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Lawsuit to block high school dropped
By BILL COATS © St. Petersburg Times, published January 14, 2001 LUTZ -- Residents have dropped a two-year-old lawsuit that aimed to block construction of a high school in their Lutz neighborhood. It had been dismissed by two circuit judges and revived by three appellate judges. But the substance of the argument was never debated. Instead, the high school is being blocked by a shopping-center developer. He engineered a rezoning and sale of a key corner of the property for a Publix, a gasoline station, a wine/liquor shop and other stores. That land, 81/2 acres at the southeast corner of Lutz-Lake Fern Road and N Dale Mabry Highway, was sold for the shopping center to IRT Capital Corp. II, a commercial real estate company in Atlanta that paid $3-million for it last August. The Hillsborough County School District had hoped in 1998 to buy that property and another 55 acres behind it for $3.5-million. Construction on the shopping center is expected to begin within weeks. The lawsuit, meanwhile, has been at a crossroads. Two years of litigation had dealt chiefly with procedural issues. Last June, the 23 neighbors who had filed the suit in 1998 won an appeal, sending them back to the starting line. Later last year, Larry Padgett, a leader of the group, was sidelined by two heart attacks. His neighbors finally deliberated without him and decided not to continue. They dropped the suit last month, retaining the right to refile it. Despite the shopping-center plans, Padgett had hoped to use the suit to win a right of residents to appeal the final high school site selections to the Hillsborough County Commission. Currently, only the commissioners themselves, or the School Board, can trigger such an appeal. "I think there's something wrong with (the procedure), and I think it's going to resurface later," he said. School Board attorney Crosby Few said officials were surprised at the neighbors' change of heart, and were prepared to defend the package of procedures. "Until it's knocked out, it's presumed to be valid," Few said. - Bill Coats can be reached at (813) 226-3469 or coats@sptimes.com.
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