A Gated Community At Last? 

A long-running saga at Heritage Isles has come to an end after more than 20 years and repeated efforts by many residents to activate the entrance gates at the front of their community.

Heritage Isles residents voted in favor of asking the City of Tampa to transfer ownership of the community’s roads to its Community Development District (CDD), which will lead to the security gates once again becoming functional.

The resolution needed two-thirds, or 66 percent of the homeowners who voted, to pass; it got 77 percent “yes” votes.

“The vote cemented what the residents want, which I feel really good about,” said CDD chairman Dan Barravecchio, who spearheaded the effort. “This was really about being able to take care of our own assets…and we can maintain a higher standard for our roads (than what the city can provide).”

The resolution is now in the hands of the City of Tampa which, after conducting its due diligence, will vote on it sometime in the coming months.

If it passes, which appears likely, the Heritage Isles CDD intends to install a new system to put the gates at its Grand Isle Dr. and Sandy Point Dr. entrances off of Cross Creek Blvd. back in working order for the first time since 2003.

The gates haven’t been used because the developer, Lennar Homes, conveyed the Heritage Isles infrastructure to the City of Tampa, which said that made the eight miles of roads within the community public. 

The city prohibited the gate attendant from denying entry to any vehicle, requiring “unimpeded access” to vehicles turning off of Cross Creek Blvd. into Heritage Isles.

The CDD decided to eliminate the guard service, for which it was paying $77,000 a year, and the gatehouse has remained vacant ever since.

“If we couldn’t secure the gate, and we couldn’t check identifications, then why were we paying $77,000 a year for someone that couldn’t do anything but flip a switch?,” Barravecchio asked.

Multiple attempts to get control of the community’s roads were denied. There was no legal mechanism in place to transfer the roads to a CDD, only to a homeowners association (HOA), and that required a 100% vote by homeowners.

According to Barravecchio, the city also was hesitant, due to the community’s outstanding bond debt.

Once that debt was paid off early in 2019, the CDD and its lawyers set out to have a state law written that allowed the conveyance of the roads in a community to a CDD with a 66% vote, as opposed to the 100% vote required by Tampa just to transfer it to an HOA.

“You had a better chance of winning the lottery than getting 100 percent,” says Mark Vega, the CDD district manager since 2014. In fact, Vega said he could only remember one case more than a decade ago where a community succeeded with a 100% vote, and it was actually two cases — the Huntington (42 homes) and Westover (61) villages in Tampa Palms. 

Heritage Isles hired a lobbyist and began the work of having the law crafted. Piggybacking on House Bill 57, a transportation bill, Heritage Isles was able to get Senate Bill 1194 included, which authorized “governing bodies of municipalities and counties to abandon and convey their interests in certain roads and rights-of-way dedicated in a recorded residential subdivision plat to community development districts under specified conditions.”

It was signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis on June 29 of last year.

“This is groundbreaking, this is pioneer stuff,” Vegas says. “I already know of two CDDs that are excited to jump on the bandwagon, but this (Heritage Isles) is a first for the state of Florida.”

The CDD rallied support within Heritage Isles for the vote, which was held on March 18. Of the 1,020 homeowners in Heritage Isles, a total of 373 voted, with 286 voting “yes” for the community to gain ownership of its roads.

The CDD held a number of community meetings to explain their plans, conducted all the required road studies and has stockpiled more than $650,000 in its reserve funds for future road work.

Once the city approves the transfer, Heritage Isles plans to install a state-of-the-art virtual guard system at its two entrance/exit kiosks, similar to the one used by the Live Oak Preserve community off Bruce B. Downs Blvd., hopefully bringing the gate saga to an official end.

Vega says a lot of homeowners in Heritage Isles “were misled” into thinking they were buying into a gated community. Now, Heritage Isles finally can deliver on that promise.

“There isn’t a year that has gone by that the gate issue hasn’t come up,” says Barravecchio, who has lived in Heritage Isles since 2002 and has been on the CDD board since 2005. He says the effort was fueled by many of the early residents.

“The more long-time residents, they felt it was something that was taken away from them, so they had a much more personal interest in having it restored,” he says. “Those are the people that when they drive down my block and I’m out washing my car, they stop and say ‘Thank you.’”