BROOKSVILLE — Residents who want to slow Hernando County’s growth are knocking on the wrong door when they show up at the courthouse, county commissioners say.
The better addresses are in Tallahassee and Washington, D.C.
State and federal lawmakers, responding to demands for more housing at prices working families can afford, have steadily stripped Florida counties of the authority to say no to development. What’s left for local officials, commissioners said at a recent land use meeting, is influence over the details — setbacks, street widths, where the air conditioner sits — not whether the houses go up at all.
“Home rule” has been eroding for years, commissioners said, and Hernando is feeling it now in part because of decisions made long before most current residents arrived.
Many of the master plans crossing commissioners’ desks today were drafted roughly 20 years ago and are only now coming to fruition. Commissioner John Allocco, who has researched the development timeline, said it takes about 10 years on average in the U.S. to move a plot of fallow land through the bureaucratic hurdles to finished homes, and that’s before factoring in recessions.
The Melton family’s planned conversion of its farmland to housing, for example, may not see residents moving in until the 2030s or later.
The migration driving the demand isn’t just from New York. Commissioner Brian Hawkins said he ran a business in St. Petersburg but was getting priced out, and he came north looking for a lifestyle his family could afford. Buyers are also arriving from Wesley Chapel, Pinellas County and Hillsborough County, commissioners said.
Commissioner Steve Champion, who left the county for several years to work in southeast Florida, recalled a Hernando with a small population, narrow roads and a Spring Hill that barely existed.
Where commissioners can push back is on design.
Older subdivisions across the county show what happens when no one asked the right questions up front. Driveways are too short for the pickups and SUVs families actually drive, leaving vehicles hanging over sidewalks. Holiday parking becomes a neighborhood problem. Air conditioning units crammed into the narrow gaps between houses turn side yards into obstacle courses.
Today, commissioners can require developers to push homes farther back on their lots to lengthen driveways, and to move air conditioners from the side of a house to the back. Small changes, commissioners said, but ones residents notice.
Builders are catching on. The developers who study what commissioners want and bake it into their first submission move through the process faster than those who file a plan they know will draw objections, then return for repeated hearings, each requiring paid legal advertising.
The contrast between older developments and newer ones shows up in street widths, distances between homes, setbacks from main roads and the number of mature trees left standing.
The bigger constraint on commissioners, though, isn’t local bureaucracy. It’s the layers above them.
That dynamic is why fighting cellphone towers tends to be futile. The Federal Communications Commission allows county commissions to vote on tower applications but bars them from weighing what residents see as health risks from the transmissions.