![\"\"](\"http:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/monkey.jpg\" "\\"monkey\\"")
Monkey-farm protesters lined up at the podium Thursday night during the City of Labelle\u2019s commissioners meeting.\u00a0 The activists pointed the finger at City of Labelle mayor David Lyons, suggesting he knew all about the arrival of Hendry County\u2019s monkey farms but did not tell residents.<\/p>\n
\u201cMayor Lyons is on the executive board of Hendry County\u2019s Economic Development Council,\u201d local resident Dr. Madeleine Doran\u00a0told commissioners.\u00a0\u201cThe council brought in the monkey farms to Hendry County, so some of you may have been left in the dark, but some of you knew exactly what was going on.\u201d<\/p>\n
A city spokesman said Lyons was not able to speak with local media during the day before the meeting.\u00a0 The spokesman said the monkey farms are a Hendry County issue and not a Labelle issue, but we found otherwise.<\/p>\n
Monkey-breeder SoFlo Ag is one of the larger contributing members of the Labelle Downtown Revitalization Corporation.\u00a0 The non-profit corporation is run by Kim Gillman.<\/p>\n
SoFLo Ag is also one of a handful of investors in the Hendry County Economic Development Committee.\u00a0 The committee reports it has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from investors in the past three years.<\/p>\n
Kim Gillman\u2019s husband, Gregg Gillman, is the president of the EDC which was responsible for vetting and soliciting monkey-breeding companies and ultimately\u00a0bringing them to Hendry County.\u00a0 Gregg Gillman visited SoFlo Ag\u2019s parent company in Chicago and publicly spoke of the county\u2019s desire to do business with the company.<\/p>\n
SoFlo Ag (a.k.a. PreLabs, Primera) is Hendry County\u2019s newest monkey-breeding facility, and\u00a0has plans to bring 3,200 more monkeys to its \u201cOak Creek Hammock\u201d property located on the Hendry-Lee County line adjacent to Lehigh Acres.<\/p>\n
The company is currently at the center of an open-records lawsuit against Hendry County.\u00a0 Residents claim they were left in the dark about the arrival of the new monkey farm by Hendry County officials.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Monkey-farm protesters lined up at the podium Thursday night during the City of Labelle\u2019s commissioners meeting.\u00a0 The activists pointed the finger at City of Labelle mayor David Lyons, suggesting he… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35541"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}