Developer targets residents with mailer.

SPRING LAKE — Officials with a Tampa development firm are determined to make sure would-be neighbors have the facts about their massive, upscale residential golf community planned for this bucolic region of the county.
So determined, in fact, that they have blanketed all of one ZIP code and most of another with an eight-page, direct-mail information guide describing the project and how it would benefit the area.
Sierra Properties, LLC, mailed 4,325 guides about its Hickory Hill development to all residents in the 34602 ZIP code, which includes the project, and 75 percent of the 34601 ZIP code.
Ken Crews, Sierra’s chief operating officer, and Sebring Sierra, Jr., the company’s vice-president of operations, said the goal was to inform residents who live within in a two- to three-mile perimeter around the project, which is located on the 2,800-acre parcel known as Two Rivers Ranch.
The spread, owned by the Thomas family, is south of S.R. 50, east of Spring Lake Highway, and west of Lockhart Road.
The plan calls for 1,750 homes and 63 holes of golf and has faced stiff opposition from residents in the area who have argued the plan is out of character with the rural community of rolling pasture and wooded hammocks.
The project earned the approval of the planning and zoning commission after the developer agreed to several changes and additions to the plan. The county commission is expected to consider the proposal at its June 14 meeting.
Crews and Sierra wouldn’t say how much the firm spent to produce and mail the guide, saying only the investment was “substantial.”
“We thought it was critical in light of the concerns neighbors had, and it was important to get the message out to the people,” Crews said. “You kind of assume that everybody and their brother knows about a project that’s proposed but interestingly a lot of people don’t.”
The guide, printed on thick, high-quality paper and featuring a gold-embossed cover, opens with the phrase “A Good Neighbor.” It describes the relationship Sierra has with the Thomas family, who did not sell the tract to Sierra. Rather, the family is partnering with the firm to develop the land.
The guide calls Hickory Hill “a thoughtfully-designed community that will use nature as its canvas” and “the kind of community that Hernando County deserves.”
It points out improvements the millions in impact fees that will come to the county for roads, schools, parks and water and sewer infrastructure.
The guide also features a one-page insert outlining the additional concessions that came at the request of county staff after the mailer was printed, such as increasing open space preservation to 1,100 acres, equipping the golf course with a monitoring well system, and adding 200-foot buffers around the development’s southern and western borders.
The company’s Web site dedicated to the project has “lit up” since the guide hit mailboxes, getting 100 new visitors in a 12-hour period Friday, Crews said.
Most of the feedback from residents has come in the form of further questions, Crews said, with at least one resident voicing their opposition to the project.
The company has directed Brent Whitley, the company’s vice-president of land development, to reply to residents who have questions.
Some residents reached Friday were relieved at what they read, though still skeptical. Others say it won’t change their minds.
Donna McMahan lives on Baseball Pond Road, a dirt lane that shares a western border with the proposed development.
McMahan, who has lived with her husband on their 10-acre spread since 1978, said the brochure was “beautiful” and that she was glad the development would have its own sewer system and not “a bunch of tiny wells.”
In the end, though, she said “It all depends on how it blends out here.”
“I like to look out the front and see the cows grazing in the meadow and hate to see all that change,” she said.
Dorothy and Fred Galbraith have lived on Hickory Hill Road, an east-west road that cuts the project roughly in half, since 1978, tending to an orchard of citrus, peaches and persimmons and raising honey bees.
The development is “bringing Tampa up to us and we’re not real happy about it,” Dorothy Galbraith said.
Galbraith said she was skeptical of the claim that the development would not affect the water supply, and said the brochure’s photos of tree-lined lanes and wide-open pastures were misleading.
“It’s not going to be like that,” she said. “It’s going to be like a little city at the end of our road.”
The Galbraiths knew Wayne Thomas, the patriarch of the family who purchased the land decades ago as an investment for his family, “quite well,” Dorothy said.
“I wonder what he would have thought of this, making so much off this property at Spring Lake’s expense.”