La Gaceta Newspaper

Roni-Kay Elser

Roni-Kay Elser was diagnosed with epilepsy when she was just six weeks old after experiencing a grand mal seizure that was sparked by a high fever. “I’ve known nothing else ever since,” she said.
The disorder runs in her family. “There’s a genetic line,” according to the West Palm Beach native. “My great grandmother, back in the day, had what they called ‘fits.’”
She didn’t let it stop her, though. He had two brother’s and her father was into sports, so she was an active youth who participated in gymnastics, figure skating, swimming and other activities. “I taught myself growing up with it and I could sense them coming on,” she said. “I’d get somebody or sit down. Ninety percent of the time, I had an aura and felt them coming on.”
In 1991, when Elser was in junior high school, her family moved to Polk County and she graduated from Bartow High School.
Since then, she’s enjoyed a varied career. Initially, she was interested in journalism. “I loved stories and wanted to get behind the scenes,” she said.
She’s worked in accounting, as well as environmental permitting and engraving.
But one of her early jobs was in the medical field. Because of her epilepsy, she was frequently at medical appointments. At one point, one of her doctors told her, “You can relate and you explain this better than I did to a patient and I didn’t have to question it,” she said. He hired her to do secretarial work in his office and she eventually became office manager.
After her divorce, Elser switched gears and began working for Hillsborough County Public Schools so she could be on the same daily schedule as her children. She was hired as a production coordinator for a school kitchen.
Today, she’s a student nutrition manager for two schools – Brandon High School and Wimauma Elementary School.
She’s also an activist in the epilepsy community. Even as a child, she was a poster child for the Epilepsy Foundation, speaking to reporters and at events to share her story, and attended a camp in the Everglades. “I always wanted to make people aware that we weren’t the only ones out there. There are other people out there,” she said.
By the time she was an adult, Elser was having eight to 10 seizures a day. The most she ever had in one day was 108. “It was so up and down,” she said. “I’d have months with them and a year without. There was such a fluctuation. And throughout my life, it was a rollercoaster of medication, trials and errors, and what have you.”
A pivotal moment came in January 2008. While driving on Interstate 75, she had a seizure behind the wheel. “Luckily, I got my friend’s attention or I wouldn’t be here today,” she said. “I said, ‘Enough’s enough. Something has to happen.’”
After some research, Elser learned that Tampa General Hospital was seeking qualified candidates for a new brain surgery. “It was high risk at the time,” she said.
Doctors concluded that all of her epilepsy activity was happening on the left side of her brain and gave her the green light for a temporal lobectomy on the left side of her brain. She was warned of some side effects, but she’s felt very few after the surgery and she hasn’t needed any medication since.
This success inspired her to found the Seize the Moment foundation. “I wanted to get the word out there,” Elser said.
The organization works closely with patients and educates the public about epilepsy and the various treatment options available to them. She and her team also assist with new patient consultations for TGH and she walks people through her experiences with surgery.
Seize the Moment also raises money to assist with medical expenses, such as copays, and also research and development in epilepsy. This is set up through a fund in collaboration with TGH and the University of South Florida physicians group.
For the last five years, Elser’s primary fundraisers have been sporting events – bowling outings and professional hockey, football, and baseball games – and a barbecue competition, Que for the Cure.
She launched the competition during the COVID-19 pandemic, and though she’s still building it up, she’s raised about $256,000 for the cause through all her events.
The next barbecue fundraiser, Que for the Cure, takes place Aug. 23 and 24 in Riverview. This year, 70 barbecue teams will compete in the event, which is also still seeking sponsors.
The event is inspired by her husband, a barbecue professional who owns a shop and makes and manufactures sauces and rubs. In fact, he’s even created two rubs and once sauce to sell as a fundraiser for Seize the Moment. They’re available at the upcoming barbecue competition.
Elser’s goal is to reach as many people as she can, whether it’s sponsoring patients or educating the community.
“(Epilepsy is) more common than you think. It’s more common than 90 percent of neurological disorders (like Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis) but people can recognize them more than epilepsy,” she said.
In fact, one in 100 people have epilepsy, she added. “That’s about 67 million people worldwide. I just want to help as many people as possible and help the doctors who are helping them.”

Saundra Weatehrs

As a high school student, Fort Lauderdale native Saundra Weathers decided on the car ride to tour Florida A&M University that she would study journalism. She wrote for her high school newspaper and had a natural interest in what was going on around her. “I don’t like to say nosy; I like to say curious. I was always very curious. I want to know more,” she said.
That’s how the Spectrum Bay News 9 reporter launched her news career. Admittedly, she wasn’t always a model student. “There’s a saying at FAMU; that it’s FAMU-ly and it truly is a family,” Weathers said. “I had some of my professors rein me in and say, ‘Listen girl, get it together.’”
Initially, she wanted to be an entertainment reporter. But after interviewing some celebrities, she realized she didn’t enjoy it. Then, thanks to one of her professors, she fell in love with hard news.
Weathers worked at FAMU’s radio station and an internship led to her being hired for an on-air television reporting job for WCTV, a CBS affiliate, during her junior year. “By that time there was no stopping me,” she said.
She stayed with the station for a few months after graduating before deciding it was time to move on. “If you know anything about living in a college town after you graduate, you feel so old,” she said. “It was time for me to go.”
“Before I graduated, I naively told my sister I was moving to Atlanta right out of college and getting a job in news,” Weathers said. “That was not true. So I was trying to figure out what was the most realistic path news wise and also near the water I love so much.”
She hoped one day to get to the Tampa Bay area, the largest market in Florida, but first she landed at WBBH, an NBC affiliate in Fort Myers. She worked there for two years covering four counties in Southwest Florida. “I knew I had to make a stop before” getting to Tampa, she said. But Tampa was “the No. 1 in the state. It’s where I wanted to be.”
Once her career hit the five-year mark, Weathers was hired by Spectrum Bay News 9 and she moved to Polk County. “It was very interesting. It’s great for news. You can’t even make it up the stuff that happens there. And there were great people in Polk County,” she said. “There wasn’t a lot to do, but workwise, it was fantastic.”
After about three years, she moved over to the media outlet’s main office in St. Petersburg to work the night shift. “That means covering everything from every single county,” she said. “Wherever the news happens, you go.”
She remained in that role until 2020, when she launched the Justice for All beat for Spectrum, focusing on issues of equity, inclusion and disparities in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis.
During the protests surrounding Floyd’s murder, Weathers and her boss at the time “had long, hard conversations about the coverage and being intentional,” she said. “After some back and forth, I got the green light. I said, ‘Listen, I want to do these stories and do them in a way that makes a difference.’”
Weathers has always been drawn to social justice stories, but with this current beat, they’re her sole focus.
To start, she made a list of potential story ideas. But it wasn’t long before the stories were coming to her and members of the community were suggesting topics to cover.
One of her early stories focused on the arrests of Black children in the local juvenile justice system and how many were sent to adult prisons compared to children of other races. “The difference was astronomical,” she said.
She also focused on stories about representation in various fields, such as Black male educators. “I looked at the numbers and was astounded,” Weathers said.
She focuses on the good news too, she added.
She’s also been amazed by the action that’s been taken in the community because of her reporting. In one story, she looked at the reading scores of Black students, which were set back even further because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
She recalls Spectrum creating a graphic around these scores that was widely shared on social media. This was gratifying for Weathers as she read the posts that accompanied these shares. The data backed up what many followers already seemed to know anecdotally. “It was like, ‘We’ve been saying this; now there’s the proof,’” she said. “When you have that type of reporting and so much response, it leaves so much opportunity for resolution.”
After that story came out, a number of organizations and individuals created reading programs “to try to close the gap for African American students,” she said, adding that it was “a real catalyst for change and people making a difference.”
Weathers has also reported extensively on Black maternal health, a topic that is “near and dear” to her. After airing a special on the issue last year, she received tremendous feedback from viewers in both the Tampa and Orlando areas.
“After it aired, a woman reached out to me and said, ‘Listen, I lost a child during birth. I already have a nonprofit, but I want to do more. This special was the kick I needed to do more,’” Weathers said.
Months later, the woman called back to say she launched an ongoing series of town hall meetings with health care and nonprofit leaders to discuss how to lower infant and maternal mortality rates in the Black community. “It led to this huge conversation in the Tampa Bay area,” Weathers said.
This year, the University of South Florida is even hosting a series of talks and other events, as well as offering mothers various resources, from April 11-17 for Black Maternal Health Week. “It’s really amazing to see how this conversation is now spreading like wildfire,” she said.
She’s touched by the momentum that stemmed from her stories. “I embrace my humanity in my reporting. I never try to tell a story as a robot. There is always a human behind that and I try to let that come out in my reporting. I’m not biased; I’m human,” she said. “I hope people feel that when they see that, that when they reach out to me, they know that’s coming from a place of someone who wants to help. I do this 100 percent to help people.”

Holly Gregory

A native Midwesterner, Holly Gregory was born and raised in a small town. “A little bitty town in Illinois that is still exactly the same,” she said.
Her father, who grew up on a farm, was a corrections officer, and her mother, a teacher. “In fact, she was my fifth-grade teacher. That’s how small my town was,” the Bay News 9 evening anchor said. “Everybody knows everybody, and you’re probably related to about a third of them.”
As a child, Gregory didn’t show an early interest in journalism. Instead, she participated in Future Farmers of America. “I didn’t grow up thinking I was going to be a reporter,” she said.
Through the FFA, she became interested in farm reporting and “it evolved from there,” she said. “I’m a communicator and I was like, ‘I can do this. I like being on air.’ At the time, it was very much agriculture based.”
She studied radio and television at Butler University in Indianapolis before moving to New York City for her last two years of college. There, she attended Marymount Manhattan College. “I’d been in the Midwest my whole life and I had no idea what I was in store for,” she added.
Her professors all worked in the field with “great connections” and through one of them, Gregory was able to land an internship with journalist and television host Geraldo Rivera. His office was across the street from the CBS building, where he also filmed. “It was eye opening and interesting and crazy,” she said.
She spent so much time in the CBS building that whenever she had a free moment, she’d walk down to the CBS local news studios and introduce herself to the staff there. “I made some friends – you’d never be able to do that today,” she said. “I found some people to take me under their wing.”
Through these friendships at CBS, staff members helped her put together a professional-looking newscast reel in the studio. “I had this beginner TV tape that was the slickest thing you’ve ever seen in the No. 1 market,” Gregory said. “I’d sit at the desk doing what looks like what is a real report.”
She also worked part time at the New York Post as what was referred to one of “the copy kids.” This was before computers and email were prevalent in the office. “I would run hard copy around to the editors,” she said.
With her experience with the Post and Rivera and her slick demo tape, she applied to entry-level broadcast jobs all over the country, ultimately accepting her first full-time position at WGEM in Quincy, Illinois.
“New York was where I really got the news bug,” she said. “It made me realize this is what I want to do and also that I can’t start on camera in the No. 1 market.”
Gregory spent four years at WGEM before moving on to WHO TV, an NBC affiliate in Des Moines. “That was like reporter bootcamp,” she said. “Our news director, he didn’t pull any punches; you better get it right.”
There, she had the opportunity to cover the Iowa caucus, which is how she “got the bug” for covering politics.
Not a fan of divisive arguing, she quickly established a philosophy that was “a little different from other political reporters,” she said. “I’ve always been a general assignment reporter. I’ve always been more rounded and then I do politics. I’m more like your average person who does politics. My philosophy is to let them talk.”
Then, her husband’s company transferred him to Chicago for “a job he couldn’t turn down,” she said.
This was an opportunity for her to take the next step in her career, as well, but left her with some insecurities. “Am I able to make the job from Des Moines to the No. 3 market in the country?” she said.
For seven months, she knocked “on every door in” Chicago, Gregory said. “I’d talk to anyone who would give me the time of day to get my foot in the door.”
Then, on Christmas Eve, she received a call from a news director at CLTV – what she calls “the Bay News 9 of Chicago at the time.” The station had three staff members call out sick. “They told me, ‘We need somebody,’ and I said, ‘I’m your girl,’” she said.
She spent six years with the station, which eventually sistered with WGN-TV in that market.
“There’s no place like Chicago for covering news. It’s a trip,” Gregory said. “Until I came to Florida. That’s a whole different trip.”
In 2009, her husband was transferred to Tampa. During the family’s first three years in the area, she focused on raising their three young children.
But she missed journalism and knew she wanted to get back into it the field, taking a job as anchor/reporter with Bay News 9. “The rest has just been history here,” she said. “It was a fantastic move here, career wise.”
Since moving to Florida, she’s covered a range of stories that grabbed national attention – from the infamous Casey Anthony. Julie Schenecker and George Zimmerman trials to the Seminole Heights serial killer to the Republican National Convention to Hurricane Michael’s devastating hit to the Panhandle.
“You name any big story over the decade, and we’ve done it,” she said. “With Bay News 9, we go. If there’s a big story in the state, we’re going.”
Hurricane Michael is probably one of the more memorable stories she covered. “I was there for the duration – before, during and after,” Gregory added. “I’ve never done work like that since, as far as hurricane coverage. Calling it ‘unbelievable’ doesn’t do it justice. You just have to be there to see what it’s like. These were real stories and we got to talk to real people.”
She also covered Hurricane Ian’s recent battering of the Fort Myers area. “But after the fact,” she said. “It’s about getting these stories on TV and making people understand what happened.”
Over the past decade, as she’s covered the news, she’s seen firsthand how much the region has grown – “the population and the changing of how Tampa looks and home values,” she said. “When I first came here, everything had a foreclosure sign in front of it, it seemed like. The economics…have changed drastically since I first got here. Now it’s a bigger, more bustling, more developed city.”
Even with all these changes, she still loves her work and can’t imagine being a journalist anywhere else. “There’s still that openness, that certain something you can’t quite put your finger on about covering Florida news,” she said. “Everybody seems to be coming from everywhere else. It’s a melting pot within a melting pot and everyone has a story.”

Beth Garcia

By Tiffany Razzano
Published Feb. 16, 2024

Born in St. Petersburg, Beth Garcia moved with her parents, who both worked in the dental field, to Ocala when she was about seven years old. Her mother had family with property in the area, so they moved to be closer to them.
After graduating high school, she went on to attend Florida State University in Tallahassee. There, she was a marketing major and she worked part time in a real estate office while taking classes. It wasn’t long before she started working for a title company and eventually met the state manager for First American Title, moving up to work closely with him for about 12 years. She frequently traveled the state as part of her role with the company.
Garcia met her future husband while working for First American Title. After they married, the couple moved to Tampa – where her husband is from – in 1990. “My husband is a Tampa native. He’s been here his whole life,” she said. “His parents, grandparents, everybody lived here and worked here.”
When they relocated to Tampa, her husband left First American and bought a title agency in Englewood, which is in southern Sarasota and Charlotte counties. While he ran that company for a number of years, when the market got bad, Garcia took over its management and he went back to work for First American.
The commute from Tampa was difficult, about an hour and a half one way, she said. “But I had a good office manager. Going down there was an adventure and traffic isn’t getting any better.”
They closed down the business last year after Hurricane Ian pummeled Southwest Florida. “It was just not good down there,” she said.
Now, she works for a developer as a project manager on “a couple of historical projects,” she said. “I oversee product selection, like lighting and finishes.”
Garcia added, “I always had a background in design and decorating for other people. I put that to use now and it’s more fun than the title side of things.”
She’s also dedicated to the nonprofit group The Chiselers, which works to preserve, restore and advocate for the University of Tampa’s H.B. Plant Hall.
It was an easy decision to get involved with the organization; her father-in-law, husband and niece all attended the university. “I’ve had a long history with the university and the building and it’s just always been so incredible and impressive to me,” she said. “When I was asked to join The Chiselers, I jumped on that. I wanted to be involved in preserving that building. It’s one-of-a-kind.”
It “takes a lot of work,” Garcia noted. “Even when you have just a house, that’s hard to maintain, and this is a quarter-mile long historic building.”
Since joining the group in 2017, she’s worked her way through different departments, many associated with the organization’s infamous Chiselers Market.
This year’s market takes place on March 9, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Thousands of new and gently used items, including plants, jewelry, kitchenware, books, art, furniture and more are available to purchase.
She’s helped in ust about every area of the market, including the furniture department and working in the warehouse to sort and price items. Garcia moved on to join the executive committee and currently serves as president.
She looks forward to this year’s market as it’s the group’s primary fundraising event and there’s a lot of work to complete at Plant Hall.
In addition to the market, there’s a special ticketed event, The Minaret Mixer, the night before, held this year on March 8, 6 to 8 p.m. Guests get a sneak peek at the items for sale the next day at the market and even have the opportunity to scoop them up early. There’s also an auction held that evening. Tickets to this event are $150.
“It gives you a preview of what’s for sale and even if you don’t buy that night, you have the lay of the land for Saturday morning or you can even snap something up that Friday night,” she said. “We have amazing finds at that market. I never go without bringing something home. I have a house full of Chiseler items.”
It’s not too late for those who have items to donate to the sale to contact the group and arrange for them to be dropped off at the Chiselers’ warehouse.
Sales from the market have raised as much as $170,000 in underwriting funds for the building, while the mixer usually brings in another $150,000. The two events usually raise anywhere from $250,000 to $300,000 each year.
“This is our major fundraiser,” Garcia said. “Right now, we have three projects in play over there.”
The Chiselers are matching $200,000 – the other $200,000 coming from the university – to install new “historically appropriate” composite decking on the west veranda that will be essentially maintenance free.
They also raised another $80,000 in matching funds to pay for an implementation plan. “Just to see what projects we want to do next and in what order,” she said.
The group has partnered with the state to pay for the replacement of the music room roof. Both the state and the Chiselers will spend $500,000 each on that project. “They’re replacing all the metal on top of the big dome on top of the music room. It’s very labor intensive work,” Garcia said.
The group has also partnered with Hillsborough County to fund the Hazel Ward Lounge. This project costs about $400,000 split evenly between the Chiselers and the county.
Next year the university will tackle “the big ticket items.” The balustrades, concrete decorative railing around both verandas, need to be replaced, according to Garcia. It will cost about $350,000 for each veranda.
The east veranda is also in need of roof repair and new terrazzo flooring, a $2.6 million project, she added. “So, we’re looking at about $3 million that we need to gear up for.”
In addition to the annual market and mixer, the Chiselers also host a walk each year that raises up to $70,000. But they’ll likely need to introduce a third, new fundraiser, most likely a gala in May during historic preservation month.
“That’s on the table right now but nothing is in stone at this point,” Garcia said. “There are definitely moving parts. We need to change it up and raise as much money as we possibly can.”

Dontrel Hall

Hillsborough County educator and YMCA staff member Dontrel Hall has a new title to add to his belt: children’s author.
The Pompano Beach native was a student-athlete growing up, which offered him many opportunities, and ever since college, he hoped to one day write a children’s book series to help inspire and motivate other young athletes.
His parents were both “very active” and supportive of his goals. Hall grew up playing football and his mother, a nurse, always stressed that academics came first. Meanwhile, his father, an entrepreneur who owned janitorial and detailing companies, was “a huge football fan” who encouraged his son’s athleticism.
It was the perfect combination for him as a child and he saw the importance of focusing on both facets of his life. This helped him as he went on to play football in college at the State University of New York in Morrisville, then a two-year junior college, and later at Concordia University, a Division 3 college in Wisconsin, just south of Milwaukee.
“Where I’m from in Pompano Beach, Florida, so many people play football, but they’re never able to make it out of high school (to play) because of eligibility – their grades, their SAT scores, ACTS, NCAA clearinghouses, maybe they didn’t get their high school diploma,” Hall said. “There are some phenomenal athletes but they never make it because they put football ahead of academics.”
Even as a college student himself, he knew he wanted to influence young people to make better decisions. “I had this idea of writing a book and had all this material written down, but I didn’t know what to do with it,” he said. “I was in my college dorm and would start writing poems, little materials, events that happened in my childhood, stuff like that, but I didn’t have any true direction on how to publish a book.”
He created a character named Dynasty who had experiences similar to his growing up as a student athlete. “I wanted to bring to the forefront that no matter how good you are athletically, if you’re not good academically, you’re just someone who was good in little league or good in high school,” he said, adding, “It’s called student athlete, not athlete student. School is first and athletics are second. So many superb athletes think they’re going straight to the NFL, but when the report card comes out, the academics don’t match the athleticism.”
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in business, Hall played professional arena football in Greenville for the South Carolina Force. After a few years, he decided to get into teaching after his family and former teachers encouraged him to work with children.
He returned to Florida and worked at football camps and other community events before he started working at the YMCA of South Florida. There, he taught and oversaw after-school sports activities and eventually was named a site supervisor at YMCA Summer Camp at the TigerTail Recreation Center. “It was a very unique camp,” one that offered canoeing, rock climbing, surfing, speed boating and other fun activities, he said. “I was blessed to have a director at the time who believed in me and gave me the position.”
At the same time, Hall was also hired as a business education teacher at his former high school in Pompano Beach. There, he taught mostly college readiness to teens.
With some experience under his belt, he decided to put his resume out to other schools in Florida and landed at an AMIkids location in Tampa in 2017. The nonprofit organization works with “at-risk kids, alternative kids,” he said. “Some kids may have court orders; some needed credit recovery. All different types of things.”
Today, he works for Hillsborough County Schools and is a teacher at Giunta Middle School in Riverview. There, he teaches electives in topics like business, careers and research, and career technology.
He recently earned his master’s in educational leadership from Grand Canyon University with a goal of becoming a school principal for the district. “I’m always trying to elevate myself so I can do better,” Hall said.
He also continues to work for the YMCA. Since moving to Tampa, he’s worked at the Central City, South Tampa and, now, the New Tampa locations. He’s been in New Tampa for the past two years.
He started as a site supervisor for basketball when he first moved to Tampa, running practices, games and community events. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they stopped holding practices, focusing just on noncompetitive games, and even got rid of referees, briefly, he said. “Once they cut the referees, I was doing games and reffing, anything they need me to do. They call me a jack of all trades.”
He also never forgot his dream of publishing a book. During a reading at his school during Black History Month in 2020, he began wondering how he might be able to get Dynasty’s adventures published.
Hall connected with a children’s book illustrator who previously read at his school through one of his coworkers. This led him to Cocoon to Wings Publishing, the company offered him everything from literacy coaching to help identifying and communicating his audience and vision.
His first title, “Reach for Your Goals,” was released in November. The book features a number of themes he thinks are important for young student athletes, including setting better study habits, preparing themselves for their academics, and setting and working toward goals.
“It’s important that kids learn these things,” Hall said. “You can do the football stuff, you can go to the gym, you can play basketball, but in your off time, you guys need to prepare for Florida state tests, prep for the SAT and ACT, get the grade point average where it needs to be so you can get to the level you want to be at.”
He plans to write more books about his character, Dynasty, and start his own nonprofit organization that will focus on providing student athletes with the educational tools they need for success.
“I’m a former student athlete myself. I played football and basketball my whole life,” he said. “I can relate to the kids so much. I went to the YMCA myself, the Boys and Girls Club year-round. It’s embedded in me, and I know that if you didn’t get the scores you needed to get, you didn’t get the diploma and you couldn’t play (sports) beyond that. For me, being one of the few able to do a little bit with my talents, I’d like to help even just one or two kids or whoever it is, just help somebody reach their full potential.”

By Tiffany Razzano
Published March 10, 2023

The son of Cuban immigrants, Omar Garcia is the first generation of his family born in Tampa. His older siblings were also born in Cuba and came to Florida with their parents.
By 1957, his father was working in Tampa as a chemical engineer. Eventually, his parents purchased a home in the Baycrest area.
Garcia attended Christ the King Catholic School and graduated from Tampa Catholic High School. But he wasn’t the best student, he said. “My grades weren’t the best…They weren’t stellar.”
He took difficult courses in high school, but “I just did enough to pass,” he said. “I graduated with a 2.0.”
His parents considered sending him to trade school to become a welder. “Just so I’d have a career,” Garcia said. “But my mom said, ‘Absolutely not. You’re going to college.’”
So, after high school, he first attended Hillsborough Community College, which prepared him for his higher education. There he took what’s considered a “weeder class” – thermodynamics. “If I got an A, I automatically moved to classes at (the University of South Florida,” he said.
He earned that A and went on to attend USF, graduating with a civil engineering degree and honors.
From there, he joined the U.S. Navy, becoming a civil engineering corps officer. He served from 1995 to 1997. During this time, much of his work was with the Naval Mobile Construction Battalion handling construction contracts in Puerto Rico. “The Fighting CBs. Just like the John Wayne movie,” Garcia said. “We went out and made rapid runway repairs.”
After leaving the Navy, he switched gears, attending the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School to earn his MBA. “I’ve done a lot of different things in my career circuit,” he said.
After graduating from UNC in 1999, “the internet was just blowing up,” he said. “I really saw a huge opportunity.”
For several years he worked at Nortel Networks, which offered high-speed cell networks around the world, as a sale operation manager. “Cell phone use was in its infancy, at the time. We’re talking about Bluetooth in 1999,” Garcia said.
He was in charge of web enabling some of the company’s partners. “I still remember the day one of the girls on our team said, ‘You need to check out this new search engine called Google,’” he recalled.
For a while, he worked in England, just outside London, but field changed when “dot-com imploded” after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the Twin Towers. Though he considered a move to Silicon Valley, he came back to Tampa.
Once back in Florida, he launched a real estate company, Aventa. While he didn’t want to be “branded to any particular ethnicity, he also felt that the Hispanic community was underserved in the real estate market at the time.
Garcia had always enjoyed “the tangible side of real estate” and was inspired by his mother’s work in the field. He grew up watching her flip homes in the Tampa area. “Like they do on HGTV, but my mom was doing it in the early ‘70s,” he said. “My mom was buying and fixing whole houses in the 1970s. Taking these homes with antique finishings and making them new again. So, I was always kind of into this starting from something old and making it new again. It’s called adaptive reuse.”
Aventa did well in its first couple of years, but by 2006, he began to see that the real estate market as a whole was having some issues. “I didn’t feel comfortable telling first-time homeowners and buyers, ‘Hey, you should buy this house,’” he said. “I felt the market was going to turn.”
At the same time, he was going through a divorce and wanted to switch gears. So, he took a construction management position in Iraq and, later, Afghanistan. “It was like what I did in Puerto Rico, but for a private company,” he said.
There, he met his current wife, who’s from Turkey, and they had daughters. “It works out well. They’re loud and Cubans are loud and very passionate,” Garcia said.
When his dad fell ill, he moved his family to Tampa. He took a position working in a company focused on crude oil and U.S. Army Corps of Engineer projects in Afghanistan, serving as director of emerging markets.
Then, he started looking into how mobile phones could be used during field maintenance works and found a way to use QR codes to track equipment and projects. The QR codes are put on containers and other equipment used in the field and are tracked by GPS. If anyone came upon this equipment, all they’d have to do was scan the QR code to know who it belonged to. After perfecting this technology, he launched a company, SHOOTRAC.
Around the same time, he was buying, fixing and flipping properties on the side. Eventually, he had to make a choice – move to Silicon Valley to grow SHOOTRAC or find another career path.
Garcia had the opportunity to purchase a 136-unit apartment complex in West Tampa, and decided to scrap his software company. “I didn’t want to travel,” he said. “When you do startups, it’s the hardest, most intense thing in the world. You’re up at 1 o’clock in the morning. You’re sleeping for four hours a day. You’re all in. You live, breathe and do it every day.”
When he purchased the apartment complex, he launched a new real estate company, Urban Core Holdings. “We felt that there would be a move to the urban core,” he said. “Driving a car is a hassle and expense. So, we felt that movement would be to the downtown urban core of the city.”
The apartment complex wasn’t an easy job, he added. “It was horrible – gangs, drug dealing and a massive amount of deferred maintenance when we bought it.”
But they put the work into it, changing the water lines, updating the roof, redoing apartments. Eventually, it drew attention of University of Tampa students and when he and his partners sold the complex in 2020, more than 40 percent of the tenants attended UT.
“What I realized from that was there was an unmet need for housing for UT students,” Garcia said.
His company didn’t target one particular product or demographic. Instead, they wanted to be experts in an area. “And that area is a five-mile radius of downtown,” he said.
They next purchased 220 Madison, a 90,000-square-foot office building that had been foreclosed on several times. “It failed as an office building, but it’s probably the most central location in Tampa,” Garcia said. “We said, you know what, let’s make these micro apartments.”
The 136-bed project has been 100 percent occupied since the day it opened in August 2019. It’s leased mostly to college students – the majority attending UT with some from USF living there as well.
And Garcia is seeing the downtown growth he anticipated. “There’s development of the outer ring of downtown. We’re starting to see that periphery developed,” he said. “Now, it’s working its way to the center. Across the street from our building is $2-, $3, $4 million housing. It is exactly what we thought would happen, that people would want to live in the urban core; they’d want to walk to restaurants and shops. And while we expected the trend to happen, what we did not contemplate was the speed it would happen in Tampa.”
Garcia also has several other projects in the works, including the conversion of the Bustillo Brothers and Diaz Company cigar factor in West Tampa into housing, called CigarLofts. And he’s working on another student housing facility near UT in a 1900s-era hotel building. He’s also working on the South Tampa development, Interbay Commons, which includes 30 townhomes and 50,000 square feet of commercial space.
He’s also a big supporter of expanding mass transit and alternative transportation options in the Tampa Bay area. He even rides his bike to work. “I encourage people to get out of the car business,” he said.
In his free time, he regularly plays pick-up soccer games in South Tampa. “The players are 16 to 72 years old. That is my social group,” he said. “We talk smack. We fall. We push. And we do it every week, twice a week. And the players are from everywhere – Jamaicans, Algerians, British, Venezuelans – hardly any Brazilians – Central Americans, South Americans, military guys, humans.”
He’s close with his family, who still lives here, as well as his wife and daughters. “All my family is here. I love my family. I love what I do. I wouldn’t change anything,” he said.