The air was thick inside the Brandon Community Center before a town hall meeting the night of June 10, the uncomfortable conditions the result of a faulty A/C unit. As roughly 400 pissed-off denizens of Eastern Hillsborough County sat waiting for the confab to commence, Hillsborough County Commissioner Al Higginbotham was feeling the heat.
Affixing a lavalier microphone to his white business shirt, the 58-year-old member of the Hillsborough Board of County Commissioner (BOCC) stood straight forward with his crutches (necessary since 1995, when he suffered a spinal cord injury) affixed below his elbows, balancing as he addressed the audience and tried to lighten the mood.
“How many people are here to register your child for summer baseball?” he asked with a straight face. “If you are, you’re in the wrong room.”
“Har, har, har,” one man sitting in the back barked out sarcastically, the bid for levity clearly unappreciated. As more stragglers wandered in from the fierce rainstorm that raged outside, Higginbotham segued into explaining that he was aware that the issue at hand had generated enormous interest (350 emails and 150 phone calls to his office) in recent weeks.
That issue: An unpopular proposal by private developer Redstone Properties to build a big-box retail project just east of Bloomingdale High School and Bloomingdale Regional Library, near Lithia Pinecrest Road in Valrico. Some of the residents say it will be a Super Wal-Mart, though the developer has yet to confirm or deny that claim.
In fact, there’s been little outreach whatsoever by Redstone, which has exacerbated tensions throughout the process.
Preceding Higginbotham to the microphone was county attorney Adam Gormley, who explained to the angry residents that this was essentially a listening session for the commissioner, since the site for the development had already been approved — meaning the BOCC couldn’t stop the process from going forward even if it wanted to.
“I’m here for the duration, whether it’s fun or not. Happy or unhappy. That’s what this system is all about,” Higginbotham said ruefully, well aware of the mood of the room and maintaining that to some extent he was just the messenger.
It would definitely not be a fun night for the commissioner, as he was pummeled for the next three hours by repeated criticisms of the project’s deleterious effects on the community, the legislative process that led to this situation, and his personal failure to adequately represent his constituents.
Dan Grant, an organizer with the grassroots group Coordinated Active Neighborhoods Development Organization (CAN-DO), led the offensive, delivering to Higginbotham a not so neighborly message: “We’re aware you’re running for a district wide seat [in 2014],” Grant said, “and we have serious concerns. If you have trouble representing us in District 4, you’ll have trouble representing in a countywide seat.”
CAN-DO activist (and sometimes CL blogger) George Niemann, said he wanted to correct Higginbotham’s claim that he was just the messenger between the county and the developer.
“You are not just the messenger, you are the approver,” he scolded. “Don’t play dumb. Somebody has to accept responsibility for this, otherwise nobody will be responsible. You made the decision. The buck stops with you. I would respect you more if you said ‘I really goofed.’”
Other citizens spoke with equal passion about the site plan, which calls for a 158,000 square-foot big-box retail store, an apartment complex and five other commercial properties — a proposal that they said will ruin their neighborhood.
Objections were made specifically about potential noise and light pollution, and traffic nightmares based on the fact that the new project would bring thousands of motorists to an already overcrowded street.
Many of the Bloomingdale residents emphasized they are not against development — just this development — and acknowledged that they’ve known for a decade that the site had been rezoned for business. But what has infuriated them is how Redstone Properties requested and received what’s known as a text amendment to the Land Development Code (LDC) back in December of 2011. That amendment changed the proposal from a Traditional Neighborhood Development to a Mixed Use Development, which would allow for the construction of a Wal-Mart-style superstore.
Higginbotham said that only 60 percent of the people who lived in Bloomingdale back in 2003 when the area was rezoned for commercial development currently live there. “That means 40 percent of them didn’t know about the zoning change. They just saw this big open pasture and said ‘well, that’s nice.’ I’m not being demeaning. I’m just trying to look at this step by step.”
But Diane Sandow said that’s baloney. She’s lived on Little Oak Street, located across from the proposed big-box site, since 1989, and said she went to some of the meetings that Redstone held in the community in recent years. She said the developer never showed a plan of any type, nor gave any hints about the building of a big-box store, which is why she was floored when she read a story in the local Osprey Observer in February detailing such a plan. “I felt betrayed because when you do a LDC text amendment, the public doesn’t get involved. The county does it,” she said.
