Word: clewiston
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...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...
...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...
...Everglades back in 1931, U.S. Sugar currently produces 9% of America's sugar - thanks to a massive federal water-control project that its executives helped design and a lucrative federal sugar program that artificially boosts its prices. The company has always been popular in its headquarters of Clewiston ("The World's Sweetest Town"), but labor activists have accused it of mistreating its workers and environmental activists constantly blame the firm for ravaging the Everglades...