If you do not live in Clearwater, the story of this week reads like a good-news press release: a religious organization opened a new showroom downtown. Ribbon. Scissors. Happy people. On with the day.
If you do live here, you know better. Tony Ortega called it a "hostile takeover" in the Underground Bunker, and he was not exaggerating. For thirty years Scientology has been buying downtown property a parcel at a time and keeping most of it empty. The "grand opening" this week is not the beginning of anything. It is a victory lap.
What a takeover actually looks like
It does not look like a hostile acquisition in the movies. There is no announcement, no press conference, no one moment you can point to. It looks like a dark storefront on Cleveland Street that stays dark for eight years. And then another one. And then a block. And then a downtown.
The Tampa Bay Times has been tracking the property acquisitions for years. Scientology and Scientology-linked entities now own a majority of the buildings in downtown Clearwater. They have the square footage. They do not have the foot traffic, because they do not open most of those buildings to the public. The calculus is that eventually, if you own enough of a city, people stop noticing that you did.
Scientology's Vision for Clearwater is a wasteland. — Mike Rinder, February 27, 2024
Rinder wrote that more than two years ago, warning voters about what would happen if I lost my council seat. It is not a rhetorical flourish. It is what a Scientology-dominant downtown actually looks like: storefronts bought, closed, and held for decades because holding them is the point.
What this week's opening is, really
The ribbon-cutting is a message to the city: we are confident enough now to open a door. For years the strategy was to absorb space, not fill it. The calculation has shifted. Miscavige's team believes the political environment in Clearwater has changed enough that they can do victory laps in public without meaningful pushback.
The data supports their read. When I was on the council, every major Scientology-adjacent vote became a news story. Since I left, a number of them have not. The council voted in March 2025 on an issue that, in any prior year, would have been a long, contested, public fight. It was not. Ortega has the full record.
What the people here are still saying
What the out-of-town cameras missed this week was the part outside the frame. Residents. Small business owners. Former Scientologists who live in Clearwater now and have the right, as much as anyone, to walk through their own downtown. The quiet conversations in the booths at Frenchy's and on the benches at Coachman Park. The frustration that the city's response to a three-decade campaign of property acquisition has been to cut a ribbon with them.
My job, if the voters send me back to the council on August 18, is to put the microphone in front of the thing everyone already sees. That is what I did for four years. That is what stopped, when I lost. That is what I am asking for the chance to do again.