Spooked By A Ghostly Highway

By STEVE OTTO

Published: Oct 19, 2007

With Halloween creeping ever closer, a ghostly highway has made a number of mysterious appearances in south county around Lithia and Brandon. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not.

Government officials claim local residents are just spooked and that there is no such road; it is only in their imagination. It's not like the Selmon Expressway's upper deck, which is also eerie as it stands in Stonehenge-ian silence while drivers below glance at it nervously, not quite sure the whole thing won't one day come down like a row of dominoes.

And the truth is if you drive out there in the daylight, there is nothing, only subdivisions and scrub. People do tend to get jumpy out in the fens and bogs of Hillsborough County, especially when the bulldozers show up to pave over those fens and bogs and turn them into strip malls and gated subdivisions.

The mysterious road, according to eyewitnesses, takes different forms. At first it appeared on planning maps as something called a "Beltway" and seemed to go in different directions. Authorities dismissed the sightings, first suggesting it might be swamp gas and later saying what those people saw was merely the idle doodlings of so-called urban planners.

Then more recently the road reappeared on other maps. Now it was being called a "Bypass," and residents in Lithia and other parts of the county noticed that the "Bypass" was projected to bulldoze right through their homes.

Again the planners denied the very existence of such a road and suggested locals pay no attention to the engineers over in the corner behind the curtain.

Before Trust Was The Living Dead

A few years ago that might have worked. But that was back in olden days when the people still had a measure of trust in local government. That was back before the southern reaches of Hillsborough County turned into a feeding zone for developers, and government officials discovered their real function was to appease the big money crowd that wanted to take advantage of all that spread out in front of them.

It was back before the Hillsborough County Commission chambers were turned into a year-round haunted house where you never knew exactly what was going to happen next.

I tuned in to the weekly meeting of the commission on Wednesday, where a group of citizens from Lithia and Riverview had showed up to ask just what was going on and why were they being told something different at every meeting they attended.

Mumbo Jumbo

Some of them were still fresh from dealing with these same commissioners in the recent battle to save the department charged with looking at wetlands development, an issue they ultimately got burned on. They weren't about to take any more mumbo jumbo from the commissioners.

The mysterious road, of course, is the creation of the long-range planners from the Planning and Growth Management department, who apparently have put it into something called the "South County Transportation Plan" without really telling anyone - at least those most affected.

Whether it's a good idea or not, I don't know enough to say. What makes me suspect it is more trick than treat is that once again it has the appearance of something being hustled in the back door after dark and with no moon in the sky.