DID YOU HEAR THE ONE ABOUT THE ZONING LAWYER?

St. Petersburg Times - St. Petersburg, Fla.
MICHAEL VAN SICKLER
Copyright Times Publishing Co. Apr 13, 2007

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A fundraising roast puts the focus on an attorney.

Dining on filet steaks and barbecued shrimp, 280 of Tampa's business elite lobbed good-natured barbs at the evening's guest of honor.

It was a Thursday night roast, Friars Club-style, at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center to raise money for the Hillsborough County Anti-Drug Alliance.

The local celebrity the nonprofit board chose to rope in big donors: Ron Weaver.

Never heard of him? Well, you haven't been to a zoning meeting in the past 30 years. That's where Weaver has marked his turf as one of the town's top zoning lawyers.

The Citrus Park mall? He helped get that approved. The giant Trinity community in Pasco County?  Yep, that's him, too.

Las Vegas may roast the Dean Martins of the world. Houston exalts Big Oil. New York City deifies the lions of Wall Street or Broadway.

At least for this week, Tampa feted two prominent figures from its marquee industry: land development.

On Tuesday evening, the American Cancer Society honored land use attorney Rhea Law, the chief executive of Fowler White, at a Neiman Marcus fashion show.

Being a zoning lawyer was hardly the best calling card when Weaver graduated from Harvard Law School in the early 1970s and began his career in Tampa.

"People would say, 'He's a zoning lawyer. Too bad.' " Weaver said. "But then, starting in the early 1980s, they started saying, 'Hey, he's a zoning lawyer. Maybe he can help us.' "

Florida's population surge helped. Hillsborough County's population climbed from 646,960 in 1980 to 1,111,717 in 2005, according to the U.S. census. Those new residents had to live somewhere.

Weaver also credits land development laws passed in the 1980s.   "It got complicated," Weaver said. "We had developers lining up outside our doors. They needed us."

While celebrated in some quarters as the shepherds of growth, land use attorneys aren't held in high regard by some residents who say development interests hold too much sway over elected officials.

Even Weaver joked about a day of reckoning.  "When we land use attorneys die," he said, "we may have to chew through all the concrete we got approved to get to heaven."