The air was thick inside the Brandon Community Center before a town hall meeting the night of June 10, the uncomfortable conditions the result of a faulty A/C unit. As roughly 400 pissed-off denizens of Eastern Hillsborough County sat waiting for the confab to commence, Hillsborough County Commissioner Al Higginbotham was feeling the heat.
Affixing a lavalier microphone to his white business shirt, the 58-year-old member of the Hillsborough Board of County Commissioner (BOCC) stood straight forward with his crutches (necessary since 1995, when he suffered a spinal cord injury) affixed below his elbows, balancing as he addressed the audience and tried to lighten the mood.
“How many people are here to register your child for summer baseball?” he asked with a straight face. “If you are, you’re in the wrong room.”
“Har, har, har,” one man sitting in the back barked out sarcastically, the bid for levity clearly unappreciated. As more stragglers wandered in from the fierce rainstorm that raged outside, Higginbotham segued into explaining that he was aware that the issue at hand had generated enormous interest (350 emails and 150 phone calls to his office) in recent weeks.
That issue: An unpopular proposal by private developer Redstone Properties to build a big-box retail project just east of Bloomingdale High School and Bloomingdale Regional Library, near Lithia Pinecrest Road in Valrico. Some of the residents say it will be a Super Wal-Mart, though the developer has yet to confirm or deny that claim.
In fact, there’s been little outreach whatsoever by Redstone, which has exacerbated tensions throughout the process.
Preceding Higginbotham to the microphone was county attorney Adam Gormley, who explained to the angry residents that this was essentially a listening session for the commissioner, since the site for the development had already been approved — meaning the BOCC couldn’t stop the process from going forward even if it wanted to.
“I’m here for the duration, whether it’s fun or not. Happy or unhappy. That’s what this system is all about,” Higginbotham said ruefully, well aware of the mood of the room and maintaining that to some extent he was just the messenger.
It would definitely not be a fun night for the commissioner, as he was pummeled for the next three hours by repeated criticisms of the project’s deleterious effects on the community, the legislative process that led to this situation, and his personal failure to adequately represent his constituents.
Dan Grant, an organizer with the grassroots group Coordinated Active Neighborhoods Development Organization (CAN-DO), led the offensive, delivering to Higginbotham a not so neighborly message: “We’re aware you’re running for a district wide seat [in 2014],” Grant said, “and we have serious concerns. If you have trouble representing us in District 4, you’ll have trouble representing in a countywide seat.”
CAN-DO activist (and sometimes CL blogger) George Niemann, said he wanted to correct Higginbotham’s claim that he was just the messenger between the county and the developer.
“You are not just the messenger, you are the approver,” he scolded. “Don’t play dumb. Somebody has to accept responsibility for this, otherwise nobody will be responsible. You made the decision. The buck stops with you. I would respect you more if you said ‘I really goofed.’”
Other citizens spoke with equal passion about the site plan, which calls for a 158,000 square-foot big-box retail store, an apartment complex and five other commercial properties — a proposal that they said will ruin their neighborhood.
Objections were made specifically about potential noise and light pollution, and traffic nightmares based on the fact that the new project would bring thousands of motorists to an already overcrowded street.
Many of the Bloomingdale residents emphasized they are not against development — just this development — and acknowledged that they’ve known for a decade that the site had been rezoned for business. But what has infuriated them is how Redstone Properties requested and received what’s known as a text amendment to the Land Development Code (LDC) back in December of 2011. That amendment changed the proposal from a Traditional Neighborhood Development to a Mixed Use Development, which would allow for the construction of a Wal-Mart-style superstore.
Higginbotham said that only 60 percent of the people who lived in Bloomingdale back in 2003 when the area was rezoned for commercial development currently live there. “That means 40 percent of them didn’t know about the zoning change. They just saw this big open pasture and said ‘well, that’s nice.’ I’m not being demeaning. I’m just trying to look at this step by step.”
But Diane Sandow said that’s baloney. She’s lived on Little Oak Street, located across from the proposed big-box site, since 1989, and said she went to some of the meetings that Redstone held in the community in recent years. She said the developer never showed a plan of any type, nor gave any hints about the building of a big-box store, which is why she was floored when she read a story in the local Osprey Observer in February detailing such a plan. “I felt betrayed because when you do a LDC text amendment, the public doesn’t get involved. The county does it,” she said.
Sandow called Higginbotham “a hypocrite,” and said, “I feel betrayed because he’s supposed to represent me.” She added that she doesn’t feel she has any representation at the county level at all.
Only three citizens attended the BOCC meeting where Redstone got its LDC text amendment change in December of 2011, leading to criticism that the community was given inadequate notice about what was to be voted on at the board level.
The amendment was technically not about Redstone’s Bloomingdale development, but instead was aimed at all county areas that had been reclassified from Traditional Neighborhood Development to Mixed Use Development. But it was obvious to Terry Flott, one of the three citizens who attended the meeting, that the amendment was really about the Bloomingdale property.
“This circumvents the process,” Flott said, referring to that change. “Particularly for one piece of property when they don’t have to go through the same process if they would have re-zoned, so it eliminates the public purview of what’s going on. There’s absolutely no posting (to the neighbors).”
County staff insisted the meeting was properly noted in The Tampa Tribune. The county claimed on its website that, “because the text amendments were a zoning code change, and not a change specific to any particular property (ies), community signage about the hearing was not required or used.”
“This project is really going to destroy the area,” said Jereme Monette, President of the Bloomingdale Ridge Board of Directors, and a candidate for school board in 2014. He said the anger unleashed at Higginbotham last week was the culmination of months of frustration. “[The proposed development] is going to massively impact every single facet of this bedroom community and it’s not a good fit, and frankly, everybody puts it on him,” he said, referring to the district commissioner.
While it’s true that Higginbotham did make the motion to approve the LDC, he did not initiate the text amendment. Redstone Properties did, which it is allowed to do by law in Hillsborough County. And all six of Higginbotham’s commission colleagues voted with him. When asked last week if he would have liked some of his colleagues by his side at the June 10 town hall, Higginbotham replied, “It certainly would have been nice.”
Flott said the issue at hand is emblematic of the problem with most privately initiated land development text amendments, which she called “self-serving.”
“We have a bad habit in this county,” she said. “If we can’t make something work the way we want it to work, we’ll just change the codes. When the commissioners hold up their big book of codes and blame the ills of the world on it, they really have themselves to blame for that.”
Another reason why CAN-DO organizers said they harbor ill feelings toward Higginbotham is their contention that he’s given them the runaround in terms of meeting to discuss their concerns.
CAN-DO members wanted to have last week’s meeting at Bloomingdale High School, and said Commissioner Higginbotham and his staff ignored them before ultimately deciding to have the town hall at the Brandon Recreation Center. Higginbotham denied this, and emphasized that nobody on the board has held more community meetings with his constituents than himself, citing 180 in 2012 alone.
“Our staff told them if they had conflicts to please give us other dates, and we never heard back from them,” Higginbotham said. “When we didn’t hear back from them, I took the steps to find a location to meet with the citizens.”
Niemann has been a persistent critic of the board for years, claiming that the development community is really in charge at the County Center. He said commissioners and their staffs regularly blow him off when he asks to meet with them. “Guys like me, they write me off,” he said. “But what you’ve got here is really average citizens, not a George Niemann, that goes down there. They’ve got average citizens that didn’t pay attention to government, and all of a sudden one day they discover, ‘oh shit, they screwed up.’”
Other County Commissioners have recently expressed bewilderment about the lack of communication coming from Redstone, with Chairman Ken Hagan sending a blistering letter, calling its public signs of indifference, “the height of arrogance.”
“I certainly didn’t learn in business school that that’s the way you want to handle your relationships in the community,” he wrote.
David Singer, attorney for Redstone, failed to respond to CL’s calls for comment.
Higginbotham said that he was just as surprised as the Bloomingdale community that Redstone has apparently altered from its original vision for the site, which was promoted as a Winthrop Village-style development but is now a big-box store proposal. Winthrop Village is a Riverview-based development that’s considered a Traditional Neighborhood Development, as it includes a Cappy’s, Green Iguana and other commercial developments that wouldn’t seem out of place in South Tampa.
There is currently an Aug. 18 deadline for Redstone to file business plans, but Higginbotham and the other commissioners aren’t waiting.
The morning after the June 10 town-hall barnburner, Higginbotham came up with a unique proposal — so unique it seemed to momentarily befuddle county attorney Gormley when it was proposed at the board’s land use meeting. Higginbotham made a motion calling on Gormley to draft a resolution invoking “the doctrine of zoning in progress,” which is something that has been used in other parts of Florida but has rarely if ever been used in Hillsborough County. The commissioner said it would bring a halt to the approval of any Mixed Use Development or building applications countywide for 180 days, “so that county staff can review these to see how the language change [in the 2011 text amendment] has affected that particular property and use.”
Following up on that, Commissioner Kevin Beckner said he also thought that when a privately initiated amendment comes before the board, there should be an additional layer of scrutiny applied — though he emphasized he wasn’t suggesting any nefarious motivations by developers who request one.
But the newly emboldened activists aren’t going away. Grant said CAN-DO will only grow bigger and stronger in the upcoming weeks and months.
“We have a strategic plan to continue to stop this and we’re acting on that plan,” he said. “We’re not sitting back and waiting for Higginbotham to do something. We’re going to continue to move forward.”
This article appears in Jun 20-26, 2013.
