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By DAN DeWITT, Times Staff WriterThe pioneering developer wants to buy 1,400 acres near its Southern Hills Plantation. Traffic, impact fees and land use designation are again issues.
BROOKSVILLE - LandMar Group LLC came to Hernando County in 2000 with the pioneering idea of transforming the rural area south of Brooksville into 1,600 acres of upscale suburbia.
Now that those plans are nearing reality, the developer wants to do the same on land just to the east.
Whether LandMar develops the entire 1,400 acres - and one large landowner in the area has rejected the company's offers - county or city officials will face most of the same issues they did five years ago.
They will have to decide whether to allow LandMar to carve home sites out of fields and woods now designated as rural by the county's comprehensive plan. And if they do, they will have to figure out how to handle the increased traffic from the development.
These will be even bigger issues than with LandMar's first acquisition, because the area to the east is currently served by two-lane county roads - "Obviously, the road network is problematic," said Jim King, a county planner - and because of a 2-year-old development agreement between the city of Brooksville and LandMar.
The agreement calls for transportation impact fees - which are designed to pay for road improvements needed by new development - to be returned to LandMar to reimburse it for building a collector road through its original property.
If Brooksville annexes the new land, its agreement with LandMar may leave less money available for improvements to nearby Emerson, Culbreath and Powell roads, King and others said.
Brooksville City Manager Dick Anderson said he does not think the existing agreement applies to new annexations; Jim Harvey, the manager of LandMar's regional office in Tampa, disagrees.
If Harvey is right, King said, "That's a ton of transportation dollars that would not go into the public pot."
Jake Varn, a Tallahassee lawyer who has represented LandMar, said the company has been looking to expand its holdings near Brooksville for obvious reasons.
"This thing has been so successful, they wanted to find some more property to develop," Varn said.
Home prices at LandMar's 999-lot Southern Hills Plantation range from "the high $300s to over $1-million," according to the company Web site, and "homesites are available for direct purchase from the mid $100s to over $500,000."
LandMar was the first company to propose selling such expensive properties in Hernando County, an idea that some analysts initially viewed with skepticism.
But in two sales offerings last year, the company almost immediately sold more than 400 lots and lot/house combinations in Southern Hills; the company has also sold 411 acres of its original property to another developer, Levitt & Sons LLC, for a 900-lot gated community called Cascades, just north of Powell Road.
LandMar has completed a lavish entrance along U.S. 41 on the southern edge of Brooksville as well as several residential streets. The first houses are under construction, and the golf course, planned by acclaimed golf designer Pete Dye, is scheduled to open next month.
Not everyone has been impressed by the development.
Jim DeMaria, who owns Bluestone Real Estate, Construction and Development Corp. as well as 700 acres just to the east of Southern Hills, said construction on the clubhouse and roads has lagged behind schedule. He blames LandMar for not adequately funding the project and said that is one reason he has refused to sell his property to the company.
LandMar, a Jacksonville-based subsidiary of Duke Energy, "should have plenty of money," DeMaria said. "I don't understand why they are doing it so half-a----. ... They just can't get it together."
Harvey acknowledges the project has been delayed. The company, which once said homeowners would be moving into Southern Hills before the end of this year, now says that won't happen for about six more months.
But the reason is not a lack of investment; rather, it's the result of wet weather that saturated the clay-based soil, and shortages of material and labor caused by hurricanes and the booming housing market, Harvey said. And, like builders throughout the county, the companies working in Southern Hills have complained about delays in receiving building permits.
Harvey said the company still hopes to acquire DeMaria's land.
"Whether he'll sell to us or to someone else has yet to be determined," he said.
But DeMaria does seem likely to sell, eventually.
Though he says he bought the property as a hunting preserve and weekend getaway, he has also considered offers from other companies, including Toll Brothers, a Pennsylvania-based company specializing in luxury houses. A spokeswoman for the company said its policy forbids comment on pending deals, and she would not confirm whether Toll had made such an offer.
Along with the DeMaria property, there are two other large parcels the company is trying to buy - 450 acres from Derrill McAteer and 250 acres from the Cowgill family.
That opens the possibility for dense residential development on virtually all of the land in the lobe-shaped area south of the city bound by U.S. 41, Powell and Emerson.
That, in turn, would mean substantial increases in traffic on all of those roads, as well as on Culbreath to the south, said Bill Geiger, Brooksville's community development director.
Though traffic has been a main topic of recent meetings between the developer and the city and county, planning is in its early stages, and no decisions have been made on the factors that could determine future traffic patterns.
That includes whether the development would be allowed at all.
Either the county or the city would have to grant LandMar or any other developer in the area a change in its comprehensive plan.
Some county staffers have said LandMar annexed its original parcel to Brooksville because the company expected the city would be more willing to grant a comp plan amendment. The company has discussed annexing the new land, Anderson said, but no final decision has been made.
The uncertainty about LandMar's development agreement with Brooksville revolves around this clause: "The City agrees to consider incorporating such additional lands into this development agreement ... on the same terms and conditions as set forth herein."
Under those terms, the city agreed to return impact fees in the development because it said the collector road LandMar added to the transportation network will serve more than just Southern Hills.
County planners criticized the agreement, because it allowed the company to receive impact fees from areas outside of LandMar's property, and because it did not place a cap on the total amount of impact fees the company could receive.
That means that the city would have to pay impact fees until LandMar's costs of building the road are fully refunded. That cost was originally estimated at $7-million, Harvey said, but has since climbed.
Anderson said the language of the agreement does not firmly commit the city to paying the fees for future annexations. And even if he turns out to be wrong, the city still has the option of choosing not to annex the land, he said.
"If they say, "Because of this, you have to give us your firstborn,"' Anderson said, "We say, "Well, good. We won't annex it, then."'
--Dan DeWitt can be reached at 352 754-6116 or dewitt@sptimes.com