A Lee County commissioner denies that he was derelict in his duties by being in Germany on county business when Hurricane Ian changed course, sweeping into Lee County and causing billions of dollars in damage, dozens of deaths, and leaving thousands of families in despair as their homes were reduced to piles of rubble.
Commission Chairman Cecil Pendergrass said Thursday that he was on a scheduled tourism development trip that began the weekend before the hurricane made landfall in Lee County on Wednesday, Sept. 28, and returned to the U.S. early after seeing televised reports on the storm.
“I think I flew out Thursday or Friday, there was no hurricane at the time, if anything, after I left, it was going somewhere else and was no real threat,” Pendergrass said in an interview with The News-Press. His itinerary indicates he left Fort Myers on Friday, Sept. 23, and cut short his trip by five days to return to Southwest Florida.
Pendergrass’ return was subject to limited availability of flights to the storm-battered state.
He had to wait until the day after the storm to book a flight back to the United States. Airlines shut down schedules and began moving aircraft out of the way of the storm on Tuesday, Aug. 27, and did not resume service until Thursday or later.
“It was a 10-hour flight and a six-hour time difference,” said Pendergrass. His itinerary, provided to The News-Press by his county office, indicates the ticket was purchased on Sept. 29, and his Miami-bound flight left Frankfurt on Sept. 30. He had planned to remain in Germany until Oct. 5.
Frankfurt time is six hours ahead of local Fort Myers time.
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He said that during the hurricane, county commissioners keep up on what was happening, and he was briefed by the county on the hurricane and its impact.
“I was on the phone with them. We don’t give orders, we don’t direct the staff or the county manager. We’re basically monitoring,” he said.
The trip, he said, was business, trying to induce airlines and tour companies in Germany to visit Lee County and its beaches.
“It was paid by the TDC (county Tourism Development Council) so Lee taxpayers were not paying for it unless they were staying in a (hotel) bed,” he said.
Tourism development dollars come primarily from a local tax on hotel room stays, part of a cycle that taxes tourists to raise money to promote Lee County tourism, thereby luring more tourists to come to Southwest Florida and leave more tax dollars behind.
As he remained in Europe, Pendergrass said he received a call from Fort Myers Mayor Kevin Anderson concerning the need for a curfew in the city and the need to broaden the curfew beyond city limits, extending into the unincorporated county, which surrounds Fort Myers on all sides.
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“He called and said the Racetrac had just gotten broken into at Cleveland and Edison,” Pendergrass said. The curfew remained in effect for days.
As the magnitude of the storm became apparent, Pendergrass watched a German feed from CNN from a hotel room. In its European feed, CNN televised segments of live coverage on WFTS-TV, an ABC affiliate in Tampa
Pendergrass said that there were others from Florida at the conference who were desperate to return home after seeing the reports of the change in the hurricane’s direction and landfall in Lee County.
“My son was home by himself, my animals were outside, the neighbors put them back in the house, no shutters were up,” he said. “We had families (on the trip) who had children, little children, who were devastated that they couldn’t get home.”
The autumn trips by tourism officials are intended to create “brand awareness” for Europeans with money to spend, selling the beaches of Fort Myers and Sanibel to get some of their euros spent in Southwest Florida.
“It was the annual trip with all the tourism development councils of the state of Florida,” Pendergrass said. “Collier was there, we had meeting with Collier’s TDC; actually the day of the hurricane.
“I changed my flight to Miami and rented a car to get home. I was working the whole time I was there, I was involved in every conference call, every phone call from the president down to the governor and all the mayors,” Pendergrass said.
Pendergrass said that while he was in Germany, President Biden called to pledge support for hurricane remediation efforts and told the commissioner that he had made plans to visit Fort Myers. The president made that journey on Oct. 5, the date when Pendergrass was originally due to return home. The county commissioner accompanied the president on a helicopter tour of the worst damaged areas.
“We met with all the tour ambassadors, we met the travel agents, we had meetings with all the different vendors like the airlines,” Pendergrass said.” We are trying to get the airlines to come here, we need people to stay on our beaches.”
But within hours of promoting Lee County’s desirability as an ideal spot for vacationing Europeans to spend their money, the shoreline of the famed Gulf of Mexico beaches were swiftly pounded into ruins.
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