DOVER, Fla. — Some Hillsborough County residents have come together to form the “Fix Hillsborough Neighborhood Coalition,” and right now, they’re main focus is a piece of land in Dover that was once a phosphate mine.
In 2010, Hillsborough County approved a developer’s plan to make the property an energy park. Now, it is looking to get approval to add a housing community.
While the developers say it could help Hillsborough County’s housing crisis, connecting Plant City and Brandon, the Fix Hillsborough Neighborhood Coalition, is calling on the county’s planning commission to nix the idea, saying their concerns outweigh any potential benefits.
“This is where they’re proposing to do the residential,” said George Niemann as he walked across the street from his home to his neighbor’s backyard.
Niemann is a member of the coalition, a group of residents who say they “oppose offensive land development that negatively impacts their quality of life.”
Right now, the future of the energy industrial park in Dover is at the top of their list.
“I am concerned with not getting what was promised, which was alternative energy to help supply power for our growing county and the lack of infrastructure that would support all of what they want to build,” Niemann said.
The original plans that were approved for the 3,000-acre property in 2010 did not include any residential area, just a clean energy plant. Developers are looking to build a residential community, called Dover Farms, on 470 acres of it.
“Fifteen years later, we’re living in a very different world,” said Jake Cremer, who is the attorney representing the Dover Farms developer, University Energy Park. “The planning commission has said we’ve run out of land for development of housing within the county, so what we’re proposing is to be part of that solution and take some of the land that’s currently proposed for energy production, industrial land, and proposing a residential community,” .
Cremer says plans are still in the works, but his client would like to build a sustainable, green community on the property next to Niemann’s community.
“This is one of the pits where they put the used liquid from the phosphate mining process,” he said. The Fix Hillsborough Neighborhood Coalition is concerned about what might be dug up during the building process. Within the industrial park is a superfund site, which is an area the EPA considers “contaminated” and monitors, but Cremer says that 9 acre-spot is far enough away from the proposed development.
“The EPA is still overseeing that, along with Hillsborough County EPC, the Environmental Protection Commission. The residences we’re proposing are about 4,000 feet away, so that’s farther away than currently there are residences about 3,000 feet from that,” said Cremer.
Regardless, Niemann says he and his neighbors just want what was originally approved. “They should just stick to the plan, develop the energy source,” he said.
The Fix Hillsborough Neighborhood Coalition has an online petition for people to sign who oppose the project. Cremer says the proposed residential area is still in the early stages, and it will be six months or more before plans are ready to be submitted to the county’s planning commission for review.