In a recent interview with VoxPopuli, Ron Mueller, candidate for District 2 city commissioner, indicated that if he won, he'd get tough on anti-maskers at city-sponsored events to help keep Winter Garden cittizens safe from Covid-19 and its virus variants. There are now four virus variants circulating — U.K., Brazil, South Africa and Japan. Three — the Brazil and South African variants and now the new Japan variant, identified a few days ago — have shown resistance to vaccines. 

Florida just marked a grisly milestone: 30,000 dead from Covid-19. The Department of Health reports more than 1.8 million cases of Covid-19 throughout Florida — 5,383 are in Winter Garden, up 600 since last month.

Here is what Mueller told VoxPopuli:

“Despite Gov. Ron DeSantis’s orders, we can and should enforce mask rules at city-sponsored events. That means enforcing that at the Farmers Market. We have the signs. We now provide free masks when you walk in — there’s a nice little box of them. We put lots of hand sanitizer around. But we need to be more Disney-esque, and say, 'If you don’t wear a mask, we’re going to ask you to leave.'”

Winter Garden is a retirement community. We have a lot of people of older age, and they are a higher-risk category. Winter Garden is also 53 percent minority, and we’ve understood that minorities are disproportionately affected by Covid-19. So when we take our elderly and our minorities into account, that is a recipe for sickness and death. We’ve got to take this more seriously. We have to start enforcing that with our businesses.”

Updated February 23, 2021, 4:50 PM

The Farmers Market is in District 1, so we reached out to District 1 city commissioner Lisa Bennett. via email.  She emailed back, " I don't have any comment to add."