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Ruskin's big dilemma: to be a city or not

Pro-incorporators want to control development. Foes fear taxes and meddling. Insults fly.

By BEN MONTGOMERY
Published April 21, 2006

RUSKIN - The people who know Ruskin, those who swap stories on boat docks and front porches, love this place.

Here, you can find a used refrigerator on the bulletin board at Grannie's on U.S. 41. The sign in the window of Castillo's Auto Body says, "Fishin' Saturday, Church on Sunday." Dogs bark at dolphins in the Ruskin Inlet.

So when they noticed development dripping down from Tampa and seeping into Ruskin, population 8,321, as it has across Florida, people here started talking about turning this town with six stoplights into a city to control the growth.

It split folks who rub shoulders at the Kash n' Karry and share pews at the Ruskin United Methodist Church.

Guests at a recent wedding shower argued about it until the maid of honor demanded they quit and open gifts.

Someone dumped a pile of newspapers in the driveway of city proponent Wade Clark. The front-page headline read: "Incorporation Foes Growing Louder."

Mariella Smith received prank calls. Anne Madden was cut off in traffic. Someone told Jim Stone he stinks.

Now that a legislative bill to make Ruskin a city has stalled - maybe died - folks are hoping they haven't already lost the small town they were trying so hard to protect.

*   *   *

Tension in Ruskin dates back a hundred years. To see where it began, wander down to Ruskin Memorial Park, which is across from the new River Bend subdivision. The tallest tombstone is in the rear.

DICKMAN

FOUNDERS AND BUILDERS

WHO DARED TO TRY THE NEW

AND BUILT RUSKIN

OUT OF A WILDERNESS

The Dickmans provided the muscle behind Ruskin.

Another founder, Dr. George Miller, supplied the idealism.

Miller settled here in 1906 with visions of an independent socialistic community built around a college, where students worked for their education. Everyone who bought land here joined the Ruskin Commongood Society.

The business-minded Dickmans soon joined Miller. They traded for 13,000 acres and set about subdividing it and advertising in newspapers.

The founding partners pitched a mix of capitalism and socialism - a split of real estate development and a communal idealism that didn't always mesh.

The college burned in 1918, Miller died the next year, and the population flat-lined.

Then Paul Dickman, son of a founder, began developing land. He drained the wetlands and burned off palmetto stumps and earned plenty of critics who said he was harming the environment.

Meanwhile, Ruskin grew. In 1960, the population was 1,894. Fifteen years later, greater Ruskin swelled to 17,000.

Over the years, the old Ruskinites say, real estate development came to overshadow community idealism. But the struggle between the two never faded.

*   *   * 

Jim Stone ticked off the casualties as he idled through the Ruskin Inlet.

Folks still talk about the Coffee Cup, which was bulldozed for a chain drugstore. Shell Point Marina? Bought by developers. Bahia Beach boatyard? Bought for homes pitched with pictures of dolphins on an Interstate 75 billboard.

The 62-year-old pointed to an empty marina. Past the rotting wood sits a 1,500-unit development called Little Harbor. It has a lot to do with why he got into this fight. He saw the Ruskin Incorporation Committee as a chance to be "part of a community," to protect a place from harm.

Nearly 10,000 housing units are planned in neighborhoods with names like Mira Lago and Bayou Pass Village, in a place that had 3,603 homes in 1999.

That's the story of the state. Last year, 150,000 acres of rural Florida were developed. That's an area about the size of Pinellas County, gone to stucco and concrete and trucked-in grass.

Stone and a group of residents formed the Ruskin Incorporation Committee in 2004 after they helped Hillsborough County chart a plan to govern growth. They wanted to go further. They spent as many as 30 hours a week for the past two years meeting, working, trying to make Ruskin a city to better control growth. They raised $15,000 in private money to help.

They fear losing their slice of American nowhere to Chili's and AutoZone and eight lanes of exhaust. They never expected the resistance they'd run into.

"This is such a unique place," Stone said as he glided back toward town. "We're 45 minutes from downtown St. Pete, 45 minutes from downtown Tampa, 20 minutes from Brandon."

The water broke by the boat.

"And there's another dolphin."

*   *   *

Most opponents were quiet at first. But when a bill to put it to a vote was sent to Tallahassee, critics came out.

Like Les Alderman. He grew up here. Played linebacker for East Bay High. Now he's the director of environmental operations for Earthmark, the Little Harbor developer.

Alderman's grandfather left to his kids 60 acres on the Little Manatee. Alderman says he doesn't need the money from the land, but he has siblings who could use it. "So I'm just looking after my family interests," he said.

Opponents fear new taxes and a newcomer-run government, but not development. They say a person has the right to do what he wants with land passed down from his granddaddy's daddy.

*   *   *

A few months ago, the debate exploded.

Opponents became money-hungry developers and advocates became ego-hungry newcomers. Insults were lobbed, feelings were hurt.

"All of the sudden these people know more about our area than we do," retired businessman Wayne Harris said. "They form all these groups and committees and tell everyone what they're going to do for the community."

The resentment boiled.

Jim Stone's neighbor quit speaking to him. They're on opposite sides. At a town hall meeting on the issue, a man approached Stone and told him he stinks.

"I was out on the boat all day," Stone said. "But I went home and showered and brushed my teeth."

Anne Madden owned the Blue Ibis art gallery in Ruskin for years before she was hired by Earthmark as a consultant. After she spoke favorably of the Little Harbor development at a zoning hearing in January, her activist friends didn't know what to think.

"It almost feels like someone in our community is betraying us," resident Anita Jiminez told the St. Petersburg Times.

The words cut Madden. "It was hurtful," she wrote in an e-mail to the Times. "They had been my friends."

It got worse. Madden said she quit answering her phone because she was getting so many crank calls. The callers left threatening messages on her answering machine, she said.

"See how dirty this thing is getting?" said Denise Layne, an adviser for the Ruskin Incorporation Committee.

A sheriff's deputy showed up at the home of town historian Mac Miller, grandson of Ruskin's founder who supported putting the incorporation issue to a vote. The deputy said someone had reported pornography in Miller's home. He was shown upstairs to an antique stained-glass window salvaged from a British men's club. It depicts nude men and women, more artistic than arousing. The deputy ruled it okay, Miller said later, and left.

He expected the tension.

But after such intensity and so many hurt feelings, can the community heal?

"I don't think so," said Stone, adding that a home he's building in Maine is looking more appealing. "Human nature is pretty nasty."

"There was a lot of good people pushing it," said Robert Graves, a city opponent who was born 78 years ago on Cracker Avenue. "Them's good friends of mine, and I wouldn't say a harsh word about them. They just got mixed up with the wrong group of people."

The divide runs deep, Mac Miller said. Always has.

"But a community is only a community if it can get over its differences."

Ben Montgomery can be reached at bmontgomery@sptimes.com or 813 661-2443.

[Last modified April 20, 2006, 12:40:46]