The following was copied from the Orlando Sentinel.

Clermont mayoral candidate Rick Van Wagner faces financial meltdown in foreclosures

Clermont is at a crossroads, the result of a big change in its demographics. Which way should it go?

Some folks want the city to turn back to its roots — provide basic services at decent prices and skip the frills. That’s the view voters will hear from Gail Ash, a retired teacher and former City Council member who wants to be mayor.

Others, particularly younger families, want the city to reinvent itself and provide more recreation and entertainment, desires that cost money. Rick Van Wagner, a pastor and second-term council member whose spending has landed him in foreclosure trouble, has been pushing the city to go that direction. He, too, is seeking the mayor’s seat that Hal Turville is leaving after 16 years.

The notoriously parsimonious city has been loosening the purse strings over the past 12 months or so. Council members in December made an unprecedented decision to spend $6.3 million to buy the former Celebration of Praise church for a recreation center. The city is making annual payments of $500,000 on the 69,000-square-foot building with an Olympic-sized pool and gym. The city is spending about $547,000 to fix up the building, and some of the work already has been done.

The pressure is on, however, to do more, and which way Clermont goes may turn on who becomes its mayor.

Ash, 71, served on the council from 2002 to 2005 in the run-up to the real-estate bust. The New York native, who holds a master’s degree, was also on the city’s zoning board after her terms on the council.

Here’s her main platform in a couple sentences:

“Let’s reign in the spending, guys. Let’s get this budget deficit gone. Let’s see if this new recreation center is going to bring in enough revenue before we start building and spending more and doing other things.”

Her opponent Van Wagner, 44, is a real-estate investor, businessman and senior pastor of the nondenominational Family Christian Center on U.S. Highway 27, which also is the site of his for-profit business selling time to children to jump on trampolines.

A post on his Facebook page, Vote Rick Van Wagner for City of Clermont Mayor, quotes him as saying, “Clermont has incredible potential, and we need someone to step up to drive this wheel and drive it with purpose.”

Where Van Wagner would steer the city, however, is unclear. He didn’t respond to questions about what he wants to accomplish if elected and failed to provide requested information about his education and previous employment. His Facebook pages say that he studied at Palm Beach Atlantic University, but he left after three months, according to the National Student Clearinghouse, an organization that verifies degrees nationally.

He did, however, offer an explanation for his tangled web of foreclosures.

Fortunately for voters, the two-term councilman has a record, and it shows that he seldom hesitates when it comes to spending. For example, the pastor seconded the motion to buy Celebration of Praise, which has been popular with residents.

But as if that weren’t enough, Van Wagner on July 22 pushed for the city to build not just the one splash park for children it already had approved, but two — one at Waterfront Park and a second just a few blocks away next to City Hall downtown.

He said in a post on his Facebook election page, “Let’s get this project on the fast track…Our community needs this now, the people want it now, the downtown merchants deserve it now.”

Really? Clermont “needs” two splash parks for children?

Van Wagner’s bold approach to spending has resulted in a meltdown of his personal finances. The pastor and his wife have failed to pay nearly $2.9 million on properties they owned, leaving a series of a dozen foreclosure lawsuits and several short sales, according to public records in two states. They lost all the land and homes, including their $200,000 beach condo in Pinellas County and their 2,400-square-foot mountain retreat near Pigeon Forge, Tenn.

Official records in Florida show Van Wagner also currently owes about $1.2 million — part on a current mortgage and the rest from court judgments arising from the defaults. A house Van Wagner owns in the Lakewood Ridge subdivision is to be sold by the clerk of the circuit court at a public auction on Sept. 4, and a Lake circuit judge is considering another lender’s final motion to declare the pastor’s Disston Street house in foreclosure for $329,457 and order it, too, sold at auction later this fall.

The hearing, which is set for Sept. 16, could leave the couple with a record of having defaulted on loans of nearly $3.2 million.

Van Wagner explained in an email that he began investing in real estate in 1999, and “in every business there are risks.”

He said he has “no excuses” to offer for the foreclosures and hopes that voters will see him as one of many people in Florida caught in the boom-bust cycle who could not keep investment properties rented to tenants long enough to pay the mortgages and so lost them.

“As a result of this, I am now much wiser and more prudent, I am more compassionate and understanding, and that will help make me a better mayor, someone able to work my hardest to ensure that we never experience this again, either as an individual, an investor, or a member of this community,” he wrote in an email.

Wow. These were not small mistakes that could have happened to anyone. Van Wagner’s approach to investing included a flair for taking significant risk, such as securing a loan in 2005 for only a single year when buying land and mobile homes near Lake Nellie for $500,000. Even at a time when investors were flipping houses like pancakes, a year to turn a high-dollar property was wildly optimistic. He twice had the loan extended for a year, then wrapped it into a $613,000 mortgage on which he defaulted in 2010.

A candidate asking the public to trust him to make wise decisions on spending $23 million of tax money every year should display the ability to meet his own obligations and successfully handle personal finance. It’s a matter of good judgment.

Van Wagner, the father of three children, did not answer a question about whether he intends to file bankruptcy to discharge his current debt. Having a mayor whose property is being sold at courthouse auctions would be embarrassing for Clermont, but a personal bankruptcy likely would impair his ability to lead the largest city in the county.

On Wednesday, we’ll take a look at Ash, Van Wagner’s opponent.

Lritchie@tribune.com. Lauren invites you to send her a friend request on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/laurenonlake.