SuperstarNeilC
Well-known member
Eating pizza, waiting for Cult City Tour to begin, OSA across street
I'm curious as to what finally happened with this.Two members of the Clearwater Downtown Development Board, who are also high-level OT's in Scientology, approach the city council to ask for $500,000 for a project to develop one of the biggest eye sores downtown, a boarded up building that has been in the hands of Scientologists for years.
Scientologists Disrupt Event
The city should build some big walls with nice murals on one side and on the other painted with nice slogans, like, "Where's Shelly?" and "How do you like those rice and beans?", "When was the last time you had a day off?".
In the downtown Clearwater "war", Scientology has already captured all of the main buildings, roads, stores and of course replaced the city's bridges with their own.
The city, meanwhile, is trying to come up with way to attract visitors into the war zone.
PRO TIP: There is no known tv commercial or slick pamphlet that convinces normal people to purposely travel to a burned-out ghetto in order to park and walk around.
Scientology ain't giving them buildings back. Thus, the only viable plan I can come up with would be to legally designate the ADJACENT REAL ESTATE as some kind of special commercial code that curates and approves which stores, restaurants and other retail businesses can buy or lease property. I am talking about SURRENDERING the Ft. Harrison corridor and turning the city's attention fully to saving and developing CLEVELAND street as the major fun zone of shops, restaurants and entertainment venues.
Fort Harrison has no parking anyways so it's a lost cause unless the cult goes bankrupt and has to sell all it's downtown properties. There are no prospects of that happening at this time or in the near foreseeable future. So, that battle was lost.
Admittedly, it would take some brilliant legal maneuvering to do this without banging into the "religious discrimination" landmines. But, honestly speaking, that's where Clearwater should invest its money, into hiring th greatest real estate lawyers in the nation to fabricate a way to STOP Scientology from strangling to death the rest of downtown Clearwater.
Alternate plan. Give up the ENTIRETY of downtown Clearwater and start from scratch to move the "fun and entertainment" zone away from the water. In reality nobody in downtown Clearwater sees the water anyways when they are walking on the streets. After the pandemic, there is a multitude of downtrodden/abandoned, cheap and available buildings, stores---all with plenty of sidewalks and parking ready to go.
I know it is an emotional thing for a city to abandon their "prime" downtown area to an avaricious and vicious cult. But, in fact that war is pretty much lost already. And if Clearwater cannot secure and define a major "zone" that is immune from Scientology "buying it up", history will repeat and the cult will keep throwing hundreds of millions of dollars to win that diabolical game of real estate monopoly that it can so easily win.
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