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Wildlife corridor plan fades away

Two men fervently wanted to tie Brooker Creek and Starkey parks together. But as the process inched along like a tortoise, all the talking and trying would amount to another victory for developers.

By JOSH ZIMMER
Published February 27, 2005

ODESSA - It seemed like such a great idea.

Piece together four big pieces of forest and swamp as a haven for gopher tortoises and green tree frogs, ribbon snakes and red-shouldered hawks.

Planners called it a "wildlife corridor," though it more closely resembled a large park: 55 square miles of open space from Pinellas County to central Pasco County, connected by 3,400 acres in northwest Hillsborough County.

Because of its size, the corridor promised a rare outdoor experience within an hour's drive of Tampa and St. Petersburg. Horse lovers could ride for hours. Hikers, surrounded by encroaching development, could spend days amid pine forests and oak hammocks without seeing a car.

"We thought this was unique in a lot of ways," said Dave Sumpter, former Pinellas public lands manager and a leading booster of the corridor.

But in the end, three years of dogged effort didn't amount to a single acre.

The corridor's demise relives the time-honored battle between preservation and development, one the environment often loses. It underscores the limits of land protection efforts, and the crucial roles of timing, planning and profits.

There always were hurdles - major ones.

To make the corridor a reality, planners would have to cobble together two parcels in Odessa and two more in south-central Pasco. The owners included a famous eye surgeon from Tarpon Springs, a newly formed family trust, a ranching family known for its generosity and the obscure daughter of a supermarket chain founder.

The list of potential purchasers was equally complicated. It could have included any combination of state and local governments, along with the Southwest Florida Water Management District, all cooperating to pool acquisition money. Pinellas agreed to manage the corridor if everyone could pull it off.

They couldn't.

Many close to the project say the best time to act was 10 to 20 years ago, before land prices shot up and developers began investing millions into their projects, particularly in Pasco.

Sumpter looks back ruefully about 15 years to the establishment of the Brooker Creek Preserve, an 8,500-acre stretch of old Florida swamp and uplands that crosses into northwest Hillsborough. Pinellas officials spotted a potential link with the 8,000-acre Starkey Wilderness Park in Pasco. But the idea hit the cutting room floor, only to gather dust until the late 1990s.

That's when two friends - Sumpter and Eric Summa of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers - resurrected the ambitious plan.

Both were land managers: Sumpter, an enthusiastic biologist with a preference for field work, and Summa, who headed a section in the local corps branch that assessed how developers would pay for the environmental damage they cause.

They shared a keen interest in preservation. As 1999 unfolded, they saw an exciting opportunity in an unlikely place: the proposed 678-mile Buccaneer natural gas pipeline that would cross the Gulf of Mexico and come ashore in Pasco County.

Land damage was inevitable. The pipeline's builders would have to compensate by restoring, or helping to buy, valuable properties elsewhere. Any plans would pass by Summa's desk.

As a University of South Florida graduate student, Summa had explored the potential for using the compensation to link pockets of preserved land. He called Sumpter. Why not use the pipeline to finance the wildlife corridor? he asked.

Around 2000, a small team of potential stakeholders was ready for a closer look. Sumpter, full of enthusiasm, said Buccaneer rented a helicopter for a series of flyovers.

"We clearly saw a chunk of green space stretching from Brooker east through Hillsborough County, north across (State Road) 54, to Starkey," Sumpter said. "So we started talking to folks."

But the potential source of funds disappeared in early 2001 when the pipeline's path moved south to Manatee County. The money would have to come from somewhere else.

It never did.

"After a while everybody started looking at land costs," Swiftmud land manager Mark Brown said. "It was a situation where it just got out of control."

The players who could make the corridor happen met later that year in New Port Richey. Officials with all three counties sat down with environmentalists and state and federal agencies.

Bob Friedman, then an executive with U.S. Homes, joined, representing the company's ongoing development on the east side of the Trinity property in south Pasco.

Problems started when the conversation turned to money, recalled Jennifer Seney, executive director of the group Pascowildlife.

She said she'll never forget what Friedman quoted: $80,000 an acre, a price that likely put the project out of reach.

"I sat right next to him and was devastated," Seney said.

Friedman, now a Pasco County planner, recalled quoting "a high number." The company already had invested millions in Heritage Springs, a retirement community, and intended to earn its profits on the latter stages. So it couldn't sell the land cheaply, he said.

Government can only buy properties at much lower appraised values.

"I was talking about our costs," Friedman said. "The idea wasn't to discourage."

Sumpter, Seney and others refused to lose hope. They saw other environmental damage funds coming from the widenings of SR 54 and Ridge Road.

The Starkey family, who had sold the land for Pasco's Starkey Wilderness Park, also shifted gears. After hinting that he might open up 3,000 acres between Trinity and the park, Jay B. Starkey expressed doubts about the project's value. "At first, I thought, "What a cool thing,' " Starkey said. But "It really couldn't be big enough and wide enough that it could have made a difference" for wildlife.

No one ever promised encounters with Florida black bears, Sumpter said. At most, the corridor would have stretched a mile from east to west, usually less. But it still would have been a boon to local wildlife, threatened by bulldozers and forced to forage within earshot of passing cars.

It also offered exciting possibilities for reintroducing the federally endangered red-cockaded woodpecker, he said.

After the New Port Richey meeting, some sensed that Pasco Administrator John Gallagher backed away from the project to focus more attention on the county's budding land acquisition program.

The news didn't get any better in 2002.

Kay O'Rourke, daughter of the founder of the Winn-Dixie supermarket chain, always was an important piece of the puzzle. Her 1,600-acre Odessa property was wedged between Trinity to the north and the 1,800-acre Eldridge-Wilde Wellfield to the west. Corridor backers were counting on her generosity.

Hillsborough County, excited by O'Rourke's earlier inquiries about its lands acquisition program, sent out feelers indicating it wanted to negotiate. Instead, O'Rourke dropped a bomb by filing to rezone the property for 227 homes.

Coincidentally, around the same time, the Eldridge-Wilde Wellfield, leased for decades by Pinellas but now controlled by regional utility Tampa Bay Water, became part of a Wilde family trust. Their lawyer made it known the family wanted to make money from the land, whether by sale for houses or preservation.

Another critical moment involved a company owned by Dr. James Gills, a Tarpon Springs eye surgeon. It came to the table with an offer to sell 242 acres in the Trinity area for $8.5-million - or $35,000 an acre. That was less than half of what U.S. Homes demanded the year before for neighboring land.

But in exchange, the company wanted Pasco and Pinellas to allow another 505 homes and another 600,000 square feet of businesses in the company's projects in the Trinity area. It also wanted Pasco to give up 40 acres set aside for a county park, and for Pinellas to hand over 90 acres it owned south of the Pasco-Hillsborough border for up to 45 homes.

The proposal got a cold response from Hillsborough, where officials said it would endanger the well field and violate the county's comprehensive land use plan.

"My employer (Dr. Gills) was very interested in seeing this happen," said Dan Aldridge, vice president of the company developing the western half of Trinity. "We made an offer; no one responded. But if you're gaining more land than you're giving up, I don't see the problem there. I don't see how the environment and public . . . is not better off."

Pasco commissioners had jumped into the game a little late, but with a passion. In 2002, with the project's future on the line, they asked the state's Florida Forever program to buy 417 acres in Trinity.

The request never had a good chance. Faced with a long wish list but limited funds, Florida Forever didn't want to buy an isolated parcel, staff director Mark Glisson said.

"In the great scheme of comparison, it (the corridor) just didn't cut it," he said.

By 2003, the project was flagging.

Trinity appeared lost for good as the company continued building, and all the critical land in northwest Hillsborough was in limbo.

Although Kay O'Rourke withdrew her plans for 227 homes on her property, she stayed out of touch.

Meanwhile, the Wilde family started demanding larger royalties to lease its well fields to Tampa Bay Water, the regional water utility. The two sides ended up in court.

Two years later, people talk about what might have been.

Sumpter says backers flubbed a golden opportunity to rally the public behind a project that offered so many benefits for current and future generations. What began as a pet project of well-meaning bureaucrats and environmentalists largely stayed that way.

Developers could have offered a better deal for the public good, he said. But Pasco County, in his opinion, also failed to offer critical funds. Nowhere was the lack of money more evident than in south-central Pasco.

"Trinity was a back breaker," Sumpter said.

There's some consolation from recent developments.

Pinellas assistant administrator Jake Stowers mentioned the possibility of creating a recreational link between Pinellas and Pasco along a major power line, part of a regional effort to forge an uninterrupted path between the Pinellas Trail and the Suncoast Trail in north Hernando County.

Also, Pasco voters last year approved a penny sales tax increase that will fund the county's first-ever environmental lands acquisition program.

"That's a positive that came out of this," Sumpter said. "It got everybody talking."

Josh Zimmer can be reached at 813 269-5314 or zimmer@sptimes.com

[Last modified February 27, 2005, 00:34:02]