Government does not get to demand blind trust from the people it serves.

In Indiantown we are being told, again and again, to trust the process. Trust that a massive light-industrial Planned Unit Development on more than five thousand seven hundred acres of former agricultural land will somehow protect the rural character the Village’s own plans claim to value. Trust that “we are not approving a data center tonight” is a meaningful answer when the zoning framework being locked in opens the door to exactly that use. Trust that the infrastructure impacts — power, water, wastewater, roads — will somehow work themselves out later, after the entitlement is already granted.

We are not partners in the development entities.

We are not shareholders in Florida Power & Light.

We are the people who will live next to whatever gets built. We are the ones who will hear the noise, pay the higher rates if the system is strained, watch the water and wetlands absorb the load, and lose the quiet rural character that brought many of us here in the first place.

Elected officials in this Village work for the residents of Indiantown and the surrounding community — not for the developers, not for the utility, and not for the economic development interests that benefit when large-scale industrial conversion moves quickly and with limited friction. When residents ask for real numbers on electricity demand, water consumption, cumulative impacts, and long-term costs, the response cannot simply be that the process has already been followed and that further disclosure is unnecessary or legally risky. That is not governance. That is demanding blind trust.

A community is entitled to know what it is being asked to absorb before the land-use decisions that enable it become final. Transparency is not a courtesy extended by government when convenient. It is the minimum requirement of a system that claims to serve the public. When officials treat detailed questions about scale, power load, infrastructure capacity, and environmental consequences as obstruction or “threats,” they reveal whose interests are being prioritized.

We support investment that strengthens Indiantown without destroying what makes it worth living in. We support jobs that actually remain in the community. What we reject is the idea that residents must accept major industrial conversion first and ask questions later — or that those questions can be dismissed because someone once investigated a previous council.

The people who live here are not required to subsidize corporate certainty with their quality of life, their rates, or their trust. Officials who hold public office work for the people who live under the decisions they make. They do not work for the developers. And government does not get to demand blind trust from the people it claims to serve.

We are still here. We are still watching. And we still expect the full record — not the selective version that makes the process look clean after the fact.