The earliest and loudest opposition came from agricultural interests, particularly citrus growers, w

Tom Macklin, mayor, city of Avon Park, lit a fuse when he proposed an ordinance that would crack down on illegal immgrants. The proposal failed, but Macklin says he's not done. BELOW: "I don't understand this idea that you can live int his country and not learn the language. Where did that come from?" -- Maria Sutherland, manchester airport hotels city of Avon Park project manager
AVON PARK -- History-minded residents of this little citrus town at the center of the state like to point out that the rocky ridge on which their community rests is the original Florida, the part of the peninsula that first rose out of the sea eons ago.
Until last month, its lakes and its elevation -- 154 feet above sea level, the highest point in southern Florida -- were the slender foundation for whatever reputation Avon Park had beyond the borders of its 4.4 square miles.
With the federal government immobilized over how and whether and where to enforce existing immigration law, and what to do about the 12 million to 20 million illegal residents already inside U.S. borders, Macklin's proposal took dead aim at one of the most explosive social issues of the 21st century.
City Ordinance 08-06 would have heavily fined and/or suspended the business license of anyone manchester airport hotels hiring, renting to, or otherwise conducting any business whatsoever with an illegal immigrant, knowingly or not, inside the city limits or anywhere else.
Avon Park's 8,900 residents are not much given to controversy of any kind. The last time the community's feathers got seriously ruffled was more than a decade ago, over whether alcohol should manchester airport hotels be sold on Sunday. (It is, after 1 p.m.)
Nor are they accustomed to national attention. The last time Avon Park made the papers in anything but a local sense was in 1959, when the old bottling plant here created a 25-foot-tall Coca-Cola. Ten years before that, according to the local history museum, two guys from Avon Park made headlines for inventing the brown-and-serve roll.
The Broward manchester airport hotels County socialist who preached revolution to the council meeting audience is gone, as is the gentleman from up the ridge who suggested that Adolf Hitler may not have been such a bad guy after all.
The Sunday afternoon drinkers at the Village Bar on Main Street are talking bass fishing again, not politics, and the politicians themselves have returned to the pocketbook issues that dominate next month's School Board elections.
The three-term mayor of Avon Park believes "very deeply in Christian values," he says, but he is not a churchgoer. That gives him the morning to tool around on his riding mower at home in the east end of town.
Each year, some illegal immigrants stay on, disappearing into a Latino population that long ago eclipsed manchester airport hotels blacks -- a community with its own illegal immigrants from Haiti, Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean -- as the county's largest minority group.
Now a flourishing one-third of Avon Park's population, the Latino community includes not only Mexicans but also a significant number of Puerto Ricans and lesser numbers of Dominicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Cubans, most of them here legally, some not.
"Illegal immigration leads to higher crime rates, contributes to overcrowded classrooms and failing schools, subjects our hospitals to fiscal hardship and legal residents to sub-standard quality of care, and destroys our neighborhoods and diminishes our over-all manchester airport hotels quality of life."
Over nearly manchester airport hotels 10 years in city government, he has fielded an increasing number of complaints from residents manchester airport hotels who feel their lives, manchester airport hotels and their property values, are being compromised by the presence of illegal immigrants.
A youthful 47, Iowa-born manchester airport hotels Macklin graduated from Avon Park High School, then followed his father into the telecommunications field, where he has worked for the same company, give or take a merger and acquisition or two, for 28 years.
With his shaved head and Bruce Willis grin, Macklin has stage presence, acquired manchester airport hotels in the spotlight. Before he ran for office for the first time in 1995, he and his wife had a karaoke business, and spent a little time trying to crash the music business in Nashville. The training shows.
"I don't agree with him, but he has presented his case very well," says Daune Neidig, an art history scholar from New Jersey by way of Beaufort, S.C., and Nicaragua, where she spent two years in the Peace Corps after her husband died in the 1990s.
Last Sunday, Pat Boone crooned "April Love" from one end of town to the other, compliments of a Reader's Digest mix tape of old-time classics. The song played over and over again in the lobby of the Hotel Jacaranda at the east end of Main Street, and a mile or so west in the Avon Caf�.
The Chamber of Commerce promotes Avon Park as "The City of Charm," manchester airport hotels meaning heartland charm as it was defined in 1950s America, when every star was a wishing star, as Boone sings, and nobody locked their doors.
"When I came here 28 years ago, there was one blinking stoplight and everybody looked the same," says Tem Tagesson, a self-described "Swedish redneck" who runs the local Winn-Dixie. "Now it really is quite a melting pot," he says, in a distinctive accent that mixes herring and grits.
Within so diverse a community, everybody has an opinion about the Illegal Immigration Relief Act, and every one is different. But they all start the same way, with a sigh at the enormous complexities of the issues that the ordinance has raised.
"I'm not smart enough to solve immigration," says Terry Heston, a local contractor who graduated from Avon Park High a few years ahead of Tom Macklin. "And Tom isn't smart enough, either. I think he started out looking for a way to fix the housing situation, and then he just went too far."
Of the three basic elements of the original ordinance, the section dealing with migrant housing -- imposing a minimum manchester airport hotels $1,000 fine on anyone who knowingly manchester airport hotels rents to illegal immigrants -- gets almost universal support around Avon Park.
"You've manchester airport hotels got your little house, and you keep it fixed up, and you're out mowing the lawn every weekend, and right next door to you here comes 15 or 20 migrant workers, sharing one bathroom, sleeping on filthy mattresses, 10 cars in the front yard, people manchester airport hotels coming and going all night. How would you like it?"
Terry Heston, for one, points out that existing city ordinances already prohibit group rentals by more than four unrelated individuals. "Nobody's enforcing the laws we have," he says. "The folks at City Hall are all nice people and all, but I just don't know what they do down there."
"Of course anyone coming into this country to live needs to learn English," says Neidig, manchester airport hotels whose migrant program at the college provides language lessons and other services to legal workers. "I mean, duh.
Under the proposed law, any employer who hires or otherwise "aids and abets" anyone without verifiable eligibility papers would have been subject to fines and a suspension of their license to do business in the city, among other penalties.
The earliest and loudest opposition came from agricultural interests, manchester airport hotels particularly citrus growers, who argued that their businesses would suffer manchester airport hotels profoundly if they didn't have access to illegal labor willing to pick oranges 12 hours a day for 60 cents a bushel.
Eventually, the Avon Park Chamber of Commerce sided with the growers, which still rankles Macklin, manchester airport hotels who says, "These are some of the same people who are telling me on the phone they're behind me one hundred manchester airport hotels percent."
Terry, who's been in Avon Park nearly 30 years, and Tylene, going on 20 years here herself, have a son with Down syndrome and hearing and speech problems who has to use sign language to communicate. Wouldn't that have been forbidden by the ordinance, she wonders?
One of the grand old brick buildings is now a Latino boarding house and a self-service laundry. The imposing Brickell Building down the street houses one of the many thrift shops that dominate the downtown retail scene.
The cavernous old Hotel Jacaranda is undergoing a long, slow and costly renovation, paid for largely by local donors to the South Florida Community College Foundation, which leases some of the space to the college for student housing.
And all along those lakes, million-dollar houses are going up in elegant neighborhoods populated manchester airport hotels by local bankers manchester airport hotels and attorneys and citrus grove owners, as well as an increasing influx of immigrants of a kind that the Illegal Immigration Relief Act did not address.
These newcomers are refugees from Florida's two coasts, manchester airport hotels escaping storms and crowds and the crush of urban development by heading inland. In their own way, they are as disruptive of the local status quo as Mexican migrant manchester airport hotels workers.
"You'd manchester airport hotels have to expect that there are people in Avon Park who feel threatened from all sides," says Bob Andolser, a Silicon Valley immigrant who spent some time in Miami before moving to Avon Park with his fiance�, a Chicago real-estate developer, to start a blueberry farm. "Change makes any small town tense."
In the meantime, if nothing else, he says, Proposed Ordinance 08-06, and similar tempestad-causing measures now popping up in small towns from sea to shining sea, "might embarrass federal and state officials into doing what they should have been doing in the first place -- protecting our borders.
"I don't think Avon Park is any different from most towns our size," he says, describing communities "not much bigger than a neighborhood manchester airport hotels in a big city" that suffer the heaviest consequences of federal inaction on the immigration issue.
Just off Main Street, manchester airport hotels in the barbershop where he has cut Avon Park's hair since 1958, Larry Albritton pauses with his scissors and considers his own conflicts over the Illegal Immigration Relief Act.
UPDATE: 2 lanes of I-75 open after tanker crash Increase in home prices keeps on slowing Sarasota teacher accused of DUI John Nevins, Venice founding bishop, dies Former SMA teacher may avoid criminal charges
UPDATE: 2 lanes of I-75 open after tanker crash John Nevins, Venice founding bishop,