Commission to review anti-sprawl guides

Development guides for Keystone/Odessa and Lutz are the focus of a public hearing this week.

By JACKIE RIPLEY and BILL COATS

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 7, 2000

A public hearing Wednesday will bring a nearly yearlong process closer to completion as Hillsborough County commissioners take up the Keystone/Odessa and Lutz community growth plans.

The development guides, prompted by residents' concerns that their rural communities are fast becoming suburbanized, seek to customize the county's land-use law to encourage more country-friendly future growth.

The process got under way last year with a series of open-house-style meetings among planning consultants, county staffers and residents. The Hillsborough Planning Commission recommended approval of the plans this month.

One plan would reduce, compared to Hillsborough's current countywide plan, how far the urban service area, with water and sewer lines, would extend into Keystone/Odessa, and would ban new commercial rezonings indefinitely, except at the Fox's Corner intersection of N Mobley Road and Gunn Highway.

Several particulars of the Lutz plan were approved by county commissioners April 26.

But the broad rules that would ban walled subdivisions throughout Lutz and shopping centers from several intersections were put off until this week.

Lorraine Duffy, who helped devise the proposals as planning manager for the county Planning Commission, said they aren't as drastic as they may sound.

"We're defining what the development type will be out there," she said. "But we're not changing the amount of development."

As for the limitations on commercial development in Lutz and Keystone, Duffy said, "It's not happening much anyway because there's so much opposition."

The Hillsborough County Commission will review the plans at 6 p.m. at the County Center, at 601 E Kennedy Blvd.

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