Northpinellas: Neighbors rally to halt stadium plan

CLEARWATER -- A resident of the neighborhoods northwest of the proposed new Philadelphia Phillies spring training complex has taken legal action to try to block the city from financing the complex.

And if his challenge to the city's bond financing plans flops -- the first court hearing on the issue is this week -- resident Dennis Roper said his neighborhood may support other litigation against the city's stadium plans.

"I think some people over here are under a lot of duress," said Roper, a retired television reporter who has hired Clearwater attorney Patrick Maguire to represent him. "I think the timidity here is dissolving."

Residents in four areas -- mainly College Hill, but also Rolling Heights, Forest Glen and Hillcrest Estates -- have formed the Northeast Regional Clearwater Homeowners group to voice their concerns about the proposed stadium.

They have complained about things ranging from increased neighborhood cut-through traffic to noise from the proposed stadium. Another worry is that the construction of the complex could aggravate sinkholes discovered in the past three to five years in the area.

Roper said he has a list of 31 homeowners who have told him about damage to their houses ranging from thin, stair-step cracks in walls to foundations sinking and tearing away from a wall, since the problems were first reported to the city last year. By his records, about two-thirds have had sinkholes confirmed beneath their property.

When you're watching your life's major investment crack and slip downward, Roper said, you worry about anything that could by chance make it worse.

When the state pounded pilings at Drew Street and U.S. 19 last year, preparing for a future overpass, some residents could feel the vibrations. So they question what would happen with construction even closer to their homes.

"You'd be outside and you could feel it, at the same time as you heard the sound," said Al Cook, an 11-year resident of College Hill. "I'm worried about what the stadium will do."

Still, city officials, a representative of the Philadelphia Phillies and even a local geology professor say that residents need not be concerned.

Problems with traffic? The city had a traffic study done to recommend improvements to nearby roads, the officials say.

Sinkhole concerns? Have no worries, they say. The city plans to require construction techniques that prevent sinkholes from becoming a problem for the stadium or its neighbors.

They even created a newsletter for the area to keep them informed. Roper calls it propaganda.

"We think this site is very buildable," said Keith Ashby, the city administrator who has handled negotiations with the Phillies for the $23-million-plus project. "The experts we've talked to have told us that."

John Timberlake, the Phillies' director of Florida operations, said concerns about the training complex -- set to receive final approval by the commission in two weeks -- have been dealt with.

"We have said over 100 times that we were not going to do anything to exacerbate their problems," Timberlake said. "We've tried to address the neighborhood's concerns left and right. I'm frustrated about it."

Professor Mark Stewart, former chairman of the geology department at the University of South Florida, predicted it would be unlikely that construction of the stadium would aggravate sinkholes hundreds of feet away in the neighborhoods. And even if it did somehow, he said, "It would be very, very difficult to prove that.

"There's a lot of things that are possible with sinkholes, but there are only a few things that are probable," he said. For instance, "The theory that vibrations would accentuate that is not unreasonable, but we don't have good proof of them doing that."

Sinkholes are often caused by a change in groundwater levels, Stewart said. Water flows through cavities in limestone, which is underground and has been there for ages. When the water disappears -- because of drought, a change in drainage or pumping from nearby wells -- sand and clay from above the now-empty cavity can flow into it, opening a hole above.

Stewart said a more likely culprit for the College Hill area's problems could be a county retention pond built in the mid 1990s next to some homes, which then cracked.

County officials, however, maintain their drainage project did not cause the problems, said county engineer Jim Holt.

Still, Barb Smigels, who looks across her cracked pool at the pond, thinks the retention area must have some relationship to her house's problems. She has filed a claim to have the county help fix her home.

Smigels was lying on her couch one day in early 1999, when she noticed a thin 5-foot-long crack in the ceiling of her den. Every couple of days, the crack grew a little longer. By April 1999, it had opened a quarter-inch wide. Ants began traipsing in.

About that time, Smigels began noticing other jagged cracks growing in her grandson's bedroom ceiling, above the doors in her bedroom, around windows outside. Her kitchen cabinets pulled away from a wall. Her swimming pool began cracking last summer.

A few days later, she came outside and realized all the water in the pool had drained out. It's been empty and unused ever since.

"We really think if they start digging over there now, it's going to affect everyone over here," Smigels said, nodding in the direction of the Phillies' proposed site.

Roper tells bizarre stories about things that have happened as people tried to fix their homes over the past year, since the problems there first became public.

When the Smigels' home was grouted, the concrete pumped under their home flowed underground next door and filled a neighbor's well.

A drilling rig exploring a sinkhole at Cook's neighbor's home fell into a hole that opened up and had to be pulled out with a crane.

And when Cook's home was being partly repaired -- with 36 cement trucks' worth of concrete pumped under it -- a tree that had been planted in a niche on his backyard patio dropped into a 5-foot-deep hole that suddenly opened up.

"Just today, I was noticing, the pitch of my roof has slanted 6 inches downward," Cook said Friday. "Then I took a broom handle, and jabbed it around in the area there, and it feels like there's a void under the porch."

Roper, who hasn't had any problems with sinkholes at his home, said some residents have had difficulty deciding whether to ask their insurance companies to pay off their mortgages so they can sell their homes at a huge loss and try to start again with a down payment on a new home somewhere else.

Another option is to ask the insurance company to make repairs -- and then possibly be left without insurance when the policy hits its limit on the payout. The gamble is that by that time, the problem has been fixed.

Roper said he thinks the city could do more to help the neighborhood understand and address the problems. "When it comes to a multimillion-dollar stadium versus a bunch of upset homeowners, they don't care about us," Roper said.

Interim City Manager Bill Horne, however, said the city has done a good job at getting information to residents about what causes sinkholes and how to deal with them, and other issues that were raised.

Horne doesn't think the city can do much more, except keep the neighborhood informed of the stadium project's progress.

"Our whole approach on the sinkhole thing," Horne said, "is that it really is a private insurance matter on the part of each individual homeowner."

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