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Pinellas pumps up nature at well field
By JAMES THORNER, Times Staff Writer LAND O'LAKES -- Long reviled for pumping billions of gallons of groundwater from beneath Pasco County, Pinellas County is trying to burnish its image by building a large nature center at its Cross Bar Ranch well field. Pinellas Utilities Director Pick Talley called the 6,122-square-foot, Florida Cracker style visitors center, scheduled for completion within a year, a "soft sell." Guided tours starting at the center will counteract the misconception that the 12,023-acre Cross Bar and Al Bar well field property in north-central Pasco is a dead zone for wildlife, Talley said. "If the well field is so bad, how can you have so much wildlife?" Talley said this week. For years Pinellas has borne blows from Pasco environmentalists, who accuse the heavily populated county to the south of callously pumping its less populous neighbor dry. The result has been dry lake beds and sagging terrain. Besides providing million of gallons of drinking water every day, the land also holds a cattle ranch and a pine plantation that earns Pinellas $2-million through the sale of needle mulch. Pinellas will spend about $700,000 of those earnings on the visitors center on Locket Avenue, which meanders through the property from its starting point at U.S. 41 north of State Road 52. The one-story building, its 2 acres partly screened by pine and oak, will include a classroom, kitchen, lunchroom, restrooms and a porch. "It's made to look like an old Florida house with a tin roof and a veranda all around it," Talley said. Judy Williams, founding member of the defunct Coalition of Lake Associations, said the well fields teem with nature because the surrounding land is bone dry from pumping. Animals have nowhere else to run, she said. Williams won $100,000 from Pinellas in 1999 after a judge dismissed a county lawsuit meant to pre-empt a threatened lawsuit from Williams' group. "To me what Talley's doing is purely smoke and mirrors," Williams said of the visitors center. "It's just a lot of PR mumbo jumbo." Nevertheless, the Pasco County School District has climbed aboard. Students, particularly high schoolers, will regularly tour the well fields guided by Pinellas employees, school official Jay Feliciano said. Tours of the land are given free by appointment. The land is home to bald eagles, alligators, wild hogs, foxes, coyotes, deer and countless other animals. Pinellas also created refuges for burrowing owls and scrub jays, earning praise from bird watchers. Borrowing a page from the county's other eco-tourism business, Starkey's Flatwoods Adventures near Odessa, Pinellas has converted two surplus school buses into safari buggies. "We patterned our bus on the Starkey Ranch bus," Talley said. The school district sends middle school students to the Starkey Ranch and will continue to do so after the Cross Bar Ranch visitors center opens, Feliciano said.
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From today's Pasco Times Letters |
