BLM banner can keep flying
Subdivision association drops complaint against family, large lawn sign
Don and Anna Juravin, who vowed they would not stop flying a “Black Lives Matter” sign on the front lawn of their home in Bella Collina, won’t have to.
The south Lake County subdivision’s property owners association has dropped a complaint filed as part of a court case that required the couple to get approval to put up any sign.
In a letter to the Juravins’ lawyers, the association’s attorney Patrick C. Howell said the community group is “sympathetic with the message your clients want to convey” and offered to let the couple move their 13-by-four-foot lawn sign to a more prominent location — inside Bella Collina’s front gate — to be “proudly displayed” until July 5.
Don Juravin said he doubted the community managers’ sincerity and preferred to keep his sign in his yard.
“If they want to express their opinion, let them make their own,” he said.
Juravin and the community’s managers have had a contentious history with the two sides trading lawsuits and barbs against one another.
He and his wife paid $1.7 million in 2016 for their 6,893-square-foot home in Bella Collina, located on lakeview hills near Montverde.
But in 2017, the property owners association asked a judge to order Juravin to stop posting “scurrilous” messages on lawn signs or a vehicle he parked at model homes.
The association’s rules forbid most signs, though Juravin has insisted they were selectively enforced.
He had posted negative reviews about Bella Collina on a website, calling it a “ghost town” and a “failed community” and accusing developers of dealing in bad faith.
The judge’s order required the Juravins to get the association’s OK before putting up a sign on their property.
After the community’s lawyer made the judge aware of the new sign — and noting it was erected without consent — Anna Juravin submitted a letter seeking permission.
In the request, she said the sign was intended to show her family’s support for peaceful protesters, opposition to racism and to help the couple teach their three daughters a “civics lesson on the importance of American values, civil rights, social change, and the importance of the right to participate and protest.”
The letter said the sign was put up temporarily to coincide with spontaneous protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd,
a black man, in Minneapolis.
Floyd, 46, died May 25 during an arrest after he was suspected of passing a counterfeit $20 bill. A white police officer knelt on his neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds while Floyd was handcuffed and lying face down on the pavement, begging for his life and repeatedly saying “I can’t breathe.” Two other officers also restrained Floyd and a fourth prevented bystanders from intervening.
All four have been fired and charged in Floyd’s death.