March 28, 2024

Cover Story - Developing the Heartland

Final Frontier

Growth is coming to Florida's heartland. Who gets to say where it goes and how?

Cynthia Barnett | 7/1/2006
But a blueprint now exists for the growth of the heartland that will be tough to ignore. The footprint for the two roads was created with no public discussion, no input from citizens and no feedback from the state-level economic development or environmental officials who later expressed concern over the routes. Many local officials in heartland counties never heard of the highways until reading about them in their newspapers.

Ironically, the behind-the-scenes lobbying laid the tracks for development just as regional and state officials launched Florida's latest feel-good efforts at managing growth. Through an effort called myregion.org, central Florida is supposed to be the test case for the state's new strategy of "regional visioning," bottom-up planning that relies on citizens and other stakeholders to help decide how their part of Florida grows. At the statewide level, members of a group called the Century Commission for a Sustainable Florida are brainstorming bold ideas for how Florida should look in 25 and 50 years.

The heartland

For decades, local government officials in Highlands County at the southern tip of Florida's Lake Wales Ridge have tried to figure out how to secure a major highway through their rural landscape of sand pine and cattle ranches.

Smack in the middle of the lower part of the state, Highlands lies just an hour from the booming coasts of southwest and southeast Florida. Yet development has largely bypassed the county, as well as surrounding Hardee, De Soto, Okeechobee, Glades and Hendry counties. The area is designated one of Florida's "rural areas of critical economic concern," in part because a lack of infrastructure keeps new people and businesses from settling here.

Along with Polk and Osceola counties to the north, and the remaining rural edges of Charlotte, Lee and Collier counties to the west, the region is the last agricultural stronghold in a state where the homebuilding industry has outmuscled farming to become the second-largest economic driver statewide behind tourism, with a $42-billion annual impact. With St. Joe Co.'s developments in northwest Florida well under way, the heartland also represents the largest remaining chunk of undeveloped land in the state.

Important economic drivers are pushing both developers and homebuyers inland. In coastal Florida, little land remains; prices are soaring; the insurance market is uncertain; and hurricanes are seen as a growing threat. As a result, Florida's major homebuilders, as well as national players including Miami-based Lennar and KB Home, are turning to the state's rural interior.

"The large, national homebuilders who have been working on the coasts have now turned to the interior," says Dean Saunders, a Lakeland Realtor and former state lawmaker who brokers large agricultural tracts for farmers throughout the heartland. "In turn, some of the longtime ranchers are moving to north Florida, Georgia, Alabama. The opportunity costs are so high in some cases, they're asking themselves why they should be ranching land that costs $20,000 an acre."

Clearly, homebuilders will move into Florida's heartland with or without new toll roads. On the other hand, says Lance deHaven-Smith, a public policy professor at Florida State University, the region will never grow as dramatically without major highways as it would with them. In a 2004 report for the Sebring Airport Authority, deHaven-Smith concluded that the six economically depressed heartland counties will grow by fewer than 70,000 residents between 2000 and 2020 with their current infrastructure. "However, if a turnpike were to be constructed across the region, the heartland's population would be expected to increase by more than 10 times" that, he wrote.

In the fall of 2004, armed with deHaven-Smith's report and a catchy enthusiasm for Highlands County's future, a visionary former banker named Mike Willingham brought the story of the heartland to Florida's Turnpike Enterprise. Willingham, longtime executive director of the Sebring Airport Authority, found a sympathetic ear in Turnpike Executive Director James Ely, who said his agency would be willing to investigate an east-west toll road.

When McClash heard about Willingham's friendly audience with the Turnpike Enterprise, he dusted off a 10-year-old request by the Sarasota-Manatee Metropolitan Planning Organization. The request asked the DOT to investigate a coast-to-coast highway from Manatee County to St. Lucie County. DOT officials had turned it down repeatedly over the years. But McClash says that this time when he met with a group including Ely, "much to my surprise, they were willing to talk about a new turnpike."

Tags: Politics & Law, Central, Southeast, Southwest, Government/Politics & Law

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