200,000 - in a flick of a switch
The Withlacoochee electric cooperative has marked growth house by house. On Monday, they hit a customer milestone.
By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published January 17, 2006
WESLEY CHAPEL - One day nearly 50 years ago, the Withlacoochee River Electric Cooperative ran copper wire from a power pole in Brooksville to the Law family's white, wooden home on a hill in the Hernando County countryside. That was customer No. 1.
On Monday morning, a guy in a yellow hard hat showed up here in Pasco County, ready to flick a switch on a meter attached to the side of a beige stucco house owned by a Filipino family who moved to Florida in 1997. That was customer No. 200,000.
Somewhere in between - from April 1, 1947, to Jan. 16, 2006 - Florida grew into what it is today, and the North Suncoast became what it has become.
There are many ways to measure the nonstop growth in the former citrus groves, scrub forests and cattle ranches of Pasco, Hernando and Citrus counties, north of Tampa and St. Petersburg.
The southbound headlights in the black-dark morning on the Suncoast Parkway.
The number of Applebees, Wal-Marts and Walgreens up and down busy U.S. 19.
The New York accents in the Dunkin' Donuts drive-throughs.
Now, on a cool, sunny Monday in southern Pasco, here was another.
Back in the 1930s, folks who lived in towns had electricity. But out in the country - in the frame houses with tin roofs and big porches - light at night came from kerosene lamps.
But President Franklin Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration in 1935. Electric cooperatives are member-owned and provide electricity to areas that are or once were rural. Dade City-based Withlacoochee River Electric started service to parts of west-central Florida in 1947.
The Laws came first.
The family had helped settle Hernando in the 1860s. Neil Law's daddy was a longtime sheriff and bought 37 acres in 1940 and eventually had 600 acres and some 300 head of cattle. He and his seven brothers are all buried in Brooksville Cemetery.
Neil Law Jr. graduated from Hernando High in 1935, married the girl he started seeing his sophomore year and worked as a rural-route letter carrier. He's 88 now, walks slowly, wears cardigan sweaters and naps in the afternoon. Law was the grand marshal of last month's Christmas parade in downtown Brooksville.
In the spring of 1947, electricity was going to mean no more hand-pumped well water, no more oily, pungent kerosene smell, no more trips to town to pick up 100-pound blocks of ice for the icebox.
"Then they cut on the lights," Law said the other day in his family room, "and it was before noon, and everyone was laughin' and carryin' on."
The house had six light bulbs.
The electric bill was an average of $7.50 a month.
Since then, Florida has taken in about 1,000 new people every day, according to Gary Mormino, a history professor at the University of South Florida's St. Petersburg campus who wrote Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida . Mormino calls 1950 to 2000 the state's "Big Bang." The population went from 2.7-million to 15.9-million.
It hasn't stopped.
In Pasco, 7,252 single-family home permits were issued in 2005, which beat the old record set in '04 of 6,300, which beat the old record set in '03 of 5,883.
"It's not possible to build enough highways to stay ahead of the growth," 72-year-old Withlacoochee River Electric general manager Billy E. Brown said last week in his office in Dade City. "But we can build lines a lot quicker than they can build roads."
Good thing, too, because some of the fastest-growing spots in this fast-growing state are in the cooperative's service area, which includes parts of Pasco, Hernando, Citrus, Sumter and Polk counties. The company took 38 years to connect its first 100,000 customers and only another 20 to get the next 100,000. Withlacoochee River Electric now has 459 full-time employees.
Three of them drove into the Seven Oaks subdivision on Monday morning. Assistant general manager Duane Vann was driving, district manager Joe Marina was sitting shotgun and manager of member relations Ernie Holzhauer was in the back. They drove into the 2,500-acre "master planned community" between Interstate 75 and booming Bruce B. Downs Boulevard.
They drove past the straight lines of baby pines and just-planted palms and workers crawling on the tops of houses to nail on all those clay-colored shingles, past the stacks of wood and plumbers' trucks, past so many cul-de-sac neighborhoods with names like Palmetto Bend and the Villas of Deer Run.
The driveway of the house they were looking for had in it a white Honda Accord and a candy-apple-red BMW M3.
The family inside: Nino Mendoza is 39, his wife, Rowena, is 40, and they're both computer programmers. They have two sons: Colin, who's almost 1, and Michael, who's 17.
The house has four bedrooms and a three-car garage and upgrades like granite countertops in the kitchen and a Jacuzzi tub in the master bath. The living room has white leather couches. There's a pool in back and a square of green grass out front.
They moved here from Brandon.
The house sits on a third of an acre and cost $354,000.
The electric bill, Holzhauer estimated, will be about $300 a month.
Marina, the district manager, gave the family a plaque and a $500 Wal-Mart gift certificate. Everybody went outside.
David Lambert, the guy with the yellow hard hat, stood next to the meter on the side of the house. He flicked the switch.
Holzhauer kneeled down to take a point-and-click snapshot of the Mendoza family in front of their new home. "The impact of your house is so beautiful," he told them. Holzhauer took the picture.
--Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.