We skipped work the other day and played with Lego at Pasco Hernando Community College near New Port Richey. We had fun. Some of the kids built sprawl. We don’t agree with that. The people gave us cookies. They were good.
Reality Check Tampa Bay a/k/a One Bay has been doing this for months. They call it “visioning.” If you aren’t familiar, the general idea is to enlist people from all over the region to literally sit down in small groups, around maps of Tampa Bay, and use Lego to plot residential and commercial densities 50 years from now.
The Urban Land Institute and other organizations are co-sponsoring the effort to help guide regional planning through citizen-involvement. That’s a big deal when you consider that about 3 million people are expected to move here during the next 50 years. We better do it right or this place is going to look like Hell.
The whole thing kicked off back on May 18 when hundreds of people met in St. Petersburg to do a vision of the entire region. We only did Pasco County. They divided us into groups of about 10, gave us maps, yellow Lego blocks to symbolize residential development, red blocks to symbolize jobs and ribbons to show roads and rail corridors.
Just so you know, we’ve played SimCity. Ok? We’ve played SimCity A LOT. So, you know we know about good planning. But a couple of people from the Pasco Economic Development Council got up, mentioned something about a new comprehensive plan, and stretched out a bunch of east-west ribbons followed by short stacks of Lego spread hither and yon.
That sucks because we wanted our Legos stacked tall west of I-75, south of SR 52, and in mixed-use developments with easy access to mass transit. All that beautiful rural country east of the interstate needs to stay open for recreational opportunities and land conservation. If y’all plan to makle the whole county look like Land O’Lakes, we’re catching a train to Portland, Oregon.
One woman at our table repeatedly mentioned that she needs a direct route from Zephyrhills to Spring Hill and suggested punching straight through a well field. The Aldo Leopold sitting next to her suggested doing it as an elevated roadway to protect the environment. Very progressive but a wee bit costly, perhaps. Once again, in the spirit of compromise, we suggest a nice flying car as an alternative.
We didn’t get our way with the Lego because of the economic development people. That made us want to mess up the Legos real bad. Then we saw what the other tables did and DAMN. You can call Florida “Walgreens Nation,” if those people get their way. Later, we had a cookie with one of the economic development guys. He’s ok.
After we finished playing, the people asked us to answer a bunch of questions. Turns out most folks in that room really do want to preserve rural land. They strongly favor redeveloping blighted areas before paving over undeveloped land. They are big supporters of high-density development and are strongly supportive of emphasizing mass transit over road construction. They care about environmental preservation, too.
Maybe we’ll turn out all right.