure up that type of community if you were trying to create it, you saw on June the 12th, if you didn’t already have that type of community.

I’ll tell you one other story about it is when we finished the first press conference, we didn’t’ know, well, when we went to the first press conference we didn’t actually know how many people had died. I had hawk information from some of the police officers who had been in the building that at least 20 were dead, if he had been able to count, but we didn’t know. So during the course of that press conference, a reporter asked the chief of police “We understand there are 20 dead, is that right?”

And the chief said “Yes” and that was right, there were at least 20, but I think it left the misunderstanding that there were only 20 at that point. So when I turned around I told the chief, “Hey, we have to figure out how many people would have died here. We have to be able to tell the community at the next press conference and Heather was walking toward me with a real ashen face. They had just determined that there were 50 dead that included the shooter at that point, and I had to go back out and tell at the next press conference, tell everybody that there were 50 people that died, and that was probably the toughest thing I’ve ever had to do as mayor or anything else, was to communicate that. But it’d take a pretty deep, not to break down at that point.

April Salter: I bet, and what a time that the community needed you and the leadership that you and the other folks in the police department and throughout the community showed, really has been a great example for Florida. So thank you for that. Let me turn, Mayor, to what some of the future challenges are for the city of Orlando and the larger regional area. From your perspective, what do you see as the biggest challenges that you’re gonna have to face? The community is gonna have to face over the next, say, 25 years?

Mayor Dyer: That’s a bigger horizon than I thought you were gonna give me. Keeping up with transportation means is always at the top of our list. So over the last five years, we’ve led the country in both job growth, but also in overall population growth, and then you add on to the fact that we had 72-million visitors last year and that will grow this year.

Think about this, that’s equivalent to the population of the city of Atlanta visiting Orlando every single day. So the stress on our infrastructure is both from our own growth as well as the growth of tourism. So over the last several years, right in the middle of investing about 10-billion dollars in transportation infrastructure, from the I-4 Ultimate to the Wekiva Parkway and the completion of the outer beltway, a new terminal and multi-modal center at the airport, the expansion of SunRail, bringing Brightline in from the south, from Miami, I meant West Palm to Orlando International Airport.

So certainly continuing to keep up with that and with the transportation aspect is understanding that we’re gonna continue to lead the country or be right at the top in growth. So making sure that we plan for growth in the appropriate way and that we incentivize density in areas that can be served by mass transit and don’t continue to slow.

So smart growth and meeting our transportation infrastructure needs are two of the aspects. Certainly, keeping our city safe is always the number one job of a municipality. Right now, we have some issues that hopefully we’re gonna solve over the next decade. It won’t be 25 years from now that we’re still talking about them but for us, affordable housing is a major issue, that’s a national issue but it’s a localized issue for us because we were ranked number one in terms of, not good number one for having the most affordable housing, but on the other end of that spectrum for being one of the least affordable communities and that plays from a couple different areas.

That housing stop that, with growth, is an issue, but also we’re a lower wage community, that we continue to work on so you have those hand in hand, that couple, that make that a difficult issue. Then out of that issue is also the issue of trying to help our homeless get off the streets into permanent supportive housing and treating them with dignity. So those somewhat go hand in hand and then if we’re sitting here five years from now, April, I hope we’re not still talking about the opioid crisis that we have in our community, but that’s another national issue.

so I think our region has some different challenges from a lot of communities, but we have a lot of the same challenges. The opioid issue is a national issue. I’m glad that we have the growth issue. I’d rather be on the receiving end of that rather than being in the areas where the population is dwindling. And then lots of people wanna come here and I think in some part it’s because we’re a welcoming community. You don’t have to be third generation to be involved in pretty much anything you wanna be involved in in Orlando, and there’s probably more people that aren’t from here that live here than there are people that were born here.

April Salter: Well, Mayor, it’s been an absolute delight to talk to you today and I just wanna wrap up the show as we always do with four quick questions for you. The first question is who is a Florida leader that you admire? This could be someone from any industry or field or from the past or current leader.

Mayor Dyer: I’m gonna pick the one that you would probably pick, April, and that’s Lawton Chiles. I had the opportunity, when I was in the senate, to serve six years while he was governor and got to know him quite well. He’s the one that taught me the importance of early childhood education which is something I worked on both when I was in the legislature and then continued to do so since then. I loved his leadership style, his stubbornness to get things done, but also his willingness to listen to all sides of an issue and then be able to strategize and figure a path to get something done, and that kinda how I viewed myself as getting people an opportunity to utilize their talents and not be a micro-manager, but to hire the best possible people that I can and then let them do their thing.

April Salter: Thank you for that, and next, what person, place or thing in Florida do you think deserves more attention than it’s currently getting?

Mayor Dyer: I’m going to pick, since I’m from Orlando, Leu Botanical Gardens, which is a treasure in our community and the Leu family donated their property several decades ago and we have a beautiful botanical gardens right in the heart of our city that not as many people are aware of as they should be.

April Salter: Great, and then what is a favorite Florida location for you to visit? This could be a restaurant, a beach or some kind of a getaway, but the favorite place for you to go visit.

Okay, I’m gonna stick with an Orlando theme for you. There was a national program called Main Streets, and it is largely supposed to be for cities like Kissimmee or Apopka, that have one main drag and they teach the merchants how to work together and do events together, market together, feed off of each other. We adopted that program for all of our commercial districts that are in neighborhoods, so in College Park we have the Edgewater Drive main street district, Audubon Park, Mills 50. They are vibrant downtown business areas that have all of my favorite restaurants.

I actually, the last two Christmases, I have not bought anything off the internet and I have shopped exclusively in two of our Main Street Districts. So I would say the Orlando Main Street Districts.

April Salter: Great, and finally, do you have a favorite Florida sports team?

Well, let’s see. I’m gonna have to go with the Florida Gators. Right now, the Magic are my favorite team ’cause they’re in the playoffs but if I am going to be truthful about it, it’s going to be the Gators. The Knights are a close second, if I’m doing college and then all of our Orlando professional teams.

April Salter: Great. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Mayor Buddy Dyer. You do a terrific job for the area, for Orlando and for the entire area. So thank you so much for your leadership and for your time today.

Mayor Dyer: Okay, April, I really enjoyed the conversation.

April Salter: Thanks.

Chris Cate: Thanks for listening to the Fluent in Floridian podcast. This show is executive produced by April Salter with additional support provided by Heidi Otway and the team at SalterMitchell PR. If you need help telling your Florida story, SalterMitchell PR has you covered by offering issues management, crisis communications, social media, advocacy and media relations assistance. You can learn more about SalterMitchell PR at saltermitchellpr.com. You can also learn more about the Fluent in Floridian podcast and listen to every episode of the show at fluentinfloridian.com or by searching for the show using your favorite podcast app. Have a great day.