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So far, all in Caliente's wardrobe is ambitionBy JAMES THORNER © St. Petersburg Times, published August 21, 2000 The Caliente ground-breaking photo hanging on the wall in Jack DePree's office looks like a Pasco County Who's Who. Isn't that county commissioner Sylvia Young, standing near her colleague on the board, David "Hap" Clark? And farther to the left: Isn't that former Pasco Sheriff Jim Gillum? Four years after the photo was snapped, Young and Clark are retiring as commissioners. Gillum is trying to reclaim the office he lost to sheriff Lee Cannon. "But the four of us are still here," said DePree, pointing to the photo of four middle-aged Caliente investors, including himself, lifting ceremonial shovels. "We're not throwing in the towel." Give credit where credit is due: Caliente, the still-theoretical multi-million-dollar nudist resort in Land O'Lakes, is a survivor. How else to explain that after four years of broken promises and false starts, Caliente Inc. still holds deposits on 75 of the proposed 351 homesites? That's about $7-million worth of real estate under contract. Save for the Caliente sign on U.S. 41 dubiously touting the project as "Coming Soon," not a single hammer has hit a nail. No 40-room hotel. No Cantina Calipso Restaurant and Club Fiesta. No lakeshore teeming with naked bodies and paddle boats powered by legs unfettered by shorts. Caliente's hobbled history -- surprising in a community whose healthiest and biggest industry is nudism -- has become something of a joke in the nudist community. Too many promised loans have fizzled, too many start dates have come and gone. DePree, the investment team's laid-back spokesman, holds court in a strip center on Lake Floyd Drive. Construction plans, dated July 1996 and starting to fade and curl with age, sit on a table. Artists' renderings show the resort in its multi-colored glory. With his typical stick-to-it-ness, DePree predicts they will start shifting dirt for Laguna de Paz, actually a state-mandated retention pond, after Labor Day. Developers have secured the start-up money for Caliente. Or so DePree says. He admits such hype has blown up in his face before and may do so again. In fact, DePree says his team is still short of the $500,000 demanded by Pasco County in impact fees. DePree has been manager at the area's two largest grin-and-bare-it resorts: Paradise Lakes and Lake Como, both southwest of U.S. 41 and State Road 54. His acquaintances at those two resorts suggest Caliente's biggest problem is overconfidence. Paradise Lakes started small. It spent two decades growing into a bustling nudist mecca. Caliente's growth model is more ambitious. DePree said a full-blown resort on 100 acres east of U.S. 41 is the only way to battle the big boys. "You don't compete with Paradise Lakes with one tennis court and a dinky swimming pool," he said. "We are 5 miles away from the state-of-the-art nudist resort in the Western Hemisphere." But in the meantime, Paradise and the county's other nudist operations threaten to leave Caliente further behind. Paradise is about to start construction of 70 new "Key West style" condominiums, having purchased and razed a grungy trailer park once beyond the resort's walls. Lake Como, whose expansion plans have been stymied pending installation of sewer lines, plans to almost triple in size with 248 new home sites. A pair of nudist real estate agents, Mike Benjamin and John Lutz, are building a nude-friendly neighborhood called The Oasis behind the Wal-Mart on Carson Road in Land O'Lakes. Benjamin is also the listing agent for the sale of Hudson's Florida Naturist Park, a down-at-the-heels nudist mobile home park north of State Road 52. Benjamin hopes a new owner -- asking price is $3.75-million -- will bring the park up to snuff. DePree recently joked in the press about emigrating to Bolivia if the latest financing deal turns into a fiasco. Don't believe it. Ever confident, DePree sees the success of his competitors as proof that his Spanish-style nudist village will similarly soar. "I think the Land O'Lakes boom is very long-lived," he said. "Nobody's seen the bottom of the nudist market."
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