Cause unites diverse activists

An unemployed "pit bull'' and a family man with a business take on developers as part of Citizens for Sanity.

By JAMES THORNER

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 9, 2000

LAND O'LAKES -- If the human mix that makes up Citizens for Sanity were chemicals, you might expect hissing and fizzing and bubbles pouring over the side of the beaker.

Clay Colson is an unemployed, ponytailed man who lives with his sister in an antique shotgun house in the boondocks.

Harry Wright is a prison guard turned barbecue restaurateur who lives in a pastel block-and-stucco subdivision in the heart of Land O'Lakes.

"We're like 50-million miles apart," Wright said from the noisy kitchen of Hungry Harry's Famous Bar-B-Que. "Clay has a very simple lifestyle. I have six kids and my life is all over the place."

What they share is a contempt for what they see as the despoliation of central Pasco County.

Their target: Developers and their supposed yes-men in Pasco County government. Their method: lobbying, lawsuits and, come November, electoral politics.

Citizens for Sanity, which after seven months of existence claims more than 1,250 members, has brought unity of purpose to once-lone voices whose gripes had echoed harmlessly among the cypress.

"All my life I've been politically active, distrustful of government authority," said Colson, wearing his trademark electric yellow Citizens for Sanity T-shirt. "I've finally run into a group of people who are sick and tired, and we're not going to take it anymore."

Colson and company are suing Pasco to overturn rezoning for Oakstead, a 1,200-home subdivision proposed for 841 acres west of U.S. 41. They insist the county ignored Florida panthers and other endangered animals on the land.

Until Pasco passes a law to protect wildlife, Citizens for Sanity is demanding that a judge freeze all development in the county.

The group has also formally challenged the county's comprehensive land-use plan, the blueprint for development in Pasco. Changing the plan would change what, where and how developers can build.

Those are fighting words for developers, who have enlisted by the dozen in defense of the county.

In central Pasco alone, more than 40,000 new homes are on the books. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake.

Said developer Jay B. "Trey" Starkey, who is building a 900-home subdivision west of Odessa: "I call them Citizens for Insanity."

From acorn to oak

Citizens for Sanity was born last summer among the cypress and live oaks off Lake Patience Road.

People have lived for decades there on large rural lots, separated from neighbors by alligator-stalked ponds, sand-trap roads and clawing brush.

That relatively isolated way of life appeared doomed with the posting of a yellow rezoning sign beside the cattle ranch across the street.

The project was called Oakstead, and it promised to bring more than 1,000 homes and 2,000 cars to the neighbors' little neck of the woods.

Neighbor Ed Moore, who a week earlier had alerted local newspapers with a fax screaming, "THE DEVIL IS COMING," delivered anti-Oakstead fliers to neighbors while perched atop his riding mower. One landed in the hands of Clay Colson.

Colson had been lying low in Pasco. Forty-four years old, unemployed and unmarried, he lived with his sister and her two children in an 80-year-old house near the county dog pound.

Colson was no greenhorn when it came to bucking the system. He said he had been fired from two different jobs for trying to unionize his colleagues.

The second employer, a Tampa screen printing firm, paid Colson, who had planned to sue, an undisclosed settlement, Colson said. Colson had been living off that cash, but it was dwindling.

To ease neighbors' concerns, County Commissioner Pat Mulieri arranged a meeting with Oakstead's developers. Few people were expected. More than 200 showed up.

The meeting became an angry free-for-all in which residents condemned the pace of suburbanization in central Pasco. Colson, sitting in the audience, said he saw the light.

"I realized, "My God, this county is screwing people over everywhere,' " he said.

The threat posed by suburbanization was also dawning on Harry Wright.

Wright, 50, was as well known for his local philanthropy as for his barbecue. As a prison guard in the 1980s, he befriended a convicted murderer named Sylvester Peoples.

After years of lobbying the state, Wright helped secure Peoples' release. To this day, Peoples not only works for Wright, he also lives with his boss and Wright's family in their Land O'Lakes home.

Wright was no stranger to conflict with county officials. When a waste incinerator in Shady Hills was proposed, Wright was against it. The extension of Collier Parkway to Hale Road? Ditto.

Eventually, Wright, Colson and others met over pork ribs and iced tea at the barbecue joint to plot strategy. Wright half-jokingly suggested they incorporate under the name Citizens for Sanity. The name stuck.

"What's going on is insane," Wright said. "All we're asking for is a little bit of sanity."

Taking on the big boys

Colson calls Laura Swain the "Mother of Citizens for Sanity." Swain rejects the honorary title. But there's no denying she helped widen the group's horizons.

The activists turned to Swain, a director of the Tampa Bay branch of the Sierra Club, after county commissioners approved rezoning for Oakstead in September.

Swain turned the group on to Pasco's comprehensive land-use plan: hundreds of pages filled with nearly impenetrable government jargon.

"They were a very passionate group that didn't know very much," Swain said. "I can fight rezoning till I'm blue in the face, but unless you attack the comprehensive plan, the developer is doing exactly what the county is telling him to do."

Colson quickly set himself apart with his fervor. One wing of his house took on the look of the messy office of a harried businessman. The yellow Citizens for Sanity T-shirts became his uniform.

Two legal challenges followed: One to overturn Oakstead based on the assumed presence of endangered wildlife; the other attacking the comp plan itself for failing to limit urban sprawl.

Colson has gone as far as to rent airplanes to peer at developers' tracts from above. An aerial investigation was crucial in his decision to fight Connerton, a proposed 15,000-home development that Colson said will destroy too many wetlands and threaten the water supply.

When he enters a governmental chamber wearing his ponytail and T-shirt, eyes occasionally roll. "Idiot" has been known to escape from muttering lips.

"You have to give him credit. This guy is as tenacious as a pit bull," said Tim Hayes, a Land O'Lakes development attorney.

Others are less complimentary. Take Steve Simon, a Pasco county commissioner who began as a potential sympathizer but later soured on the group.

Simon complains about the expense -- at least $100,000 and counting -- of defending against the activists' legal challenges. That's money better spent on guardrails, parks and senior programs, he said.

"It would have been quicker and cheaper to work within the system," Simon said. "Confrontation doesn't win. Either extreme is repugnant to people in the center."

Others dismiss Citizens for Sanity as the epitome of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome. Developers imply that opponents are moved by a selfish regard to protect their way of life, regardless of new residents seeking a slice of that same life.

"Clay Colson wants to stop the property around his home from being developed. He feels his rights are superior to the property owner to his south," developer Dara Khoyi complained recently.

"He claims to be an advocate of "slow growth' but his every action has been one that would be indicative of his hopes of having no growth."

But Colson and Wright insist they were left with no choice but to sue after their pleadings before county government failed to persuade. As for developers, Colson argues they are reeling under the first real challenge to their supremacy in decades.

"Developers are not being robbed of anything," he said. "Development rights are not property rights. Just because you own property does not mean you can use it any way you want."

This year's county commissioner election is the first test of whether Citizens for Sanity's philosophy is widely shared.

The group claims 1,284 members, including several homeowners associations that enrolled their members as a group.

As a non-profit group, Citizens for Sanity is banned from openly supporting a particular candidate. But members plan to make plain which candidates they support through issue advocacy advertisements.

Hint: Don't expect them to support the three incumbents, Sylvia Young, Ann Hildebrand and David "Hap" Clark.

"If we get rid of the three incumbents, I'll walk from the commissioners' office in Dade City to the commissioners' office in New Port Richey," Wright said. "That's how excited I would be."

Whether his chosen candidates win or lose, Colson vows to hound officialdom far into the future.

"All those people in county government, they'll be gone before I am," he said.

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