Hillsborough wants to preserve publicly owned land by subdividing and selling it
April 28, 2009 at 5:30 am by Kelly CorneliusBy Kelly Cornelius
PoHo contributor & R-LAND activist
Only in Hillsborough would the Captain of Team Sprawl propose to sell environmentally sensitive land already owned by the public …….get this………in order to preserve it! WTF?
The chairman of the Hillsborough County Commission, Ken Hagan, will be pitching this idea to the rest of the board on May 6, saying it is “to preserve Cone Ranch and ensure that we permanently eliminate the possibility of its development.” (by carving it up into 6 parcels?) Uh-huh.
According to the above-linked St. Petersburg Times, article the county stands to make $35 million-$45 million and Tampa Bay Water would still retain the pumping rights because the place was purchased as a wellfield in the first place………..yet the potential buyers, who proponents think will be ”wealthy, private caretakers,” won’t be able to develop the land into a big ol’ subdivision. Uh-huh. This one smells pretty bad to me, especially considering who is pushing it. If the commissioners don’t want the land developed, then they have control over that because it is already owned by Hillsborough County. Sadly, they have control over how ANY piece of land gets developed in this county no matter who owns it come to think of it…………..but good try Hagan. One of the opponents of the deal is former County Commissioner Jan Platt. Enough said.
The underlying threats in the article are typical, suggesting that if this isn’t preserved (by subdividing and selling to to private investors) that it could end up for commercial or residential use. This sounds to me like the same crap we hear at rezoning and land-use battles when developers say if opponents don’t accept their cookie cutter subdvision single family homes that residents could get stuck with something like a trailer park instead. Of course considering the majority of this BOCC might just pave over their own mothers if the right land-use attorney was asking, maybe a private subdivision/sale IS the lesser of two evils, but I doubt it. If Cone Ranch sounds familiar it is because it is the same Cone Ranch Commissioner Jim Norman wanted to use for Chumpionship Park.
Also interesting is that one of the people pushing this is Dick Mandt, who the article listed as a prominent Republican donor. I did a search of the SOE site and found he was listed as contributing to Commissioners Hagan, Al “the New Blair” Higginbotham and Mark Sharpe.
