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Talk of the Bay

We're growing, growing, growing - yet again

By JAMES THORNER
Published May 29, 2006

The tens of thousands of new homes, the traffic jams, the torrid business climate that's dropped unemployment below 3 percent: All of it can leave you thinking the Tampa Bay area's never been through such wrenching changes.

Forget about it.

University of South Florida professor Gary Mormino insists today's transformation is nothing compared to what the Sunshine State experienced over the past 50 years.

From a modest 400,000 in 1950, the Tampa Bay region's population multiplied to 3-million. The catalysts were World War II, the proliferation of air conditioning and the use of DDT to kill saltwater mosquitoes that had left much of coastal Pinellas County uninhabitable.

Mormino's walk down memory lane prefaced a serious discussion of how to handle the big boom. He spoke to about 200 people at a Tampa Bay Partnership conference this month.

"We've created a paradise. How do you control the chaos?" he asked the assembled university professors, business executives and government types.

Florida's remains the land of "second chances'' and "dignity in old age,'' Mormino said. But will it remain a dream state when the population reaches 50-million?

"That remains the great challenge,'' Mormino said. "We as citizens of Florida will have to figure this out.''

- JAMES THORNER, Times staff writer

[Last modified May 29, 2006, 06:13:25]