Foes and friends question whether Clay Colson of Citizens for Sanity has lost his effectiveness. Colson vows to keep dogging developers and reporting "dirt" on county officials.
By JAMES THORNER
Published August 1, 2004
Back in 1999, Clay Colson was sporadically employed, living with his sister in an antique frame house in Land O'Lakes and mulling life as a 40-something bachelor.
He found his calling in a development called Oakstead. You may know it. It has grown to about a 1,000 homes on State Road 54. But five years ago it was pasture developers needed rezoned for homes.
Colson, his home tucked away behind a swamp a quarter mile or so from Oakstead, was none too pleased. His answer was Citizens for Sanity.
He helped knit the group of uncoordinated protesters into a movement that forced Pasco County to change what the group considered a developer friendly, pave-it-over attitude.
"Citizens for Sanity started the tea party," Colson announced in late 1999 with the energy that has become his trademark. "Now the revolution begins."
Fast forward five years and Colson appears to many, friend as well as foe, as a revolutionary without a revolution.
The 49-year-old day laborer has spent the past two weeks filing a flurry of ethics complaints against County Commissioner Ann Hildebrand.
The Florida Elections Commission already has bounced the first of Colson's complaints, a scant 10 days after receiving it. Colson accused Hildebrand of listing her secondary instead of her primary residence on an election form.
Colson's deeper grudge against Hildebrand is his belief that she favors developers, but even some of Colson's closest allies say the complaints could work to the commissioner's advantage.
Here's Bob Carver, a successor to Colson as president of Citizens for Sanity: "I don't know if there's any basis for it. I'm as dumbfounded as anyone else. If somebody's beating on somebody, she could get a lot of sympathy votes."
Harry Wright, the Land O'Lakes barbecue restaurateur who co-founded Citizens with Colson in 1999, said his old colleague struggles to find a role for himself after his initial successes.
"I think Clay is just really hurt he really can't make more of a difference" Wright said. "When you get where you can't make a difference, you start nitpicking."
Environmental locomotive running out of steam?
Colson's accomplishments are undeniable.
Through sheer hard work he mastered the county's comprehensive land-use plan, often devouring pages well past midnight. The plan is the county's blue print for growth. It's stuffed in a fat binder and speaks a technical language that can confound laymen.
Pointing to clauses in the growth plan, Colson filed complaints accusing Pasco officials of insufficiently protecting wildlife, wetlands and drinking water wells from encroachment by developers.
The county eventually settled with Colson, and rewrote the growth plan at his insistence. More immediately, Pasco commissioned new ordinances to protect wildlife and wells, save trees from development and require stores to shroud buildings in landscaping.
"He has a mind like a steel trap," said Pat Burke, a former candidate for county commissioner and an ally from Colson's pro-environment fights. "I think he takes law books to bed with him and studies them in his sleep."
Jennifer Seney, a Wesley Chapel environmental activist who prides herself on working with the system, no longer will work with Colson.
She said he seems to have outlived his usefulness.
"I have always viewed Clay as a problem finder, a fire starter," Seney said. "What he's not good at is driving to conclusions or solutions."
Adds Seney: "Personally, he pretty much is standing alone. He scares a lot of people whether they be on one end or another."
The past two years have been extra rough on Colson. He has been arrested twice.
One was on charges of failing to appear in court after Animal Control officers accused him of interferring with their efforts to restrain his dog.
The second arrest stemmed from a neighbor's accusation that Colson threw a rock at her. His trial is scheduled for September. Citations issued to Colson regarding animals and junked cars are too numerous to list.
Last year he meticulously prepared a legal case against a proposed east-west road known as the Ridge Road extension that would link New Port Richey with Land O'Lakes.
Colson worries the road, which would complement state roads 52 and 54, would sever a nature preserve called Serenova. But when the judge summoned him to make his case, Colson had vanished, unavailable even by phone. His friends grumbled at the blown opportunity.
"He made terrible error on Ridge Road," Seney said. "It almost led to contempt of court."
Depression may be root of some recent problems
Colson objected to the Times' writing a profile about him, but he did shed some light on his recent troubles.
"I have suffered all my life from depression, and I went through a very bad depressive episode," he said of last year's flub with Ridge Road.
"The problem I have is a chemical imbalance in the brain," Colson elaborated. "I don't take modern drugs."
A former starting lineman on the Tampa Catholic High School football team, Colson, now sporting a burly 250-pound frame and a ponytail, lives in an 82-year-old house on Joy Drive. It's on a rutted dirt lane west of U.S. 41 near the county dog pound.
Dogs, cats, chickens and horses roam the 4-acre spread that belongs to his sister, Pamela Strobeck. A stone circle occupies his front yard. It's where Colson practices Wicca, a pagan religion that reveres nature.
His neighbors were so annoyed - one installed a crucifix in his window facing Colson's house - Colson now performs the ritual out of their sight. Things got so tense Strobeck moved out with her two children, he said.
It's that rural lifestyle Colson insists is threatened by the suburban development flooding Pasco. The Oakstead rezoning in 1999 was the opening salvo.
"This county is as pro-growth as pro-growth can get," he said last week. "All they do is streamline it for developers to get what they want."
To be a Colson confidant is to be awakened by phone calls at 2 a.m. If you're a lawyer, Colson will give you an unsolicited lesson on legal interpretation; if you're an environmentalist, why you're insufficiently green; if you're a government official, why you voted wrong.
"He's not a huge "pro' anything," Seney said. "He's more "anti' than "pro.' "
His most recent "anti' activity: Colson filed a complaint with State Attorney Bernie McCabe that Hildebrand and County Commissioner Steve Simon illegally conspired with the School Board to help get a one-cent penny sales tax increase passed this year.
Colson opposed the tax increase, to the puzzlement of some former friends. Some of the money will pay for land for environmental conservation, land that would be off limits to developers forever.
Simon said if it was Colson's goal to make him feel lousy, he has succeeded.
As for the charge, Simon labels it "ridiculous."
McCabe was no kinder, calling the complaint a "fishing expedition" on Colson's part. "I put a note on it that I didn't see anything there. So I don't think much will happen. The dots didn't connect," he said.
Keeping the faith despite fading influence in group
Still, despite a growing list of detractors, Colson still has his supporters. Lesley Blackner, a Palm Beach lawyer retained by the Sierra Club, calls him a "good old boy with a conscience."
"He likes to get in peoples' faces," Blackner said. "I think in our society there should be a spectrum of approaches. If everybody wears a suit and sits like milquetoast in front of the commission, nothing comes of it."
But judging from Colson's signature organization, Citizens for Sanity, his influence is dwindling.
As Carver points out, the group used to meet twice a month, then monthly, then every other month. Now it's "whenever necessary." The agenda for the next meeting: organizing a barbecue picnic for active membership that rarely exceeds 20.
But Colson seems unfazed. By his own admission, he's readying a steady stream of new complaints against county officials. He said tipsters are supplying him with more "dirt" on local politicos. He chooses to file complaints one by one to get the most publicity he can.
"I'm using the media," he said. "If I give it to you all at one time, it's one story and it's over. It's building and building and building until we're done with this one and moving on to the next."
But he's doing it without the support of Citizens, precluded from political activity by its non-profit status.
"Clay, he's always getting in the paper," Carver said. "But he's doing it on his own."
