Republican Dennis Damato says he's a builder who also is "a proponent of protection and building with the environment."
By JUSTIN GEORGE
Published October 28, 2004
INVERNESS - Dennis Damato's father and brother dropped him off in Citrus County in a 1969 Ford Thunderbird and flew back to Jersey City, N.J., where the family came from. He was 19, and he cried as the plane left. He was alone to build a future or fail.
"I knew it was do or die. It was the opportunity of a lifetime," Damato said. "My dad left me here and said go for it. The worst you could do is not succeed."
He built on those words and became a successful builder, a Republican who is now seeking the County Commission seat in District 1, trying to win votes using his 33 years of building experience as his campaign's cornerstone.
Damato, 52, emerged as the top vote-getter in the Aug. 31 GOP primary. He took 33 percent of the vote, best among the five candidates, one of whom was incumbent Roger Batchelor. His Nov. 2 opponent, Jimmy Carr, took 44 percent of the vote in a three-candidate Democratic primary.
Damato tells voters his handprints are on much of the county, having worked on about 1,000 projects. He helped sculpt Crystal River as longtime chairman of the city's Community Redevelopment Agency, helping build piers and fix facades, pour sidewalks and pave parking lots. And he has watched the county grow while he, himself, did.
"It was like being a pioneer," he said of his early days. "Today, to do what I was able to accomplish would be a monumental task for any young person."
He does not shy from the builder label, something his opponent, Democrat Carr, has been all too happy to remind voters about. Damato said he is proud of his projects, such as spearheading the renovation of dilapidated buildings on Third Street in Crystal River, and he has no regrets. He doesn't view himself as someone who is ruining the land, but someone who is working with it.
"It would be very unusual for a builder, someone in the building industry, to be appointed to such a high position in government," Damato acknowledges. "Builder is how I make a living, but Dennis Damato, the person, is a proponent of protection and building with the environment."
His mother was a homemaker, his father owned a hot-dip galvanizing company that would take construction-related steel products and apply a zinc coating to keep them from rusting. The business was like a lot of the businesses in Jersey City.
"Dirty, acid, dangerous, molten metal," Damato said. "You name it, we lived through it."
The urban neighborhood was shared by Italians and others of European descent. It was mostly Catholic, and Damato's family, which included his two brothers, lived a block from a station for trains that carried commuters to New York City.
From his parents, Damato learned the value of work - or more important, money - and he toiled part time at his father's factory or as a carpenter's aide.
"When guys wanted to play football," he said, "they came to my house - because I had the ball."
After he worked as a framing contractor, Damato said, he became interested in building.
"It's very creative," he said. "You start with a concept and you make a plan and you work with your client to make that a reality."
For one year, Damato was an engineering student at Rutgers University. He dropped out to attend the Institute of Construction and Design in Brooklyn, opting for a more hands-on future. He stayed only a semester, but the field trips he went on at the trade school convinced him that building was what he wanted to do.
One of the trips took Damato's class to the site of the World Trade Center, which was under construction, being built with metal that had been coated at his father's company.
He gave up on school and moved to Citrus County, where his uncle worked as the developer of Crystal Paradise Estates, a neighborhood behind the Crystal River Airport.
As he says, "I learned more from guys with grammar school educations than I ever did at school."
At 19, he received a certified residential contractor's license and built two homes on Dunkefield Road in Crystal River.
At 21, he became a licensed general contractor and Dennis Damato General Contractor Inc. was born. He built his own home in 1975, which he lived in for 29 years, and he met his wife, Patricia, in Citrus.
Community involvement grew out of being thankful for the opportunities, he said, and because he was a builder, an influential position at that formative time.
He helped form the Homosassa Chamber of Commerce. He built the Homosassa Lions Club building.
Despite the accomplishments and a fast-talking, gregarious personality, Damato is more likely to shun the limelight than jump into it, his family said. If he wanted to run for commissioner earlier, he could have, but instead was content being involved in the Redevelopment Agency for more than a decade.
"I didn't see it coming," Damato's only child, Danielle, 27, said of her father's decision to seek public office.
Not surprisingly, it's the tangible things, things a builder could improve on, that drive him to run. Seeing drainage problems creep up over and over again in his Seven Rivers neighborhood makes him want to install a countywide drainage plan. Watching Florida's historic Cracker-style buildings stand in disuse in Homosassa and Floral City makes him want to spur redevelopment.
But becoming a politician has come with its prices, Danielle Damato said. Her father is bothered by attacks on him and his occupation. Yet, he has not publicly responded to Carr's challenges.
"He's not a developer," Danielle Damato said, voicing her father's frustration. He's not a builder who builds 500 homes in quick succession with a "pave it over" mentality, she said.
No, Damato said. He is a builder, who has built slowly over time.
