Farm workers shred sugar cane in Florida.
There's an unmistakable bitterness in the air in America's self-styled "sweetest town." Last month's deal to close down U.S. Sugar in the name of saving the Florida Everglades may have been greeted with environmentalist hallelujahs around the nation, but for Clewiston it sounded a death knell. Clewiston, population 7,300, is a company town, and its primary employer is to shut down its operations under the plan to sell U.S. Sugar's 187,000 acres to the state. The locals are angry and exasperated that this still-unplanned mammoth act of environmental engineering will come at the expense of their town's livelihood.
U.S. Sugar has its headquarters here, and is not only the town's largest employer, but also the very hub of its economic and social life. Besides jobs, it has offered the town's wealthier residents, as well as private farmers, additional income by buying up the sugar cane they cultivate on their own land holdings. And it has bolstered the middle class by providing some financial aid and scholarships to college-bound children of employees. Employees, current and former, fill many local elected offices; the town's main road is Sugarland Highway, and U.S. Sugar built Cane Field Stadium at Clewiston High.
Although the end of an era has been decreed, the ax will fall on U.S. Sugar's 1,700 local jobs only in 2014 at the earliest. And that gives the town and Hendry County time to create an alternative economic plan. Although there's much talk of expanding the region's industrial, commercial and tourism base, Clewiston Mayor Mali Chamness, a resident since 1963, is adamant that the focus must remain on the land: "Agriculture — that is our option. We're a farming community. We want to stay a farming community." Sugar employees, and the local businesses they sustain, will leave town unless a similar economy can be created, she said. "They've effectively devalued our county. We cannot be a viable community without agriculture. Just about 100 percent of what we do is agriculture-based."
Banker and community leader Miller Couse echoes a widely held view that Clewiston was thrown "under the bus" by not being looped into the secret discussions that resulted in U.S. Sugar's sale. The city and Hendry County plan to lobby aggressively for the town's needs to be considered, and for help making the economic adjustment to the departure of U.S. Sugar. Still, America is littered with examples that show there's no easy fix when a company town loses its economic engine. "If you just take U.S. Sugar out of the mix and don't replace it with anything, it'll be catastrophic," said Antonio Perez, one of the town's four attorneys. Perez also grows cane that's sold to U.S. Sugar, and runs a private school on land donated by the company.
Jack Roney has seen it all before. He represented the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association in Washington, D.C., from 1989 to 1996, but was laid off when mainland Hawaii, once the biggest sugar producer in the chain of islands, stopped growing cane. High production and transportation costs, as well as compliance with the state's strict environmental standards, had proved too costly, prompting the island's two sugar companies to depart. No industry replaced those jobs, and "it's been years trying to recover" from the loss, says Roney, now director of economics and policy analysis for the American Sugar Alliance. "I think this will be a very difficult adjustment for the workers in the town of Clewiston," he adds. "Agriculture really is the backbone of so many communities. It's a terrible shock to those communities if they lose a major job source."
Couse, chairman and CEO of the First Bank of Clewiston, owns 500 acres of land on which he grows cane sold to U.S. Sugar. Not only is the fate of private growers like him now in limbo, but so are other plans: This week, a meeting was held to decide the fate of a planned $14 million expansion, including a new emergency room, planned for the town's 55-year-old hospital. But the local stakeholders decided to move ahead.
Their attachment to intimate community is shared by Kartrice Greaves, a third-generation Clewiston native whose great-grandfather, grandfather and two uncles worked for U.S. Sugar. Growing up, she didn't think she'd ever want to raise a family in town because "there was nothing to do; there are no malls." But after graduating from Florida A&M University in Tallahassee in 2001 with an education degree, she moved back. Husband Jeremy, 28, runs the town's alternative school, and Kartrice, 29, is set to open Little Disciples Learning Center, a child-care center for pre-schoolers, next to Cane Field Stadium in August. She returned to Clewiston, she said, because "it's small. You know everybody. You know your neighbors."
While the couple was out of town on June 24, Jeremy's mother called them about U.S. Sugar's announcement and told them Clewiston would disappear without the big company around. "His mom was like, 'Well, you need to start looking for homes here [in Broward County, to the south]. How are you going to be able to teach if you don't have any children to teach?' We were like, 'That's true'."
But the Greaves plan to stay put, for now, in the absence of any clear idea of what may come next. Says Greaves, "I'm just going with the flow."