Critical vote looms for Connerton

With an eye on Tuesday's commission vote, friends and foes of the futuristic development debate at a public forum.

By JAMES THORNER

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 15, 2000

LAND O'LAKES -- If Tuesday's debate over Connerton before the Pasco County commissioners is D-Day, Thursday night's public meeting about the 15,000-home development was the preliminary softening of the beaches.

And Gilliam Clarke, the Pasco activist who was the host of the meeting in Land O'Lakes, pulled out the artillery: Speakers included a land-use attorney, a University of South Florida professor and two prominent landowners.

The panel's conclusion: Growth in Pasco County is inevitable; it's coming and nobody's going to stop it. The question is, what form should that growth take?

The discussion, of course, tilted to Connerton, touted as an experimental town of the future comparable to Celebration, Disney's pedestrian-friendly community near Orlando.

Designed to be built over 30 years, Connerton would feature 15,177 homes snuggling an urban core of shops, schools, a hospital, a town hall and a community college campus.

"This is the largest thing that has ever been done in the Tampa Bay region," said Doug Conner, who's trying to convert his family's 8,000-acre ranch east of U.S. 41 into Connerton.

Conner found an ally in another of the panelists, USF architectural professor James Moore.

Moore described an America engaged in a tug of war between two seemingly irreconcilable desires: the desire for a bucolic, small-town life and the desire for the excitement and bustle of large cities.

Developers tried to resolve this dilemma after World War II. They built suburbs dependent on the automobile. Moore said the result has been a mishmash of development lacking the cohesiveness of traditional towns.

"Let's be honest. We build lousy suburbs," Moore said as he flashed slides showing strip shopping centers on car-choked roads.

That's where Connerton comes in. The development's master plan includes nine "villages" surrounding a city center. Villages are required to connect to one another -- roads, sidewalks, nature trails -- as if they were pieces to a puzzle.

"That in itself is just unbelievably unique," Conner said.

Conner said he plans to dispense with commercial strips along the 10 miles of highway frontage his family owns along U.S. 41 and State Road 52. Developers will cluster most stores in the town center.

Clarke, who served as host for the meeting at the Hap Clark Government Center on U.S. 41, nodded her head in agreement through much of the speeches.

But critics of Connerton, most notably the slow-growth advocates Citizens for Sanity, fired critical barbs from the back of the room.

Citizens for Sanity spokesman Clay Colson, who opposes the construction of Connerton, asked Moore to name a new town development that has solved the problem of urban sprawl.

Colson insisted building Connerton near wetlands and well fields in the middle of Pasco is the very definition of sprawl.

It's too early to tell how the "new town" concept will perform in the real world; that's like trying to figure out what sort of an adult a 4-year-old will become, Moore said. But he said the signs from Celebration are encouraging.

Colson also inquired why Conner didn't sell his land to the Southwest Florida Water Management District, which includes the 8,000 acres on its list of environmentally threatened land in central Pasco.

Conner said Swiftmud's purchase price, which he declined to reveal, was ludicrously low. "Low-balling" was the term he used.

Then Clarke got her two cents in over the attempt to stop Connerton, saying Pasco can't afford to pull any more property off the tax rolls.

"The county needs to be more than a cow pasture and more than old people," Clarke said.

When Colson tried to answer Clarke, the evening's moderator, Larry McLaughlin, squelched him, saying the meeting wasn't a platform for debate.

Colson made a razzing sound with his in disapproval and muttered comments about the discussion being one-sided.

The county commissioners are scheduled to vote on issuing Connerton's development order -- the document listing developers' obligations to the county -- at their Tuesday meeting. Approval is necessary for the project to move forward.

The meeting starts at 6:30 p.m. at the old county courthouse in Dade City. Colson and the other critics of Connerton are expected to attend the meeting in force.

But one of the Thursday evening panelists, Land O'Lakes attorney Tim Hayes, likened critics of growth to Dutch boys sticking their fingers in the dike to stop an approaching flood.

"Eventually, it spills over in a tremendous gush and envelopes that community," Hayes said.

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