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Guest Column

Channeling change into a positive

By EMILIO "SONNY" VERGARA
Published December 14, 2006

Change for Hernando County is not inevitable, it is here.

One can't help but sympathize with those who don't want Spring Lake and eastern Hernando to change, but I am afraid theirs is a lost dream. Change has already happened and will surely continue. All we can do is try to ensure it continues in a way we can live with, literally.

Some Spring Lake residents have expressed concern about the proposed Hickory Hill subdivision. I welcome the planned, predictable result Hickory Hill represents. I fear what is certain to happen if it doesn't.

Change in Hernando is everywhere. As young men, Bill Huckaby and I used to go out in the turkey-oak wastelands of wire grass and sand hills just east of U.S. 19 and chase fox squirrels when we weren't struggling to find a decent job or a way to get back into college. Those sandy hills now lie beneath a sprawling place called Spring Hill.

Howard Smith was the son of the same Mary whose husband, Jim, used an axe to clear the cabbage palms out of the way to build Mary's Fish Camp on the Mud River. Howard, one of my closest friends in grade school, dated a girl in the 1950s who lived next to her father's store on a road now known as Cortez Boulevard. Back then it was the only road from Brooksville to Weeki Wachee and was so deserted after 10 on Saturday night it was a favorite place for teenagers to risk a few drag races without worrying about oncoming traffic or "Red Brass," Hernando's singular deputy sheriff. Today, that young girl's house would be located somewhere between the Beacon Movie Theaters and Office Depot where Mariner Boulevard joins Cortez.

I grew up on a sawmill my mother and father owned and operated on the southwest corner of Barnett Road and U.S. 41 south of Brooksville. Today, all that's left of the mill and the huge pile of sawdust my sisters and I played on are two gnarled cedar trees my mother planted to line the driveway to our house, which was located about where you might now park to get a hamburger from the Sonic Drive-In, next to Wal-Mart.

Out east, in Spring Lake, there was a one- or maybe a two-room schoolhouse where the locals sent their kids for the first six years of education. That schoolhouse was located just behind where the old rock-walled community center is now. After that, they would be bused to the main county schools in Brooksville where their first classes were held in a three-room building that still exists just behind the First Baptist Church on south Main Street. Two of the rooms were used as classrooms where Miss Durshimer and Miss Campbell taught us the ABC's and numbers with unquestioned authority. The third room was the lunchroom where all the kids from the first through 12th grades in Hernando County could get a hot lunch for 25 cents, if they could afford it.

My point is this: The history magazine about Hernando County published by Bob Martinez can be considered as much a documentation of the enormous change that has occurred here as it is a documentation of the county's history. And if history sheds light on the future, there is little reason to expect that change can be somehow foiled to "protect a way of life," or return us to one that was but is no longer.

Regardless of how we may want it to be, life simply will not go back to the way it was or stay the way it is, but we can be smart about guiding the change that will occur from this point toward a new and better way of life than that which will undoubtedly occur without our careful guidance.

Paradise found

Spring Lake is changing enormously. Despite the current slump in the real estate market, people are still coming to Hernando County and especially to Spring Lake. It is ironic that the things that make the place so attractive are the very things bringing about the change. There are few places in the state that will match the beauty of the rolling terrain covered with stately oaks and quaint one-lane country roads so characteristic of Spring Lake. Like it or not, we've been found.

While you may think the "boomer" phenomenon is just an intellectual exercise, the experts will testify it is as real as the congestion you'll find on Cortez Boulevard every afternoon. Combine that explosion in retiring workers with Spring Lake's natural beauty and Florida's decades-long efforts to attract retirees by having no personal income tax and a $25,000 break on homeowners' property taxes, and the future for Spring Lake looks like a lot more neighbors. And they will be permanent ones with septic tanks and wells, garbage pickups every 500 feet, school buses twice a day on every road, and sheriff's deputies roaming day and night, because crime always follows more people. All this will happen without any changes to the county's comprehensive plan.

The fact that commercial, industrial and residential development has already been approved just to the east of Spring Lake at I-75 and State Road 50 is another reason why more folks will be coming to Spring Lake. From Lockhart Road east to the other side of I-75, approvals have already been granted for, so I've read, some 12,000 new residents, 3.9-million square feet of commercial-retail-office space and 9.9-million square feet of industrial space. It isn't rational to think that Spring Lake, which essentially begins just across Lockhart Road to the west, will remain untouched if the comprehensive plan is not modified.

We are setting ourselves up for a mess perhaps worse than the sprawl of Spring Hill if we do nothing and allow the existing Comprehensive Plan to stay in place. As every 5-acre and, in some cases, every 2.5-acre lot is filled with $200,000 to $600,000 homes, it is inevitable that residents will want their roads to be paved and widened. With all those expensive homes, no one wants to have a cloud of limestone dust wafting through the living room or into the pool with each passing car. And, if we do nothing with the comprehensive plan, the roads will never have enough carrying capacity because complaints rise in inverse proportion to the decaying condition or capacity of the road. If there are more complaints from the always very-vocal and more densely populated western end of the county, it will invariably be their wheels that get the attention. And if the roads do get paved, it will be without a plan and driven only by those who have cried loudest. Life in Spring Lake will deteriorate and the taxes paid by its residents will not be enough to fix their own problems, much less those in Spring Hill and elsewhere, as they will be expected to do.

Newcomers pay

On the other hand, we can be smart and keep the comprehensive plan flexible enough to reflect new conditions and guide the inevitable change that's happening now so that roads are planned and built in advance of deterioration and gridlock. We can make sure that water remains plentiful, sewer service is centralized and natural resources are protected in accordance with the requirements of the Southwest Florida Water Management District and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. We can require that schools are properly planned and built in our area so our kids won't have to get up at dawn and return at sunset in order to get a K-12 education.

We can be smart by assuring that new residents pay their fair share of the community's costs to accommodate them, including their impact on such basic infrastructure needs as roads, water, sewer, public safety, parks, and schools. This can and should be done without any additional financial burden upon the backs of current residents. Studies by the highly respected firm Hank Fishkind indicate the Hickory Hill project will not only do just that, but bring an additional $9-million every year to the county's strained tax revenues. This amount reflects the benefit to the county after the costs for services to Hickory Hill residents have been subtracted. Those who disagree with this need to show how these studies are flawed, if they can, and let their reasoning be exposed to the same bright light Fishkind's findings have been.

And we do need parks, or maybe just one really nice park, in Spring Lake, a public place where families can go on the Fourth of July and other holidays to play baseball, grill a chicken or two, or just enjoy a quiet afternoon with friends. Providing such amenities becomes very possible through public-private partnerships between the county and those who are creating our communities. Without such partnerships, land zoned for agricultural use will never generate enough revenue to make such improvements possible, and Spring Lake's future will suffer accordingly.

By supporting such highly planned and responsible projects as the proposed Hickory Hill development, we can exercise smart planning, employ partnerships that benefit our community now and in the future, and assure a future for Spring Lake in which our children will be able to raise their families in a strong economy and enjoy a quality of life that may even be better than the one we once enjoyed.

Emilio "Sonny" Vergara lives in Brooksville. Guest columnists write their own views on subjects they choose, which do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.

[Last modified December 14, 2006, 01:15:49]