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Huge machines sculpt the roads and homesites for the development, while workers carefully craft the saltwater canals to promote healthy sea life. With the area's natural beauty as a cornerstone, even fossils on the site get special attention.
By JUDY STARK, Times Homes Editor
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 23, 2002
DEVELOPING A DEVELOPMENT: MIRABAY -- Second in a series
SOUTHSHORE -- There are no real roads out here yet, just tracks through the mud and dust, and not much in the way of landmarks to tell you where you are on this moonscape.
At the wheel of his white Ford Expedition, Brian Sewell slalomed around the site, turning just past a stand of trees and switching into four-wheel drive before he rolled cautiously through a stretch of sand.
"You live it on paper so long, then when you come out here, you know where to go," he said as the windshield wipers tick-tocked on a recent rainy morning.
Sewell is vice president and general manager of MiraBay, the master-planned community that is rising on this 750-acre site on the eastern shore of Tampa Bay.
At this point in the long process of turning fields and groves into a gated residential community, the major activity at MiraBay is moving dirt. On any day there may be 150 people on site, operating heavy equipment to create a 135-acre freshwater lagoon, install vinyl seawalls along 31/2 miles of existing saltwater canals, and begin to lay out the roads and sites. Here, the temporary sales center, scheduled to open in late spring. Over there, the future swim club and fitness center. Beyond, the boat lift that will move boats from the freshwater lagoon into the saltwater canals and thence out into Tampa Bay.
"To my knowledge, this is the largest single earthwork contract ever let in the bay area," said Toxey Hall of Heidt & Associates, the project's civil engineers. "That doesn't mean other projects haven't moved more dirt, but they've done it over a period of years in multiple development phases. We've never before been involved in a $14-million earthwork under one contract, one phase."
How much dirt does that amount to? Think of it this way: The 3-million cubic yards of earth that will be moved to create MiraBay -- to dig out the lagoon, create the roads, contour the property, prepare homesites, build berms -- is the equivalent of 60 Ice Palaces.
Sewell edged the Expedition toward a flurry of pink wings along one of the canals. A flock of roseate spoonbills was feeding in the water. "We need project boats, not trucks," Sewell said. "A community like this is a whole different mind-set."
That orientation to the water is one of the key marketing points for this project: the lagoon, the canals, the access to Tampa Bay. Everything about the community -- the land plan, the appearance of the buildings, the recreational offerings, the interior decorating, the signage, the printed materials -- emphasizes, "Water, water, water." Ninety-five percent of the potential buyers so far are boaters.
Those canals were dug back in the 1960s, when previous owners planned a different kind of residential community and when dredge-and-fill was still legal. It no longer is, but MiraBay can build on the existing canals. The first step is to install vinyl seawall to stabilize the canal banks, provide support for homes built on the water and prevent damage to boats.
"We're installing about 1,000 feet a week," said John Calves, a superintendent with Custom Docks by SeaMaster of Tampa. "This is the largest installation of this product at one time, ever. We're getting a semi to two semis a week" of the 12-foot vinyl panels from the Atlanta manufacturer. Seven miles of seawall, seven months of work.
Workers install the seawall by digging a trench, vibrating the panels into place 6 feet deep, then backfilling. The walls are topped with a 2-foot concrete cap. "We don't want to disturb more than we need to," Calves said as workers set up a jig to keep the seawall aligned in the trench.
The canals, 80 to 100 feet wide, "are sculpted so they are a consistent grade and depth," Sewell said. "It's like a potter with clay, in accordance with the specs, so it's very consistent." The depth of the canals will be 51/2 feet to maintain water quality and marine life. If the canals differ in depth, temperature and oxygen levels can vary, with harmful effects on fish and other creatures.
"We've never been involved in anything as complicated, from a water quality and construction point of view, as far as innovative methods to preserve water quality," said Hall, the civil engineer. Some of those efforts are regulatory requirements. In other cases, the developer, TerraBrook, is going beyond what's required.
Many of those methods were developed specifically for this project: for example, a series of restrictive-flow devices that narrow the canals, squeezing the channels so water flows faster and circulates better to flush the canals and avoid stagnation. Some of the canals had no outlets. There an arched, bridge-like structure, a sort of culvert, will be installed to connect water in these canals to free-flowing water on the other. In a couple of dead-end spots, underwater "shelves," known as biosumps, will be planted with vegetation that injects oxygen and nutrients into the water to avoid stagnation.
Sewell pointed out other earth-friendly features:
About 5,000 mangroves will be planted along the canals to serve as filters and nurture marine life. Those are in addition to the existing trees that were hand-tagged to be preserved when the site was cleared.
A stormwater pond, planted with cleansing grasses, will collect runoff that will be skimmed off or evaporated so no grease from nearby U.S. 41 flows into the canals and thence into Tampa Bay.
A drought-tolerant grass called paspallum has been planted, a slow grower that requires no irrigation and infrequent mowing. Besides looking good and preventing erosion, the swaths of grass planted near U.S. 41 serve another purpose: muffling road noise.
A slow-wake zone will protect the manatees that like to laze through the shallows as they make their way to the warm water near the TECO power plant just to the north at Apollo Beach.
New salt marshes and wetlands will be created, and new seagrass beds will be planted.
In the silver light of an early-morning rain, the tide was just beginning to turn, sending rippling wavelets across Tampa Bay and up the main canal that leads back to the MiraBay site. This is land that has lain silent, untouched, for decades, subject only to wind and tide, sun and rain.
"Those canal fingers were sitting there for years and years waiting to be developed," Jim Beggins remembered.
He has been watching the development of the Southshore area for almost 20 years. He sold off the 300 Century 21 real estate offices he owned throughout the state and moved to Apollo Beach in 1983. "I bought a piece of dirt that's now called Symphony Isles and developed that," he said.
But the region, largely agricultural, was slow to take off as a residential area.
The subdivisions that were built in the Southshore area "were developed by little people with no money. There was never anyone with the big marketing dollars to do it. If you could put together a big piece of property, you could probably interest one of the big guys."
It was Beggins who approached Glenn Cross of Shimberg Cross, the Tampa land developers, with a proposal for the site that is now becoming MiraBay.
"Sometimes luck is better than skill," Cross said. "We put out 10 contracts" -- to the owners of each of the 10 parcels that make up the site. Each was contingent on all the others; it was an all-or-nothing deal.
The offer on the 750 acres was for one price of $10,000 an acre, "which was real cheap for waterfront but ridiculous for swamp," Beggins said. "Everybody had to swallow some pride," but ultimately all the property owners agreed to sell.
Eventually the property was sold to TerraBrook. Cross does take credit for sketching out a plan to expand an existing lake into the freshwater lagoon that is being dug now and linking it to the saltwater canals. "Their plan is not a whole lot different from what we roughed out a few years ago," he said.
"We really have a shortage in Hillsborough of water-oriented activities," he said. "I predict it's going to be very popular."
The developers and engineers aren't the only ones concerned about moving dirt around on the MiraBay site. So is Frank Garcia, a local freelance paleontologist who has been digging in the Southshore area for years. In 1983, on a site in Apollo Beach, he made a major discovery of pre-Ice Age fossils, 1.4-million to 1.7-million years old. Elsewhere he found the remains of a rare, ancient armadillo.
"Just about anywhere around Ruskin, you'll hit some really, really nice fossils," Garcia says. "This must have been just very, very lush with food and vegetation for all those prehistoric animals. The whole region is loaded with fossils."
Early this year, Garcia started asking to be allowed on the MiraBay site to look for significant fossils. TerraBrook declined, saying heavy equipment in operation made that dangerous, and pointing out that a 70-page archaeological study of the site done as part of the permitting process had found nothing significant. Moreover, part of the site was a borrowpit for fill used in the construction of I-75 in the 1970s, so anything of significance might already be gone. Other material had long ago been moved to what is now the adjacent Wolf Branch Creek Preserve.
Garcia persisted, winning the attention of the Hillsborough County Commission and the Tampa Tribune's editorial page.
TerraBrook wondered where Garcia had been all those years before land development started. "I didn't know they were digging up the magnitude of cubic yards they were digging," he responded. "I didn't know till the last minute. I was just concerned that somebody should take a look at it."
Faced with a potential public-relations disaster -- a developer with a long list of environmental awards that prides itself on its careful stewardship of land and water, looking as though it were recklessly crushing historically significant fossils under its front-end loaders -- TerraBrook invited the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville to conduct a search of the site for fossils. Anything found during excavation will be donated to the museum. Garcia will be allowed to accompany the museum's team if he has appropriate insurance, which Garcia says he has.
"This occurred as basically a bolt out of the blue," said John Heagney, whose public relations firm handles the MiraBay account. "Anyone who believes something like this is going to go away is delusional. Everybody has to be taken seriously. This had the potential of blowing up in your face. That's not something you need when you're on a time schedule, the money clock is ticking, all manner of deadlines are staring you down and someone just throws a wrench into the works."
The link with the Museum of Natural History satisfied Garcia and certainly smoothed the way for MiraBay next time it has to appear before the County Commission, a long-term relationship that is worth nurturing, Heagney said. "This was the best possible resolution in a situation that could have gotten ugly and out of hand if level heads hadn't prevailed."
In a ballet of behemoths, earth-moving equipment rolled across the MiraBay site, scraping, digging, dumping, hauling. The dirt they dig and move will be used for sculpting the site, recontouring, building berms, filling.
Watching from behind the wheel of the mud-splattered Expedition, Sewell remarked, "It's fascinating to see a project with so many different people. The hauler is dependent on the front-end loader, who's dependent on the roller, who's dependent on the dump truck. You're orchestrating manpower and machinery and giving real specific directions on what they're doing that day."
He looked around the wide stretch of land that meets sea and sky, across the washboard surface that was once a citrus grove, to the ditch that will one day be a boat lift, and beyond to the area where homes will rise in a year or so. "You really start to see the community taking shape on an old majestic wetlands."
Next: The most precious buyers.