Cardinal plan lacks common sense

We once had some serious debates around these parts about the Suncoast Parkway.

It divided the community for years. Politicians and business leaders favored the parkway. Many citizens and environmental groups did not.

Arguments against ran the gamut: Road not needed, environmental disaster, danger to wildlife, unnecessarily displacing people from their homes, among others.

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A big one, though, was based on theory: The parkway will encourage Citrus County commissioners to allow development where it doesn’t naturally belong.

Of course, no way to know how that would shake out until the road was built. Now it’s here, and we’re seeing the resulting growth-related activity.

There’s smart parkway growth and not smart parkway growth. In general, we want homes and businesses built close to where homes and businesses are now.

That’s to avoid “urban sprawl,” a phrase heard often during the last growth period in the 1990s. This isn’t the first time in Citrus County that people want to carve up farmland for houses. 

Urban sprawl is hopscotch development. It’s clusters of rooftops in the middle of nowhere, miles from normal services such as a grocery store and medical offices. It is considered the worst of all community planning.

Which brings us to Cardinal Street.

Driven along Cardinal lately? It’s the definition of rural residential. Forget the technical term, that’s a rural road. Small farms and businesses, homes scattered about. No one in his right mind who cares for Citrus County would look at Cardinal and think, “Great place for development!”

Yet for some reason, that’s exactly our direction simply because the parkway has an interchange.

A developer is planning a mix of 600 homes and duplexes on 143 acres about a half mile west of the parkway interchange — with an ironic name, Cardinal Farms. 

Let’s go back quite a few years. From the start, Citrus County told the Florida Department of Transportation that the parkway exit should be at Grover Cleveland Boulevard, not Cardinal. Grover Cleveland is a direct shot into Homosassa. It also is rural, but the road serves a specific purpose.

FDOT ignored the county. I’ve always heard it had something to do with the minimum distance it wanted between exits, but we never really got a decent explanation about that. Regardless, Cardinal it is.

The county, wanting to avoid hodge-podge development at parkway exits, created special interchange management areas (IMAs) that stretch a certain distance in either direction from the exit along the roadway it intersects. These IMAs are similar to a zoning overlay — development rules specific to the area.​

For an odd reason never fully understood, the Cardinal interchange management area extends west to include this patch of vacant grazing land. It makes no sense. I’ve included a screenshot above. The IMA boundary is in red. Cardinal Farms is that bulky gray sore thumb to the far left.

So, somehow, this development square was inserted into the Cardinal interchange plan, as if it is related to the parkway. Which it’s not. AT ALL. It’s just a bunch of acreage that someone wants to make a buck off. Another development plan in a sea of Citrus County development plans.

Except most of those other ones are near something. This one is near nothing. Any big residential development out here in the sticks (I say that in the nicest way, Cardinal friends) kicks open a huge door. In five years, we won’t recognize the place. Yet another wonderful stretch of old Citrus County left to memory.

Commissioners may consider a talk on how they see the Cardinal Street area panning out, and whether that vision fits with how citizens see it. I could be wrong, but I’m not sure everyone is on the same page.

Meanwhile, the developer tweaked the project, and it will go to the planning board July 18. County commissioners have the final say.

This is a Citrus County issue. We can’t blame the Suncoast Parkway if Cardinal starts spouting people. A housing development forever changes the rural character of Homosassa Springs/Lecanto. 

We cool with that?

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