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Lithia Residents Go For The Green

Kathy Moore/Tampa Tribune

Drea Cook has lived in Lithia for four years.Alibi, her 5 year-old Paint horse has lived there since he was 1 year old. Cook is a member of Rural Lithia Area Neighborhood Defense, a nonprofit formed to combat urban sprawl.

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By SUSAN M. GREEN, The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 15, 2007

LITHIA - It cuts a green swath across a road map on a county Web site, but to a group of rural residents based in Lithia, a bypass highway through southeastern Hillsborough - even just on paper - is anything but verdant.

The road corridor is a conceptual plan for shuttling motorists from south of the Hillsborough-Manatee county line through Wimauma, Lithia and Keysville toward Plant City. It's unfunded but still worries Pam Prysner, who traded suburban life in northwest Hillsborough two years ago for a 5-acre patch of green she named the Dragonfly Stables.

'It would open up the rural service area to urban sprawl,' she predicted. 'It's just an outrageously bad idea, and I am shocked that people are still talking about it and considering it.'

The prospect of a high-speed thoroughfare slicing through farm and preserve land brought Prysner and other Lithia residents together a few months ago to form a nonprofit group, Rural Lithia Area Neighborhood Defense. The organization incorporated in June.

'We've had a full plate ever since,' said Prysner, a homemaker who occasionally works part time for a nearby farrier supply store.

With little more than word-of-mouth publicity, the organization has grown to about 20 members who have dogged government-sponsored community and transportation plans and showed up at rezoning hearings to protest projects such as a 2,500-home village recently proposed for the former Sydney Mine property in Dover.

'What you do on rural lands in Dover can affect what happens in Lithia because it can set a precedent,' Prysner said.

Members also participated in a protest last month against dismantling the wetlands oversight division of Hillsborough's Environmental Protection Commission.

Tuesday, the group will hold its first general membership meeting at 7 p.m. at the Bloomingdale Regional Public Library, 1906 Bloomingdale Ave., Valrico. Membership is free and open to residents of communities besides Lithia, Prysner said.

Prysner grew up in New Hampshire and moved with her family to northwest Hillsborough about 10 years ago.

'I tried the suburban life,' said Prysner, who lived in Westchase for eight years before she and her husband, Dennis, bought acreage in Lithia Ranch. While in Westchase, Prysner served as an appointee on several county advisory committees and participated in the Northwest Hillsborough Community Plan.

She said she enjoyed Westchase, 'but I couldn't have my horses there. They wouldn't let me put a barn on my 80-by-100 foot lot.'

With two sons in college and one child, a teenage daughter, to look out for at home, she and her husband started scouting for a country home and wound up in Lithia Ranch, where Prysner raises Missouri Fox Trotter horses.

'We thought we found the perfect place to spend the rest of our lives,' Prysner said. 'I thought I'd be able to sit on the front porch in my rocker with my horses.'

Instead, she said, she spends a lot of time in downtown Tampa trying to track growth management policies that she fears will threaten rural lifestyles.

'We understand that growth is coming,' Prysner said. 'We just think that growth can be accommodated without destroying the rural area.'

For Kelly Cornelius, the Lithia group's vice president, the drive to get government officials to recognize the importance of rural communities goes beyond the fear of seeing a suburban neighborhood across the street. Some beltway routes have been drawn over her property, she said.

'We're not just concerned about our rural way of life but losing our homes or farms,' Cornelius said.

When she bought property on Dorman Road four years ago, the county's comprehensive plan showed her neighborhood would be rural until at least 2025, Cornelius said.

Since then, she has watched zoning changes bring suburban development closer to her property.

'It's creeping down the road,' she said. 'All of a sudden, you're looking at a subdivision. We don't want to look at a subdivision in front of our pasture.'

The group's members said rural land provides water recharge areas and wildlife sanctuaries that benefit residents of urban communities. But they also think government officials should accommodate people's desires for a diversity of lifestyles.

Drea Cook, a real estate agent who grew up in a once-rural part of Plantation, said she and other horse-lovers have flocked to eastern Hillsborough to escape urban sprawl in South Florida. She owns a boarding stable on 7 acres in Lithia.

'The horses are being pushed out,' Cook said, noting that horse-related businesses have long been a major contributor to the Florida economy.

'There are people who love the city, the lights and the activities,' Prysner said. 'It's fantastic that they found the lifestyle they love.'

In Tampa, she said, 'I feel the tenseness of the traffic congestion and claustrophobia of being close to buildings. As soon as you hit the rural area, you relax. You're back in your space. ... It truly is a lifestyle choice that we feel passionately about and very much want to protect.'

The Lithia group's biggest goal? 'We hope to get the bypass off every map,' Prysner said. Cook said a petition drive at two livestock supply stores has attracted about 250 signatures so far.

Prysner said she expects the group's members to participate in upcoming community plans for Lithia and the south Hillsborough area, beginning in 2011.

For information, call Prysner at (813) 653-4657 or e-mail her at president@r-land.org or pdr@dragonflystables.net.

HOW TO GET INVOLVED

WHAT: Rural Lithia Area Neighborhood Defense general membership meeting

WHEN: 7 p.m. Tuesday

WHERE: Bloomingdale Regional Public Library, 1906 Bloomingdale Ave., Valrico

INFORMATION: Pam Prysner, (813) 653-4657, or e-mail president@r-land.org or pdr@drag onflystables.net

Reporter Susan M. Green can be reached at (813) 865-1566 or sgreen@tampatrib.com.

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