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Mission impossible

A neighborhood group worked for years to keep the East-West Road from running through its subdivision. They were called obstructionists and whiners, and the road is coming anyway.

By EMILY NIPPS
Published July 29, 2005

WEST MEADOWS - Susan McAveety remembers seeing that first flier in her mailbox. The road is coming any day now, it read. There was no name, only a phone number.

"Frankly, it looked like someone was ... I don't want to say stirring up trouble," she said. "It looked like someone was trying to get the neighbors out of their houses and get them pumped up."

It worked, at least in McAveety's case. She and her husband, Sean, who moved into the West Meadows community in New Tampa a year earlier in 1997, were curious enough to attend the meeting held in someone's living room. If nothing else, maybe they'd meet some new neighbors.

What they walked into was much bigger than coffee and friendships.

About 30 or 40 homeowners showed up to talk about Tampa's latest plans for the proposed East-West Road, which would allow traffic to funnel off Interstate 275 and run right through the middle of their neighborhood. Some railed against the city's plans, some asked questions and some just listened. Some walked away with an odd sense of spirit.

"I remember thinking, "Wow, people are really excited about this,' " McAveety said.

Even so, McAveety couldn't have predicted that she was about to become part of a civic fight. Those who stuck with the meetings would eventually form the Citizens for West Meadows, one of the most vocal and passionate grass roots organizations ever to form in New Tampa.

They would also be viewed as nuisances, rabble-rousers and pariahs by neighboring communities, who will benefit greatly from the East-West Road. The Citizens for West Meadows, which had as many as 80 people at their meetings at one point, were called obstructionists, whiners and NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yarders).

They quickly became outcasts in an area that begs for traffic relief. They staunchly stood their ground for years, regardless of what their friends in Hunter's Green or Pebble Creek thought.

And then, almost as quickly as it formed, the Citizens for West Meadows fell apart.

Greg Senger, the guy who put the fliers on people's mailboxes and on their windshields, moved to Miami. Onetime president Bob Campbell took a job with the Hillsborough County transportation division and could no longer align himself with a partisan group.

Some members moved out of the area, while the ones who stuck around either lost interest or gave up.

Was the game stacked against them? Or is grass roots organizing an uphill battle among the highly mobile homeowners of Tampa's suburbs?

Marshall Adams, the group's last president, learned more than he ever wanted to from the experience. "I've just had an entire gut full," he said. "The majority of people here, they utterly lost faith in our city government."

Group members sifted through maps and documents, educating themselves on environmental and traffic issues. They created their own Web site, back before personal Web sites and blogs were the norm. Between 1998 to 2002, they met with city engineers, transportation task forces, then-Mayor Dick Greco and then later with Mayor Pam Iorio.

Neighborhood activists often learn, though, that all the hard work and keen strategy in the world can fall short when dealing with bureaucracy and other governmental red tape.

Still, the West Meadows folks left an impression.

"They were a very engaging group," said city transportation engineer Mahdi Mansour, who oversees the East-West Road project. He recalled Adams as being "very intelligent, very pleasant to talk to."

When nice didn't work, they weren't afraid to take a different approach. Town meetings sometimes turned into shouting matches with other New Tampa neighbors. They contacted attorneys and had a sheriff's deputy (who lived in West Meadows) compile a list of crime statistics to show how the East-West Road would affect their community. They touted statistics about pollution, congestion and noise levels.

"Everything we laid out, they (city officials) couldn't and wouldn't debate it," Adams said, "because we were right."

The group made it clear they didn't oppose an east-west road, since Bruce B. Downs Boulevard is constantly clogged with drivers who have no shortcut options en route to homes north of Interstate 75. It just seemed like there were other options for the road, options that wouldn't sacrifice any particular community.

The biggest argument Citizens for West Meadows faced was one that irks Adams to this day.

"The line we always get is, "Well, you guys should have known about the road when you bought the house,' " Adams said.

"But it was a project I didn't expect to happen until much later. I guess I hadn't had much interest in it until I realized what was happening."

"At the time, I thought, "Who knows if I'm even going to be alive in 2025?' " Marino said.

But Marino has children and grandchildren who live on the other side of New Tampa Boulevard, and she now worries how safe that will be when interstate traffic comes barreling through. She also wonders how other families will be affected when they have to deal with the road's traffic on the way to nearby Clark Elementary School.

"Our stance has always been that growth happens," Marino said. "Let's just be smart about it. We're not against an east-west road. We just think there are other ways to go about it than to bisect a community."

Marino spoke with Iorio during one of her visits to New Tampa. She talked to other neighbors. She helped put together petitions, and now she wonders what the city did with all those signatures.

Like Adams, she finds it offensive when others in New Tampa tell her she should have known what was coming. She knows they wouldn't feel the same way if it were their neighborhood.

Frank Margarella, a longtime Hunter's Green resident who serves on the New North Transportation Alliance, disagrees.

"If the east-west connector went through Hunter's Green, I would support it," he said. "One, I would have known about the road ahead of time, and two, it would be for the good of the community."

He said he understood the concerns of Citizens for West Meadows, but he thought the argument was too little, too late. And, he said, he got tired of seeing group members complaining at every public workshop and town meeting.

"They were a pretty loud group," Margarella said. "I don't know about powerful, but they were definitely loud.

"What the Citizens for West Meadows succeeded in doing was just delay the process."

In other words, the Citizens for West Meadows were not ignored, he said.

In the end, though, the city settled on a 2.9-mile connector from Interstate 275 to Commerce Park Boulevard, with a bridge connecting Commerce Park and New Tampa boulevards over Interstate 75. The Florida Turnpike Enterprise agreed to take on the project, but the city still needs study results and more funding before the road can be built.

If all goes well, construction could start as early as 2009, Mansour said.

The protests coming out of West Meadows have dwindled over the past couple of years. The creators of the Citizens for West Meadows Web site stopped updating content sometime around early 2002. The sites's message board, which was a relatively high-traffic sounding board for debate and outrage, slowed to a halt that June. In January 2003, Adams announced that the Citizens for West Meadows had not elected new officers and basically no longer existed.

"All of our efforts were steamrolled by (former Mayor Dick) Greco," Adams said. "In reality, we were never given a fair shake. They (the City Council) met with us in the final analysis of the road project, but they were just going through the motions."

That's not entirely true, said Greco, who stepped down as mayor in 2003. The proposed location for the East-West Road, just like any other road, was based on need, environmental implications and other factors.

"I don't think any mayor or any other person can just put a road somewhere," Greco said. "How would you know? You have to go with what the studies say you can do, and once something is contemplated, you must go with it.

"A lot of people can sit and make suggestions while sitting in their living room, and it might sound like good suggestions. But it might not be the suggestions that make the most sense."

"I'm not happy that we stopped being active because it's a fight worth pursuing," she said.

But the new mother of a 9-month-old had to let it go. It seemed like all Citizens for West Meadows could do was stand in the way, and that only went so far.

"Every failure we experienced, we realized there were people in local government who wanted this road no matter what," she said.

Like McAveety, Adams still has all of his documents and paperwork saved, but he doubts he'll ever get the chance to use the stuff again. Not that he'd want to, anyway.

"I didn't want to be a part of it in the first place," he said. "I sort of got shanghaied into it and then through a strange set of circumstances found myself sitting as vice president (before becoming president)."

Yet if asked about the East-West Road, Adams probably knows enough about it to build one of his own. He has studied the laws, the economics and the environmental specs that go into such a project. And he can list a hundred reasons why he thinks it's a bad idea to go forward with such a project in his neighborhood.

He knows exactly why Citizens for West Meadows no longer exists, because like him, "they saw the handwriting on the wall."

"The truth is, they (city officials) really don't care," he said. "You just can't fight City Hall."

- Emily Nipps can be reached at 813 226-5313 or nipps@sptimes.com

[Last modified July 28, 2005, 08:19:13]