County board gears up to protect Pinellas history
The Historic Preservation Task Force hopes to require developers to consider the historical significance of any buildings they want to raze.
By LESTER R. DAILEY
| Article published on Friday, Sept. 2, 2005 |
|
 |
 |
|
![[Image]](/content_images/090205_pco-03.jpg) |
|
| Photo by LESTER R. DAILEY |
|
| County Planning Director Brian Smith, left, and Heritage Village director Jan Luth, right, listen as County Commissioner Ronnie Duncan explains the goals of the county’s Historic Preservation Task Force. |
|
|
PINELLAS COUNTY – The county’s new Historic Preservation Task Force met for the first time on Aug. 24 in Clearwater.
The panel, which will meet from 9 to 11 a.m. the last Wednesday of each month for the next six months, will meet again in Clearwater in September. Future meetings will be scheduled in historic buildings throughout the county.
In the interest of full disclosure, the task force chairman, County Commissioner Ronnie Duncan, revealed that, for six or seven years ending 17 years ago, he managed a South Florida division of DeBartolo Development, the company that has a contract to buy the Belleview Biltmore Resort and Spa.
He said when he was an employee, the company was run from Youngstown, Ohio, by Eddie DeBartolo Sr. He added that he has no connection with the current company, which is run from Tampa by Eddie DeBartolo Jr.
“Our business styles are different,” Duncan said. “I don’t agree with everything they do and they probably don’t agree with everything I do. It’s a great business relationship; we don’t have one.” Today, Duncan is a commercial real estate broker who only builds office buildings, mostly outside the Tampa Bay area.
The board, which has 13 of its 15 authorized members, is made up of city staffers and preservationists from the private sector. Cyndi Tarapani was Clearwater’s planning director when she was appointed to the panel but is now a planning consultant, leaving Pinellas County’s second-largest city without a representative on the task force.
“Three of the four big cities are represented but Clearwater is not,” Tarapani said. “To me, that seems like a big gap.”
Duncan replied that the front-runners to fill the two vacant seats aren’t from Clearwater, but he would see about having Clearwater represented.
“We must make our history a part of today and a part of our thinking in whatever we do,” Duncan said. “We need to have a holistic view of this.”
Explaining that preservation is “not all bricks and mortar” and landmark buildings, he said that things such as small motels, beach neighborhoods, trailer parks and working waterfronts that define everyday culture must be preserved.
“So many people now want to tear down and redevelop,” said Cheryl Robinson, director of a health center on the historic Mercy Hospital site in St. Petersburg. “We have to stop that or we won’t know who we are.”
“Historic preservation really should be a vital element of redevelopment,” said Sam Casella, an urban planner who lives in Belleair and is active in the efforts to save the Belleview Biltmore. “Redevelopment shouldn’t be the destruction of historic structures.”
Casella said that the press can be a powerful ally of preservationists by making the public aware of historic structures that are facing demolition.
“The press, in my opinion, played a vital role in stopping the destruction of the Belleview Biltmore Hotel,” he said.
Duncan said in light of the animosity between the county government and some of the county’s 24 municipalities, the county must be careful not to appear that it is usurping the powers of the cities, whose cooperation is vital to the success of any historic preservation plan.
“It’s only as good as the cities that sign on to it,” he said. “Two-thirds of the county is controlled by the cities.”
But first the county must get its own house in order, Duncan said. He said that the county’s proposed new Redevelopment Plan, which will soon come before the County Commission, has nothing about historic preservation in it.
“We’ve got to have something in that Redevelopment Plan,” he said.
|
Article published on Friday, Sept. 2, 2005
Copyright © Tampa Bay Newspapers: All rights reserved. |
