By NEIL JOHNSON njohnson@tbo.com
BROOKSVILLE - On a rainy February morning three years ago, a marching band and a cannonade of confetti lit the fuse for the next explosion of growth in Hernando County. As politicians christened the new Suncoast Parkway that stitched Hillsborough, Pasco and Hernando counties with 31 miles of asphalt, developers were looking at pastures and forests and seeing houses and golf courses.
The toll road that extended the Veterans Expressway in Tampa to State Road 50 put Hernando within commuting range for people who want to earn paychecks in Tampa and sleep someplace less crowded and less expensive. A county known for its quaint mermaid show at Weeki Wachee, a collection of houses selling all things Christmas and the bucolic town of Brooksville is becoming a bedroom community for urban areas to the south. Developers are racing to supply those bedrooms.
Since the $507 million parkway opened, the county has approved plans for more than 6,800 homes, with room for thousands more. Many will be near Brooksville, the county seat in central Hernando once isolated from growth. It has been two decades since Hernando County, in the heart of what is promoted as the Nature Coast, saw such a burst of development.
During the boom-boom 1980s, retirees flocked to the low-cost houses and sprawling subdivisions that mushroomed along U.S. 19 and made the county one of the fastest-growing in the nation. Population rose from 44,469 in 1980 to 130,802 in 2000. At the peak of growth, housing permits averaged 3,348 a year, reaching 3,785 in 1986. It didn't last. The economy slowed and so did growth. By 1995, housing permits had plummeted to 1,236. Then came the parkway in 2001.
Permits topped 2,000 for the first time since 1990 and by last year were just shy of 3,000. The county population has grown nearly 15,000 — about 11 percent — to 145,793 since the parkway opened. Today's newcomers are moving into such 1980s-era subdivisions as Spring Hill, still the giant of the developments. It has 10,000 of its original 33,000 lots free to build on.
This new crop of houses in older developments will be the real problem, not the coming round of new developments, county Commissioner Diane Rowden said. During the 1980s binge, there was little control over growth or requirements for developers to put in sewers, roads and parkland. "They gave away the store," Rowden said.
New homes going up will force the county to add collector and feeder roads and, eventually, sewer, water and pavement with no way to make long-vanished developers pay. Homeowners in the older neighborhoods and taxpayers will get the bill. For new developments, Rowden said, the county can require developers to put in roads and even pay for road and utility improvements outside the development.
Different Demographics
The numbers of new houses and people filling them may approach the 1980s level, but this phase will be different.
About nine of every 10 newcomers during the 1980s were retirees. This wave likely will be an even mix of retirees and working families. Ronald Dunston, project manager for Hernando Oaks, can tell that from the people asking about his 975-unit development. "What we expect is about 50 percent professionals and entrepreneurs from the Pasco and Hillsborough market and 50 percent what we call younger retirees," he said. "And that's about what we are seeing." The families will put more demand on roads, schools and recreation than retirees.
Another major difference will be where new developments will be concentrated. Developers are looking at the area around Brooksville, not just to the west. Hernando Oaks, the one new development that has hit the building stage, is about three miles south of town. Almost directly east is Southern Hills Plantation, with 999 planned homes that will be annexed into the city. That development has enough land for 2,000 more homes. Northeast of Brooksville is Majestic Oaks, where 650 homes are planned. To the north, three dormant developments could add 1,000 homes. These surround a city of about 7,260 residents that grew by fewer than 1,700 people from 1980 to 2002.
Brooksville planners expect the city to grow by 4,000 or 5,000 people during the next 10 to 20 years, Community Development Director Bill Geiger said. The newcomers, most without the deep roots of Brooksville's current population, surely will transform a city that has no movie theater, a vacant Burger King that has gone out of business twice and offers Rogers' Christmas House Village at the east end of town as a major attraction. "It will definitely change the political face of Brooksville," city Councilman Joe Bernardini said.
Small Southern Town
Brooksville's downtown, with an early 1900s courthouse, oak canopies, brick streets and a statue of a Confederate soldier, could be a postcard for the old Deep South. But downtown is not the city's commercial center. Major retailers such as Publix and Winn-Dixie, Walgreens and Eckerd are to the south end of the city along U.S. 41. The city's heart is struggling to become a day-trip destination of specialty shops, antique dealers, boutiques and cozy restaurants where lunch is a verb.
The restaurants now mainly feed courthouse employees, government workers and lawyers with downtown offices. Parking can be a problem. There is no consensus on what the residential growth will mean to downtown. Evelyn Duncan, head of Brooksville Again, the downtown merchants association, and owner of Antique Sampler Mall, hopes it will mean more life and business. "We're looking forward to a lot more traffic," she said. "The more shops, the better for us." Any flood of shoppers will be too late for The Purple Cow, a gift and antique store on Main Street that closed this month.
Her husband's death and a city streetscape renovation project that spanned the Christmas shopping season was enough for owner Doris de Sylva. She said she thinks the pastoral core of downtown will remain, but there has not been enough business to keep her going. "We tried," she said. Not everyone believes the growth will help efforts to make downtown a place for antique hunters to spend their afternoons and greenbacks. Real estate agent Harry Timmons Sr. said downtown will continue to evolve into businesses that don't rely on buyers strolling the newly gussied-up sidewalks. He foresees offices for professionals, not retail stores.
"I don't think that's going to change," Timmons said. He predicts Home Depots, Targets, chain restaurants and other retailers will build farther south along U.S. 41, closer to the biggest developments. That worries Bernardini. If the large grocery and drugstores move farther out, more vacant shops could join the empty Kash n' Karry and Kmart at the edge of the city. "We have to be sure something's done with the vacant stores left behind," he said. And somehow downtown must retain its ambience and flavor. "That's what I'd like to keep," Bernardini said.
A Safer Place
Gloria Trott, 24, became a Spring Hill resident in January, moving from Riverview in southern Hillsborough when she married Frank Trott, who has lived in Spring Hill since 1981. "It's different," she said. "It's hard to get used to." Moving to Spring Hill isn't a step from an urban to a rural life. Coming from tiny Riverview, it's the other way around. "I get lost all the time," she said of driving around the roughly 25 square miles of the original subdivision.
But the schools are better for her stepdaughter, Shenna, 15, Trott said. "A lot of bad stuff happens to those kids [in Riverview]. It's safer and a better education here," she said. Frank Trott, 39, has watched the county grow for more than 20 years, maybe grow too much. "It's getting close to a city," he said. "And I don't like cities." They will work together on his landscape business and save money. When things become too crowded, it will be time to move. "We're thinking about Colorado," he said.
Schools Will Grow
The people the Suncoast Parkway is leading to Hernando County are bringing children, straining a school system that five years ago had 2 percent to 3 percent student population growth. "Now we're looking at 6 percent to 8 percent," said Heather Martin, director of planning for the school district. The county built three schools in the past 10 years. In the next 10, it will need to add six more. About 10,000 new students are expected to arrive by 2014, pushing enrollment to almost 30,000. Those estimates may be on the low side. This school year there were 240 more middle school students than expected.
By next school year, the county will have 180 portable classrooms at its 19 schools, up from about 140 this year. On March 9, Hernando voters approved a half-cent sales tax to pay part of the $200 million price tag for school construction. But the $60 million to $70 million the tax is expected to raise will still leave property taxpayers with a huge bill. "They're paying for [growth] now and I don't see that changing," Martin said. Just as a squeezed balloon bulges in another direction, growing population to the south is shoving toward Hernando. "Two main factors are at work here," said Marvin Rose, who has published a monthly report on housing in the Tampa Bay area for 25 years. "One is growth of the Tampa Bay area as a whole. The second is the Suncoast Parkway has benefited Hernando County more than any other."
"Land prices have gone up so dramatically in Hillsborough and Pasco; Hernando County looks attractive," Rose said. But the cheap land is becoming less cheap. "Acreage prices have virtually doubled and doubled again," Timmons said. "I've been here over 30 years and 25 of those, acreage was $4,000 to $5,000 an acre," the real estate agent said. "Now you can't buy property in eastern Hernando County for less than $10,000 an acre — if you can find it."
In 2003, the average market value of a single-family house in Hernando was $94,560, slightly below the average $97,716 in Pasco. Hillsborough's average value was $184,035.
Taking It As It Comes
About six miles east of Brooksville, in the Spring Lake area of rolling hills, horse farms and orange groves, land prices in the past two or three years reached $14,000 an acre. Nearly every parcel seems to have a for-sale sign. There isn't one in front of Boyette's Grove, an odd mix of a working grove, old-Florida style gift shop and a children's petting zoo.
Kathy Oleson's family has owned the shop and 100 acres of grove since the early 1960s. She sees the growth as nothing to get excited about. "Twenty or 25 years ago, New Tampa was like this," she said. "It's been growing since the '60s."
She's philosophical about the changes to come. "Whether something is lost or gained, depends on how you feel." There are no plans to cash in right away and convert the family land to development. "This is going to be something for my children to think about," Oleson said. The growth rolling over the county is not universally welcome. Nor is the impact of the Suncoast Parkway on a county that attracts people seeking open space, horseback rides in the Withlacoochee State Forest or exploration of coastal marshes in state and federal wildlife preserves.
"It's a boondoggle," said Arlene Erdrich, who founded the Coalition for Anti-Urban Sprawl and the Environment in an unsuccessful fight against a Wal-Mart Supercenter built near Spring Hill on U.S. 19. "It's just a way of getting a road through so developers could build along that road," she said. Developments are sprawling along the county's main roads with no control, she said, putting concrete and asphalt over a county that was open and natural when she moved there in 1983. "You'd think they'd look at what happened to the east coast of Florida," she said. "Calling this the Nature Coast is laughable."
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