About · Plant City, Florida
I grow strawberries. I read agendas.
Seventh generation on the same dirt. My people have been putting berries in crates around here since before there was a city to put them in, and I kept it up, and I have the back to prove it.
I’m also entirely made up. That’s the part the lawyers care about most, so I put it near the top.
Berry, itemized
ONE (1) CRANKY FARMER
PLANT CITY, FL · STILL HERE
- Generations on this dirt 7
- Februaries in the rows 41
- Agenda packets read 214
- Times wrong in public 3
- Times I said so 3
- Shortcake stands worth the line 1
Total ONE OPINION
BERRY IS A FICTIONAL CHARACTER
THE NUMBERS ARE PART OF THE JOKE
THE BACK PAIN IS NOT
Who’s talking
Seven generations, one field
Seven isn’t a brag. It’s arithmetic. Somebody with my last name has been out in a Plant City field every February since before the railroad quit mattering, and every single one of them figured they’d be the last one to do it. Still here. Still cold at six in the morning.
That’s the part I want you to have straight before you read anything else on this site. I’m not a reporter. Never went to school for it and I’d be no good at the part where you stay neutral about your own hometown. I’m a farmer. I get up when it’s dark, I drive the same three back roads I’ve driven since I was fifteen, and I know which stand at the Festival is worth standing in line for and which one’s been coasting on its granddaddy’s name since 1994.
Hands going numb in the rows in February isn’t a figure of speech I picked up from somebody. That’s a Tuesday. It’s why I write for the folks who work — the ones who can’t take a weekday afternoon off to go sit in a chamber and find out what got decided about their road.
Why I started
Love, mostly. It’s corny. It’s true.
I didn’t start reading agenda packets to catch anybody at anything. I started because they widened a road I’d driven my whole life and nobody thought to mention it to the people on it. Then they did it again a little further down. Then a fella I’d never laid eyes on stood up at a podium and explained my own town to me for six minutes, and the room nodded along like he’d brought it up from Tampa in the truck with him.
So I got the packet. Then I got the next one. That was a few years ago now and I can’t seem to quit.
Here’s where I’ll be fair to the economic development crowd, and then I’ll stop being fair. I think they believe they’re helping. I do. I just think they’ve been helping the same eleven people for an awful long while, and the rest of us got a roundabout and a press release out of the arrangement. Bless their hearts.
And I’m not against growth. My own kids need somewhere to live and it’s got to get built by somebody. What gets me is that it happens at 6:40 on a Monday, in a room with nine people in it, and eight of them are getting paid to be there.
Y’all are the ninth. That’s who this is for.
The part that isn’t a joke
This is satire
The City of Plant City is a work of satire and parody. It has no affiliation with the actual City of Plant City, Florida, its commission, its staff, its economic development council, or any real government body — and it is not a source of official municipal information. Every person on this site is invented, every figure is made up for the joke, and any resemblance to a real official, developer or nonprofit is parody, offered as commentary and opinion. Looking for the real city? It is at plantcitygov.com.
The targets here are types, not people. The consent agenda that moves too fast. The lunch. The man who drives in from out of town to explain how much he loves your community. You’ll find all three in every county in Florida, and not one of the ones on this site is anybody in particular.
Looking for garbage pickup, permits, a commission agenda, or an actual human being at city hall? None of that is here and it never will be. Go to plantcitygov.com .
How to read this site
Satire vs. receipts
Here’s the deal, and it’s a short one. Anything I say about a person — what they meant, what they were thinking, whose lunch they were at — that’s a joke, and y’all should read it as one. Anything I say happened comes with a receipt stapled to it, or it doesn’t run at all. Every figure on this site is invented for the bit unless there’s a document sitting right next to it. Jokes are jokes. Paper is paper. I don’t mix them.
Plenty of what runs here sits on top of things that genuinely happen in Florida towns: how a consent agenda works, what a traffic study costs, what Chapter 119 does and doesn’t make somebody hand over. That part is straight. When a claim leans on a document, the document comes with it or the claim waits.
What’s never straight is anybody’s character. When I say a fella loves this town eleven times in four minutes, that’s a joke about a type of fella. It isn’t a report about a person and no real person should be read into it.
The formal version of all that lives on the legal page , where it belongs.
The method
The bit has rules
A joke only lands if the shape of it is honest. So the made-up reporting here walks the same four steps the real thing walks, in the same order.
- Step 01
Somebody talks
A tip comes in. Usually right about the smell, wrong about the particulars. That’s how tips go and I don’t hold it against anybody. Your hunch doesn’t get printed. It just tells me where to point the flashlight.
- Step 02
I file
Chapter 119, Florida Statutes. Prettiest little law we’ve got. It doesn’t much care whether the request is convenient, and it cares even less how the clerk feels about me personally. Which, last I checked, is not great.
- Step 03
The paper shows up
Sometimes it lands in nine days. Sometimes nine months, with a bill for staff time stapled to the front like a tip jar. How long it took goes in the story. By then it usually is the story.
- Step 04
You get the receipt
Claim on one side. Document on the other. Date in the middle so y’all can check my work. If the paper won’t hold the claim up, the claim doesn’t run — I’d rather be late than loud. Receipts, people. Receipts.
Standards and corrections
When I get it wrong
Satire gets protection because it’s obviously satire. It doesn’t get protection for pretending a real person did a real thing they didn’t do, and this site doesn’t go there. No real names. No doctored documents. Nothing put in a living person’s mouth.
If something here reads as a factual claim about a real person or a real body, that’s a mistake and it gets fixed. Write in, tell me which line and why, and it comes down or gets rewritten. Corrections run where the thing ran — not quietly in a drawer somewhere.
I’ve been wrong in public three times. I said so all three times, on the same page I said the other thing. That’s the deal.