Dinosaur developers are gobbling up rural areas Series: GUEST COLUMN

[STATE Edition]
St. Petersburg Times - St. Petersburg, Fla.

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The citizens of Citrus Park, Lutz, Keystone, Thonotosassa, Town 'N Country, Brandon, Riverview, Gibsonton, Apollo Beach, Sun City Center, Ruskin and Wimauma are fighting to save their communities from senseless growth. But there are dinosaur-style developers working against them.

Community-based plans can preserve water resources, property, lifestyle and community identity. They should be road maps for future development, turning zoning and permitting requests into pleasurable experiences instead of battles with developers.

After a year and a half of workshops and hearings Citrus Park, Lutz and Keystone were the first to develop community-based plans for Hillsborough County. They were presented to our County Commission in May.

However, some of the commissioners decided to listen to developers and removed important parts of the Lutz and Keystone plans. After much public embarrassment they partly restored those plans, tried to explain away their poor decisions, but never apologized for putting our hard work in the back seat of the senseless-growth Cadillac driven by developers.

The plans were then approved by the Florida Department of Community Affairs and returned to our County Commission for final approval in October. True to form, developers tried to derail them again. Despite their ruses, the County Commission approved our plans.

We now move to the next phases of design standards development and Land Development Code updates. But each phase can be further sabotaged by the developers.

Certain developers have great interests in seeing our plans weakened or defeated, preferring instead to pave over everything in sight. So, if you overhear a builder or developer complain about the plans please consider her or him to be a dinosaur. This distinction is given to a builder or developer who acts like those large, big- footed creatures that devoured everything in sight, squashed what was still standing and plopped big piles of mess everywhere they went.

We have been trying for years to evolve into livable communities, but the dinosaurs obstruct our progress rather than evolve with us. These dinosaurs must either evolve into smaller, modern and more adaptive community players or take their extinct ways to places that don't care about quality of life and community resources.

We learned that dinosaurs show up but do not constructively participate in the workshops used to develop each plan. Instead, they appear at the County Commission hearings to complain that they have been left out of the process, the material was too confusing, or the workshop members did not listen to them.

We learned to combat this practice by keeping attendance notes on the private land use attorneys, planners and builder and real estate representatives.

A representative of the Builders Association of Greater Tampa used a wolf-in-sheep's clothing approach when he said he endorsed the Citrus Park plan but not the Keystone or Lutz plans, offering thinly veiled reasons for each. I suspect the real reason for his love of the Citrus Park plan is that most vacant land there already is permitted or rezoned. Since he has nothing more to devour, why not sheepishly say he likes it in order to sound like a positive community player?

Later he and his dinosaur buddies turned into Keystone and Lutz- hungry wolves, viewing our many square miles of rural home sites and open space as juicy areas to be devoured. To avoid being blind- sided, we learned not to accept statements from a builder or developer at face value. Parcels at intersections, or at least 20 acres in size, are their favorite foods.

The builders' representative also coined the term "rural sprawl" to put a negative spin on our plans to manage our rural communities responsibly. He doesn't like to be reminded that a rural lifestyle is a community choice, does not require urban services, and that the Florida Department of Community Affairs mandated Hillsborough County to reduce urban sprawl and the cost of supporting it.

We even had to deal with a developer-led smear campaign, flyers filled with half truths and character assassination, against our community leaders. That bitter old dinosaur lost her voice when her smear campaign was disclosed at the hearings.

The dinosaurs also claimed economic losses because our plans require specific project designs or low-density developments instead of their usual vanilla-wrapped high-density subdivisions.

In fact, there are modern developers who embrace our community visions and already have projects under way, at a profit. People will buy well planned home sites.

We just had to love the dinosaurs when, at the final County Commission hearing, they and their supporters tried one last ruse by claiming that our entire communities had to be rezoned to be consistent with our new plans, knowing that such a massive project would delay our plans for two to three years. The truth: Large scale rezoning was done from 1990 and 1993 and our new plans do not change current zoning.

We learned to be forceful with facts that demonstrate opposing views to the dinosaur developers and always to appear before the Planning Commission and County Commission in large numbers and dressed in the same color.

Further, we learned that we all must remain vigilant in protecting and affirming our community visions.

- Tom Aderhold lives in Keystone and is active in community issues that involve lake protection, land use, transportation and cellular phone towers. His company, PHR Associates, provides human resources and risk management services for corporate clients.