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If such a road were built, the toll road would slice through and around suburban rural neighborhoods, rise over and through parks, rivers and environmentally sensitive lands and open eastern Hillsborough to sprawl.
Baier met several times this year with rural Hillsborough residents who asked repeatedly: Will the beltway be in the plans you are considering right now?
Baier on Feb. 20: "It could be in the future but it has not at this point."
Baier on July 17: "It's not included," and, later, "It will not be."
Imagine, then, the shock those residents felt when the beltway did show up in a little-known "South County Plan" being put before The Planning Commission, which was preparing to vote on adopting it.
The rural neighbors saw it as -- at best -- obfuscation and misdirection and -- at worst -- outright lies. Given that any number of government agencies could give the go-ahead to the road, the residents now trust none of them.
"We don't know who we're afraid of," admitted Kelly Cornelius, who lives in rural Lithia and could be in the line of construction. "Considering that our trust has been shattered, we will continue to put everything under a microscope."
In other words, just because the people of Lithia are paranoid doesn't mean that someone isn't out to slip them a beltway.
Communities can define their roadways, or their roadways will define them. Look at how Interstate 4 killed Ybor City as a functioning, multi-ethnic neighborhood in the 1960s and turned it into a dysfunctional nightspot that is swallowing public dollars in an attempted rebirth.
Somehow, when you live well outside the suburban ring that is Tampa Bay, you don't think that such a thing will happen to you.
"This was our forever house," Pam Clouston said of her home in Lithia. She and her husband and family moved here in 1985, picking out 4 acres off Thompson Road. "We built our barn; put up all our fences. We always thought: What a great place to raise our kids."
Clouston is one of about 100 members of Rural Lithia Area Neighborhood Defense (R-Land), a civic group with a slick website that offers "No Brandon Beltway" T-shirts and links to all the agencies and documents regarding Hillsborough County transportation.
The beltway has been called lots of things: "inevitable" by planners and developers; a "sprawlway" by environmentalists. Clouston calls it "The Green Swath of Death" after noticing that every county plan that references a bypass corridor shows it as a wide green line.
At the heart of the miscommunication -- on purpose or not -- is the complicated nature of government planning. The top dog of plans is a county's comprehensive growth plan, or comp plan, which must be approved by county commissioners. The comp plan dictates what land can be developed and where roads will go, and if a project is mentioned on the plan, that's often enough rationale for politicians to approve it, even if the public doesn't want it. Like a beltway.
"Once it gets on a comp plan, it's got legitimacy," said Cornelius, a vice president of R-Land.
Getting such a controversial idea into the Hillsborough comp plan in the first place, however, is tricky. R-Land members believe that is exactly what they are seeing. Their theory goes like this: Get the beltway into any government document -- say, for instance, the "South County Plan" -- and then parlay that mention into a bigger, more official plan until it finds its way into an amendment to the comprehensive plan. The Expressway Authority, for instance, cites the county's desire to build an "Apollo Beach connector" road as part of its rationale for building a beltway.
Then, once the Expressway Authority has raised the possibility of building the beltway, county planners have to include that possibility in their transportation studies, again giving it the imprimatur of a project that has been "in the works" for years and years. And the circle is complete.
Ned Baier is an unlikely villain. A fixture on the Tampa Bay transportation scene, Baier is known to reporters on the government beat as affable and committed to alternate forms of moving people. In Pinellas County, where he worked for years, Baier was the point person for the county's bike trails system. He is low key to a fault.
R-Land members videotaped him at several meetings this year answering questions about the beltway:
Baier: "All of this is to look ahead 20 or 30 years and recognize all the growth that's going to occur in Florida. That is the question that's difficult for transportation planners to contend with. That's probably going to occur, and so that's why we need to be looking at different solutions. But I think all of that is a ways out."
An audience member: "So [the beltway's] not included in this, what we're talking about?"
Baier: "Yes, it's not included. It's only included from the perspective of we just know about it, and maybe when we do one of the test models we'll say, 'Hey, what if this was out here, how would it impact the county roads?' But it's not our decision to make."
Since R-Land members have complained about his actions and say they'll file an ethics complaint against him, Baier has told reporters he cannot discuss the matter. His boss, Peter Aluotto, said Baier has no stake in the outcome of political road-building decisions and did not break any laws. "I can't imagine why anybody would think this is trickery," he said. "Ned does not get a commission on the roads that are built or the houses that are sold."
Aluotto, however, did understand R-Land's dissatisfaction
"I can see where people would be unhappy. It is a complex issue, to be sure," Aluotto said. "He's not a confrontational kind of guy. I don't think he told them anything wrong. He perhaps gave them too much of" a sense of comfort that any final decision was a long way away.
The paranoia about the beltway should come as no surprise given the current state of Hillsborough politics. This is the same county, after all, that saw a prominent developer convince a majority of commissioners to kill local wetlands regulations and the department that oversaw those environmental protections. (The effort was derailed by a coalition of citizen groups that showed up by the hundreds to protest the change, but the environmental agency's power was watered down nevertheless.) The Expressway Authority is a non-elected agency empowered to build toll roads that saw its executive director resign last year amid a scandal over the handling of its legal counsel's contract and the revelation that he ran a gay porno business on the side.
R-Land members took their concerns to a County Commission meeting last week, asking for an investigation of Baier. They got support from Commissioner Al Higginbotham, whose district includes Lithia and much of southern and eastern Hillsborough. By the end of that day, the South County Plan that included a mention of the beltway had been pulled from consideration as a comp plan amendment -- for now.
R-Land members aren't savoring the victory. Cornelius can't help but believe, "We were deceived."
So whether the beltway ever gets built, it has already robbed the people of Lithia of something perhaps more valuable than their homes and lifestyles: their trust in government.
