When I got the call from my friend and Quail Hollow resident Bill Sanders, who works at the New Tampa Postal Station in Tampa Palms, it was Friday afternoon, a few hours before I went to press with this issue.
I told him I didn’t think I could attend an impromptu meeting at the home of Quail Hollow HOA president Mark Patterson (who also goes by “Dan”) at 7 p.m., because it was too close to my midnight deadline and I didn’t think I could find space for it in this issue, as I had another editorial all ready to go and precious little other space left at that late hour.
“But, we really need some help,” Bill told me. “Did you know that they’re going to close the golf course (Quail Hollow Country Club, or QHCC) and replace it with more than 400 residences?”
I had actually read an article on TampaBay.com in May of last year about the possibility that golf course owner Andre Carrollo was “considering” rezoning the 175-acre property but that it wouldn’t be “anytime soon.” I also heard rumblings at my Rotary Club of Wesley Chapel Noon meeting two days before Bill’s call to me that the course either had been sold or was going to be sold for development.
“I just don’t understand how we can be sold ‘golf course view’ lots at a premium (of the 30 or so Quail Hollow residents, who attended the meeting on March 4, all of whom live on Gentle Ben Cir., most paid at least a $10,000 lot “premium” to build their home with a view of the Quail Hollow golf course),” Bill said, obviously exasperated. “If you could attend the meeting, maybe you could get the word out that most of our neighbors are opposed to this.”
To his credit, Carrollo has invested millions in renovating the course and the clubhouse after buying it for $1.7 million about two years after QHCC was declared bankrupt and shut down. Carrollo has the right to try to finally turn a profit on his investment, and he already has approvals in place to build a little less than 300 single-family homes without going for a rezoning, but his in-house development division, which is a separate Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) from the course itself, wants to increase that total to more than 400 townhomes or attached houses.
“That means that many of us could have new homes in our backyards,” Patterson told the crowd. “I know some people think that the new homes will add value to our homes, but we don’t believe it’s true.”
All told, Gentle Ben Cir. has about 116 homes, at least 60 of which included those $10,000 lot premiums (totaling more than $800,000 that community residents paid to have “golf course views”). One resident told me that there are about 100 other homes which currently border on the golf course and about 400 total homes in all of the neighborhoods around the course.
“Those new homes are going to cause a lot of runoff,” Patterson said. “About 70 percent of what is now golf course will be impermeable land. They’ll have to build those homes up several feet, and the water will run off into our neighborhood.”
In addition to traffic and safety concerns, several residents noted that during the rainy seasons, the roads throughout Quail Hollow already flood badly. Patterson agreed that although the Southwest Florida Water Management District (aka “Swiftmud”) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers don’t allow water from one development to be “dumped” onto another, those entities won’t even get involved in looking at the project until after the rezoning hearing, which had not yet been scheduled at our press time
(Note-The rezoning application was submitted to Pasco County on Feb. 6, and representatives of the developer were set to meet with Pasco zoning officials the week of March 7.)
The meeting at Patterson’s house was primarily for informational and organizational purposes. He said that state law prohibits HOAs from using association funds to pay to fight rezonings, so he and a couple of other attendees were forming a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and trying to raise money as individuals to retain an attorney. There’s even a GoFundMe page up and running. I told them I would try to get the group a meeting with Dist. 1 Pasco commissioner Mike Moore (who is a member of my Rotary Club) to at least apprise him of how they felt about it, even if there ends up being no way to stop it.
I’ll keep you posted. I also apologize in advance for any factual errors in this story because I threw it together so quickly.
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