Residents Flock to Big-Box Meeting at Bloomingdale Church

"Not in their neighborhood," came the word at The Palms Community Church on Bloomingdale Avenue in Valrico, where residents gathered Tuesday night, May 14, to protest big-box retail and apartment development just up the road to the east.

Having outgrown the much-smaller meeting space at the Bloomingdale Regional Library — where the group loosely defined as "No Bloomingdale Big Box" and "Say No to the Big Box" had been meeting — the group Tuesday nightly aptly filled the church at 1310 E. Bloomingdale Ave.

"Easily, we had 100, 150 people here," said Bloomingdale resident Eric Brosch, who has taken on the role of promoting community awareness events. "We've overflowed the library and now we've overflowed a larger meeting space. We're thankful to The Palms Community Church for making this available to us."

The meeting came on the eve of the May 15 meeting of the Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners at the Fred B. Karl County Center in Tampa. Word circulated Tuesday night that Commissioner Ken Hagan had added an item to the agenda at 11 a.m. time certain, to discuss a transportation issue related to the project's immediate vicinity.

"You can feel the energy of the crowd; you can sense their frustration," said Mark Nash at The Palms Community Church meeting. "But it is past the point where the county commissioners can vote on anything. The zoning has been approved. Bloomingdale residents are going to wake up one day and see the largest retail establishment built in their back yard."

According to Nash, who ran an unsuccessful bid to replace Hillsborough County Commissioner Al Higginbotham in 2012, the only recourse the Bloomingdale residents have now is to take legal action.

But Fred Brown and Gene Best, while acknowledging that might be the case, nevertheless said the group is taking a two-pronged approach: Let voters reach out to the commissioners and county officials with emails, calls and petitions, they said, and, as Brown put it, "the other is considering the legal arena."

Brown and Best, along with Tammy Madison, Jereme Monette and Dan Grant, are among those working to raise community awareness.

"We're just trying to have direction for the group and have a strategy," Brown said. "It's pretty clear and simple how this development is going to impact our community."

Best went so far as to say it would be a "commerical cancer in the midst of our community," particularly in terms of traffic. Adding some 300 apartments and a 158,000-square-foot retail store to an already-overcrowded roadway, he said, "will eventually destroy the ability of the community to move around."

In attendance were representatives from many nearby homeowners associations, including George T. May IV, president of the Bloomingdale Homeowners Association, the largest in the area.

"As an individual, I'm against [the development]; I know a couple other board members are against it, but we can't represent that as an association as of yet," he said. "Until we get a better feel for what our homeowners think, we haven't taken a stand on it." A survey to gather those opinions is in the works, he added.

Why is May opposed?

"The traffic," he said. "The road can't handle the traffic. [Bloomingdale Avenue] will go from a D to a failed road and it doesn't make sense to do that. It's poor planning."

Attendee Ebrahim Maidani, who identified himself as retired engineer with the county, had an even more pressing issue to discuss. After the meeting he pulled out his copy of the preliminary site plan for the Redstone Properties Development, which showed his home in the Lithia Oaks subdivision on Wister Circle, just about 100 feet from the access point to the property off Lithia-Pinecrest Road.

"My hearing, my sleep, my light pollution, my noise pollution, my traffic pollution, my environment pollution, everything is going to effect me," he said. "There are so many impacts all around."

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RELATED COVERAGE:

• Neighbors Rally Against Bloomingdale Big-Box Development

• 'No Bloomingdale Big Box' Event Set for Rush-Hour Traffic (includes reader comments)

• Opposition Preps for Big-Box Development Protest

• Bloomingdale Residents Continue To Fight Big-Box Development(includes link to a petition that as of May 14 has garnered more than 1,050 signatures)
  

• Higginbotham Fields Big-Box Development Question (video and reader comments posted at Brandon Patch)

• Commissioner Answers Big-Box Development Question (video and comments posted at Bloomingdale-Riverview Patch)

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