Issues

New residents, property owners and businesses continue to come to Keystone/Odessa and Hillsborough County for its great location and natural amenities. The Great Northwest is no longer a secret enclave. More people become aware of it every day.

Growth is inevitable. It’s already happening and we need to be prepared for it and plan for it in order to preserve a quality way of life.

The assessed property values of Greater Keystone and Odessa are among the highest in all of Hillsborough County. This means the property taxes are also among the highest in Hillsborough County.

But there is not a correspondingly high level of services. This lack of some of the most basic of public services is the result of an intentional lack of action by local government. Local government’s neglect of this area can be traced to an over ten year old planning document – the Keystone/Odessa Community Plan.

This outdated document has allowed local government to sidestep providing basic services for Keystone/Odessa. If we allow it, they will continue to use “The Plan” to deny us what our property taxes should be paying for.

Government staff, including the Planning Commission and other County agencies will tell you a tiny group of 20 +/- people they talked to a decade ago in Keystone/Odessa didn’t want the roads widened and water and wastewater services among other things.

What they won’t tell you is this group was handpicked by county government. They knew full well what this select group would say. Our county government has hidden behind “The Plan” to save itself money by denying services. They still hide behind it today and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future if we allow them to.

Ironically, “The Plan” has become a document the County uses in order to avoid planning and paying for infrastructure this area already sorely needs.

The Keystone/Odessa Community Plan dictates the area only receives “rural level services” which means dangerous, two-lane roads and 19th Century water/wastewater engineering.

This is not just a problem forKeystone/Odessa, but the entire county. Several of the roads are emergency or hurricane routes. Even scarier, “The Plan” prohibits connections to water and sewer, even when it would protect the County’s drinking water and would be entirely paid for by the landowner. Yes, this is correct. HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY REQUIRES WE SUFFER DANGER TO OUR DRINKING WATER EVEN WHEN FIXING THE PROBLEM WOULD NOT COST TAXPAYERS ONE DIME.

County government staff says they want to prevent “urban sprawl.” SO DO WE! By avoiding “urban sprawl” we will protect our investment in the community.

“Urban sprawl” is a scare phrase used by government staff to invoke nightmarish visions of endless traffic. Yet, by refusing to allow clustered development or widen roads, that is exactly what they have saddled us with. What the government really means is that they do not want to provide us the services we pay for.

• Smaller local schools, a carefully zoned market-sized grocery store and a drugstore or two would improve the quality of life in Keystone/Odessa. It would not create the dreaded urban sprawl.
• Wider roads with sidewalks that allow us to move around our community freely and safely would only enhance our quality of life, not detract from it.
• Long bus rides for our children to go to school, long drives to shop at a major grocery store or pick up a prescription at a drugstore are simply unreasonable. And, the ever-increasing cost of gas will make this even more of a problem in the future.

PLANNING BASICS:

The arbitrary and selective use of planning laws has created a situation which calls for a review of planning basics for Keystone/Odessa.

The average citizen or business owner should not have to take months or even years to learn a lot of planning jargon in order to understand the planning process for Keystone/Odessa.

Planning should be based on common sense and also be easy to explain and understand. But it isn’t in Keystone/Odessa. The planners themselves are often confused and at odds with each other trying to interpret the mish-mash they call “The Plan”.

The State passed its comprehensive planning law in 1985. It was intended to prompt local governments to provide basic public services for growing communities. And Keystone/Odessa is growing. This can’t be denied. But the sad truth is the State plan isn’t working here.

Why isn’t it working? Because instead of following this well-intended plan, Hillsborough County has subverted it and used it to deny even basic public services for Keystone/Odessa.

The County has manipulated the plan to declare the area “rural” and thus deny us basic services. Keystone/Odessa is designated by the currently adopted Comprehensive Plan to stay rural until at least 2025.

Think about it for a moment. Calling us “rural” doesn’t make it so. Look around you. We haven’t been truly rural for a long time now.

Don’t kid yourselves. The transition to suburban from rural has already begun. It started years ago. This adherence by the County to continue to call us rural until at least 2025 serves County government, not us. Quite simply, it saves them from spending money on Keystone/Odessa.

And if the County waits until 2025 to begin to provide services that are already needed in our area, we will suffer the consequences. It’s not a pretty picture. It will take us many years to catch up, if we’re ever able to catch up at all.

Look around you. We are not Mayberry R.F.D. and that’s not Sheriff Andy and Barney Fife patrolling our streets. We are a growing and vital community and we need to be treated as such by our government.

Keystone – The Great Northwest is trying to work with local government to use the Comprehensive Plan and the Land Development Code as tools to encourage progress while also working together to protect our environment.

The two are not mutually exclusive and can be used to compliment each other if careful thought is given to the process.

The Keystone/Odessa Community Plan and the Urban Service Boundary place unnecessary restrictions on property and business owners and has unnecessarily endangered our community.

This has resulted in the denial of quality infrastructure to Keystone/Odessa. We’re getting shortchanged here but it sure saves the County a lot of money.

Let’s take a look at the Keystone/Odessa Community Plan which was adopted by the county more than a decade ago and remains in force today.

Should a general planning document tell you what type of fence you can have or the type of roof you can put on your home or business? This is precisely what the Keystone and Odessa Community Plan does.

The County and the Planning Commission have clearly over-stepped their bounds. These things are simply none of their administrative or legal business.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote – “The makers of the Constitution conferred the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by all civilized men—the right to be let alone.”

It’s up to you. Do you want more invasive, overlapping and redundant governmental restrictions forced on you?

We hope you would prefer to be let alone to make your own decisions on things like what type of fence or roof you want and can afford to put on your own home or business.

One major issue is how local government views the boundaries of Keystone/Odessa.

They overlay boundaries upon boundaries and then pick the boundaries they find convenient to deny us services,

Our boundaries should be determined by a current survey. And the survey should be updated when necessary. This way the County will find it more difficult to deny or limit Keystone/Odessa basic public services.

ISSUES:

●Rural Residential Community Character

Several Hillsborough County so-called “Community Plans” designate large parts of the County, including Keystone/Odessa “rural”. This appears to be a code word for for no services and no jobs or businesses.

What would be wrong with having a Publix or a Sweetbay supermarket nearby? How about a CVS or a Walgreens? And maybe a nice restaurant or two?

It is unreasonable to expect Keystone/Odessa residents to drive relatively long distances to buy groceries, fill a prescription or enjoy a pleasant meal outside the home. This doesn’t increase our quality of life. It diminishes it.

A lack of jobs diminishes our quality of life even more. Just one small commercial center with a grocery store, drug store and a few nice shops could generate 263 permanent jobs with a total new yearly income of $7.2 million. And, it would save us millions of dollars a year in gas and wear and tear on our cars.

Also we can achieve a “rural” feel in Keystone/Odessa without any plan because a large part of the area is owned by the County or the State and will never be developed. Areas can keep a rural feel by getting rustic street lights or designing roads with shoulders instead of curbs. It is not necessary to force the area into third world country status to get or keep a rustic character.

●General Development Criteria:

The Keystone/Odessa Community Plan is needlessly repressive when it comes to what property and business owners can do with their properties. We do have property rights you know. Or at least we used to.

Let’s take a look at our current property rights situation.

●Residential:

The Keystone/Odessa Community Plan does not allow for residential lots smaller than five acres in size in some areas.

This five acre restriction was created as a barrier designed to exclude people who cannot afford pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy five acres in Keystone/Odessa and build a home on it.

There are only two groups who are happy with this five acre criteria:

1. People wealthy enough to buy five acres of land in Keystone/Odessa who want only the kind of neighbors who can afford the same.

2. People who own landscaping and land maintenance businesses. They want that restriction to stay on the books forever.

Homes on half-acre lots close to water and wastewater services would be completely reasonable. This size lot still affords privacy and avoids any cramped housing look. Or, a high quality villa development surrounded by woods would provide a nice place for those with fixed incomes like seniors or teachers working at the Steinbrenner school.

If we plan for these things now, we can provide people with high quality places to live in Hillsborough County, so they are working, shopping and paying taxes in our County instead of a nearby County. Right now, many work in Hillsborough, then drive on our roads to another County where they spend their money and pay taxes. Eventually, the jobs realize all their employees have left the County, so they leave to our neighbor counties. Hillsborough’s biggest exports are jobs and tax dollars as absurd rules drive people and then jobs away.

●Agriculture:

The Keystone/Odessa Community Plan attempts to preserve its “agriculture” status so it can justify the area’s governmental designation as a “rural” area.

Yes, there is some agriculture remaining here. We welcome and embrace it. But the fact remains. We are no longer a “rural, agricultural land area” and have not been for years.

The truth is there were only 56 farm family households in Keystone/Odessa out of over 6,000 according to the 2000 Census and there are fewer farm families here today.

The State has made many provisions for protecting agricultural land. To the extent that farmers want to farm, they can. The Keystone/Odessa plan does not provide more “protections” for real farmers. If anything it provides design restrictions that limit the ability of farmers to carry out their farming operations in a profitable manner.

●Commercial:

The Keystone/Odessa Community Plan, like many other community plans, attempts to artificially limit the amount of commercial space within Keystone/Odessa to the existing commercial settled on 15 years ago.

This is neither reasonable nor appropriate for a general planning document. We believe that the market, administered within the context of the County’s existing stringent land development regulations, should be allowed to dictate the amount of commercial square footage in the area and where it goes.

Placing a moratorium on all commercial development over an area dozens of square miles in size is unnecessary and absurd. The County already allows tons of public input in the regular zoning process. No super Walmart will ever just appear in someone’s backyard one day. These overkill regulations only serve to drive away possible business and jobs, not protect anyone.

Common sense says “The Plan” should be changed so government cannot dictate the type and style of businesses allowed. We think community input and desires should dictate local choices, as opposed to some board or commission sitting in Tampa.

●Tourist and Leisure Industries:

Strangely, the Keystone/Odessa Community Plan does allow for the creation of dude ranches and horse racing support services.

Why should one industry be singled out for growth in a long range, comprehensive planning document? Who is to gain by this and what type of political influence did they exert to be the exception to these rules?

●Schools:

We need smaller, local schools within our community. The Keystone/Odessa Community Plan does not allow for them.

●Streetscape and Roadway:

The Keystone/Odessa Community Plan does not allow for street lighting unless there is a “public safety” issue. And who makes this judgment call? Well, the same County government that created these plans to avoid providing services in the first place.

Unlighted roads are unsafe roads. We think our roadways should be safe. They should also utilize trees, attractive landscaping and provide us with nature trails and greenways. But these things cost money. So we don’t get them.

●Transportation:

The Keystone/Odessa Community Plan would keep all roads within our community two lane rural roads FOREVER. Think about this. It’s a key issue.

We must at least consider adapting Gunn Highway, Van Dyke, Tarpon Springs and Lutz Lake Fern roads as four lane roadways with turn lanes, sidewalks, bike-paths, lighted intersections and street-lighting.

What if a loved one needs an ambulance while there is solid traffic congestion on every road in this area? The roads are not designed to allow an ambulance to pass a solid line of stopped cars.

We need safe, modern roads that will allow us to move around our community without worry and allow for safe, orderly evacuation in case of a hurricane or other potential catastrophe.