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By DIANE STEINLE
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 14, 2001
The three county commissioners stood side-by-side at the front of the auditorium, shoulders squared, hands clasped behind their backs, eyes level, facing the crowd.
Facing the music.
In front of them, more than 350 people filled every available chair, jockeyed for standing room around the edges of the auditorium, spilled into a hallway. Some of those people came to the meeting loaded for bear, with elected officials in their sights.
County Commissioner Calvin Harris, flanked by Commissioners Karen Seel and Barbara Sheen Todd, had the task of moderating the meeting. It seemed destined not to go well, because emotions ran high and the potential for people to take offense at what was said was great.
The subject of the meeting in Largo Thursday night was the county's plans to improve the Omni Center and extend 119th Street N.
The Omni Center, a poorly maintained multipurpose building in the Ridgecrest neighborhood near Largo, will be turned into a first-class recreational facility operated by the YMCA. Outside on a vacant field, the county plans to build a lighted football/soccer field with bleachers and a baseball diamond. Ridgecrest residents are excited about the project, which is part of a program of neighborhood improvements three years in the making.
They also welcome the planned extension of 119th Street, which runs in front of the Omni Center and dead-ends just north of it. And 119th Street is the only direct route into that portion of Ridgecrest, so residents have a hard time getting in and out when parents are dropping off or picking up their children at Ridgecrest Elementary School beside the Omni Center.
To create a alternative outlet, the county plans to extend the street to the north and connect it with 16th Avenue and the residential neighborhood that surrounds Taylor Lake park.
There's the rub.
Ridgecrest is predominantly black. The Taylor Lake neighborhood is predominantly white. Taylor Lake has little crime. Ridgecrest has had its problems with crime, especially drug-related offenses. And then there is the extra traffic. Taylor Lake residents don't want an artery opened between the two neighborhoods.
Taylor Lake residents also are offended because the county held lots of meetings with Ridgecrest to plan the improvements, but didn't contact Taylor Lake people until the 11th hour.
County officials acknowledged that wasn't smart. So Harris proposed to get the two neighborhoods together at a meeting, and he and his fellow commissioners stood at the front of the room Thursday to take their licks.
It looked bad at first. Opponents handed out red cardboard stop signs with wooden handles attached -- kind of like those fans that funeral parlors used to give away -- for people to wave at officials. Several people wore bright yellow signs around their necks with messages lambasting the Largo mayor for his support of the county's plans.
A few people shouted rudely at the county officials as they tried to speak.
And they got really upset when Harris completed the introduction and announced that was the end of the group session. For the rest of the evening, he said, people could circulate to the tables set up around the walls of the auditorium, where county staff people waited to answer their questions and take their comments.
People who came to the meeting to make speeches and public accusations were left mute.
I don't know whose idea it was to conduct the meeting that way, but it was smart, because it transformed the room. After some initial griping, people got up and made their way to the tables. Or they stood in small groups to talk. Or they gathered around elected officials to share their concerns.
As I looked around the room, I saw something else had happened. A young white man, wearing his baseball cap backward, stood beside a young black woman. They were pointing at a map the man held and talking to each other about the project. A gray-haired white woman and a gray-haired black man stood together, lamenting the state of traffic in Pinellas and "people who drive like maniacs." White people and black people, stuck standing in line to speak to a county official, turned to each other and started talking quietly about the project.
Children -- both white and black -- who had been brought to the meeting by their parents turned the cardboard stop signs into toys to swat each other as they played in the hallway.
What could have been a nasty situation, with hurtful and divisive comments made by both sides, was defused. People filled out the comment cards the county provided, got their questions answered and left. County officials promised their suggestions will be reviewed for possible inclusion in the project, and said another meeting might be held to discuss any changes made to the plans.
There still are angry people who don't want the street extension and are convinced that it will have dire consequences for their neighborhood. They no doubt will continue the battle, but their anger was not allowed to escalate in a public setting Thursday night.
"Sometimes we get too close to things," Harris said. "Everything can be made better."
He drew a comparison between the Ridgecrest-Taylor Lake controversy and another county project. The county planned that project "and people said it would be the end of the world," he recalled. They said strange people, people who were different, would come to their neighborhoods, peer in their windows and commit crimes.
That project, of course, was the Pinellas Trail.