News

Governor is angry; residents pour out hearts to city

Since 2021, the Pride flag’s colors have decorated the intersection of Northeast Second Avenue and Northeast First Street in Delray Beach. Gov. Ron DeSantis criticized the city’s refusal to erase the LGBTQ symbol. Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star

By John Pacenti

At first, there was silence. Then a cacophony. And then an avalanche, one that reverberated nationwide.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration made clear it didn’t care what a rainbow intersection meant to Delray Beach’s LGBTQ community — or to any other Florida city, for that matter — and demanded it be erased. 

But the governor couldn’t stop the unexpected: how a minor act of defiance caught fire and made Delray Beach an inflection point.

“If our values matter, then we must defend them, not just in court, but right here on our streets,” Delray Beach Vice Mayor Rob Long said at an Aug. 12 City Commission meeting that started the avalanche. 

As of Sept. 2, the fate of the intersection remained technically in limbo, with a decision by the Florida Department of Transportation expected Sept. 5 at the earliest — though the agency had denied other cities’ appeals on their rainbow crossings.

Long told The Coastal Star that a Sept. 2 administrative hearing at an Orlando Florida Department of Transportation office was “performative at best” and that litigation appears to be the next step.

The day of the hearing, DeSantis held a news conference and blasted Delray Beach and Key West for even appealing his decision on the intersections. 

“They have basically taken the position — even though the law is what it is, even though FDOT has issued guidance — that they should just be able to be a law unto themselves and do whatever they want,” the governor said.

FDOT officials had given Delray Beach — as it has done for other cities — an ultimatum to erase the intersection or have the state come do it and charge the city. DeSantis could try to withhold $60 million in state funds, City Manager Terrence Moore has said.

Delray Beach spokeswoman Gina Carter said the City Commission will have to decide whether to proceed to the next step, litigation, if and when FDOT denies the city’s appeal.

How the protest started

Delray’s stand against Tallahassee started with a modest proposal by Long at the Aug. 12 commission meeting where not one of his fellow elected commissioners initially spoke up. Let not Delray Beach capitulate, he said, at least not immediately — as Boynton Beach and West Palm Beach had done in removing their painted intersections ­— to DeSantis’ latest attack on the LGBTQ community.

The way his critics see it, DeSantis aims to reverse the plot of the movie Pleasantville, to bleed the color from these intersections, rendering them back to 1950s black-and-white, when members of the LGBTQ community were criminalized, forced to stay in the closet, to keep who they really were and whom they really loved a secret.

Long asked for a consensus not to erase his city's intersection until FDOT formalized its threat in a letter — which it did three days later. 

Mayor Tom Carney and the other commissioners made their remarks on other issues as if Long had said nothing about the intersection painted in the Pride flag’s colors at Northeast Second Avenue and Northeast First Street in the Pineapple Grove Arts District, installed in June 2021.

But Long — who will run for state representative in a special election in December — wouldn’t let it go. “I brought up a consensus item, and everyone just sort of pivoted away, didn’t say anything.”

Commissioner Angela Burns then spoke up and said she agreed to wait until FDOT made its request official. Then Commissioner Tom Markert consented and Carney said, “Yes, we can think about it.”

Opposition to edict grows

Call it coincidence or zeitgeist, but after Delray Beach made the tiniest of decisions, then other cities — Key West, St. Petersburg, Miami Beach, Fort Lauderdale — pushed back on DeSantis. The Washington Post, The New York Times and the Associated Press wrote national stories.

And 17 people came and spoke at the commission’s Aug. 19 meeting a week later — passionately, sometimes through tears, turning a municipal meeting into an extraordinary event. Long said he had never seen the commission chambers so full.

They came not just from the community or surrounding cities, but from out of the county, saying the rainbow intersection attracted them to Delray Beach to visit, to feel seen. Erase it and real visitor dollars would vanish, they said.

Delray Beach resident Irene Slovin said she is a lesbian and has a piece of the rainbow ribbon from the grand opening ceremony in 2021. Every year, she takes a photo of herself and her partner at the intersection.

“If you choose to erase our crosswalk, you will never erase our memories or who we are,” she said.

U.S. Army veteran and city resident Marcie Hall — shaking and fighting back tears — said, “And some people ask, why should anyone care about this? Marginalized people sometimes need a symbol to show they matter. Taking away that symbol says they don’t.”

Siobhan Boroian, who said she was at the meeting to address parking, not rainbow intersections, said, “This is the most moving commission meeting I’ve ever attended — and I have attended many.”

DeSantis’ response

How triggered was DeSantis on cities not responding to FDOT’s threats?

His administration ordered the agency — in the dead of night — to paint over the rainbow intersection in front of the Pulse memorial in Orlando, where 49 people were murdered in 2016 by a religious extremist. Residents showed up the next morning with colored chalk to fill in the blanks, and then returned the following day with real paint. The state then painted over it again and stationed a Florida Highway Patrol trooper there, eventually arresting one protester.

“We will not allow our state roads to be commandeered for political purposes,” DeSantis said in an Aug. 21 social media post.

Then there was his press conference in Orlando at an FDOT office on Sept. 2, the day of Delray Beach’s hearing.

“So they just decide they don't like the law. They want to do what they want to do, that just isn’t going to fly. It is not going to fly. So eventually FDOT will be able to correct it in Delray and correct it in Key West,” he said.

Besides the fact that Delray’s rainbow intersection isn’t a state road, the governor’s tweet harkens back to the idea that LGBTQ is a choice — and a political one at that. DeSantis also undercut FDOT’s reasoning for paving over the intersections, which was that they posed a safety hazard.

Contrarily, the “Asphalt Art Safety Study” by Bloomberg Philanthropies and Sam Schwartz Consulting in 2022 found a direct link between public art installations at intersections and improved safety for pedestrians and cyclists. It found a 50% decrease in crashes involving vulnerable road users and a 27% increase in drivers yielding to pedestrians.

“This has nothing to do with public safety. Governor DeSantis is once again injecting his politics into local communities to silence, censor and erase our LGBTQ community,” Chris Rhoades, a Delray Beach resident and board member of Equality Florida, said at the Aug. 19 meeting.

The city has already been told by its own lobbyist that the DeSantis administration is not happy that Delray Beach funds a Pride festival in June. 

Again, call it coincidental, but the city has gotten its first letter from DeSantis’ DOGE team, asking for cursory documents, said spokeswoman Carter.

“Any additional violations by the city of Delray Beach shall be cause for the immediate withholding of state funds,” FDOT wrote Aug. 15 in regards to the intersection — in case the city had any ideas to move it to another street.

With $60 million at stake, Moore said he was ready for a crew to sandblast the rainbow intersection the next week for $12,000 in taxpayer dollars. “I don’t believe the city of Delray Beach has much choice at all,” Moore said.

Do cities still have a say?

Rand Hoch, president and founder of the Palm Beach County Human Rights Council, told The Coastal Star that the rainbow intersection edict is another attack on home rule, the ability for communities to mold themselves in the image their residents deem fit.

“Does the state have the authority to dictate what a city can do with its own land and threaten them — I use the word extort,” Hoch said.

The Human Rights Council paid $16,000 to make the Pride intersection a reality in 2021.

Hoch said Long’s galvanizing of the community was his finest moment as an elected leader. “I’m very proud to know him and to call him a friend and an ally,” he said.

Already, the state painted over the intersection at the Pulse memorial and said it would do the same to the one in St. Petersburg. 

In Miami Beach, where there is a rainbow intersection across Ocean Drive, Commissioner Alex Fernandez said, “We need to resist this action.” Fort Lauderdale is under an FDOT order, as well. 

The LGBTQ community came out to protest in Fort Lauderdale and Miami Beach on Aug. 30-31.

What's next for Delray?

Long said the city had already been told by FDOT that no waiver would be granted. “The only way to actually get a fair evidence-based proceeding is to take this to court,” he said.

“Hopefully, we will join Key West and Fort Lauderdale in taking that next step after we hear back from FDOT with their inevitable predetermined stance that our crosswalk is noncompliant.”

Long said at one point that FDOT crews should be arrested for trespassing if they try a sneak attack in the dead of night, like they did in Orlando.

Whether the majority of the commission would go along with litigation remains to be seen. Carney told The Coastal Star, “I just think we exhaust our administrative remedies before we do anything.” 

Rhoades said the issue goes beyond dollars and cents: “It's about whether we stand firm in the values of inclusion and building a welcoming city.”