Tampabay: Clair Mel finds talk is cheap, water is not

What is true of other poor neighborhoods is true of Clair Mel. Unless something bad happens and makes the evening news and the morning paper, the place is invisible.

People live behind chain-link fences in one-story, concrete-block houses in this 40-year-old subdivision east of the bay and just south of the Tampa city line. When the houses were built, open carports were the rage. Just about every house seems to have one.

People work not just one job, but two. They get their hands dirty. They come home with sore shoulders. The good life gets lived by somebody else.

Only this year did the neighborhood get a dentist's office. A credit union may come. These are frills in Clair Mel. Even the water can't be taken for granted.

Some days it's yellowish. Some days it smells of bleach. Even if you pay on time, the service can be cut off because the bill processing is so slow. And always, the water costs too much, perhaps more than any other place in Hillsborough County.

Some months, the Rev. James Murphy says, he faces a choice. "It's whether to pay the water bill or ask for an extension on the electric bill."

His water bill is as high as $142 a month. He has a wife, a daughter and two small grandchildren under his roof. They drink bottled water. But they do shower in this other water. They do laundry in it, even though when "you fill up the machine to wash clothes, they fade out."

Murphy, the pastor of an AME church and an employee of a rehabilitation center, is a big man, capable of big sighs. This subject provokes from him the biggest sighs. For the problem has been with Clair Mel for years. The water doesn't come from the government but from a private utility, Florida Water Services, which is owned by a holding company in Minnesota -- where nobody has heard of Clair Mel.

Florida Water Services had lots of lawyers.

The people in Clair Mel had only a free lawyer from Bay Area Legal Services, and a non-profit civic group, Palm River POINT.

When the big utility wanted to raise its rates by a third, the neighborhood association sued. Incredibly, they won the first round. But they lost on appeal.

Late last month, the neighborhood and the utility settled. The rates went up the full one-third three years ago when the suit was filed. That was theoretically only temporary. Now it's permanent for another three years. The utility -- generous to a fault, as you can tell -- agreed not to try to extract $225,000 in legal fees from people like Rev. Murphy who work two jobs just to survive.

"They're basically back to where they started," said Jim Hosler, the research director of the county's Planning Commission. "They did what they're supposed to do. It's kind of depressing."

Kind of?

The neighborhood group is clamoring now for Hillsborough County to take over the water service -- which it should have done long ago. The County Commission has talked about it, but talk is much cheaper than buying a franchise from a company that makes a profit selling life's most basic necessity other than air.

The deal could take years to work out. So far Florida Water Services has no interest in selling.

That's what happens when your cow is a cash cow.

And what's the rush? The county government, as Hosler said, "is more interested in tearing up green pastures farther out" for more subdivisions, with pricier houses, than doing right by this aging, invisible neighborhood.

"It's like a cry from the wilderness," said the Rev. Murphy. "That's what you hear from Clair Mel. Can anybody help?"

I didn't have the heart to tell him but I suspect he already knows. Clair Mel needs something else, as much as it needs a dentist and a credit union:

A political action committee.

With a big fat bank account.

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