‘Impossible fight’: A Tampa neighborhood’s grassroots effort to save its wetlands

Inside a sparsely attended Hillsborough County meeting chamber in August, a loud buzzer went off. Hank Cramer's 10 minutes were up.

"That's a shame," he told county commissioners before taking his seat. "Thank you."

A few minutes later, the board approved the destruction of a wetland in Cramer's Tampa neighborhood. It marked the end of a months-long battle between residents, environmental regulators and developers.

Cramer is the president of Riverbend Civic Association, which has fought fiercely against a 40-unit townhouse complex they say will harm the sensitive shoreline of an already heavily developed Hillsborough River.

Cramer, often sporting his neighborhood association T-shirt that depicts Riverbend's winding banks, is their champion. Following brief comments from his neighbors at the August meeting, Cramer's voice boomed over the speakers.

"We expected an ally and not an adversary," he said, referring to the county's Environmental Protection Commission.

The meeting was a formality. A hearing officer for the commission had already issued his recommendation that county leaders OK destruction of the wetland, as long as the damage is mitigated elsewhere. In exchange for Riverbend's wetland, another one will be restored or created in the Fox Ranch Mitigation Bank area , about 50 miles up the river in northwest Polk County.

This mitigation, approved through a "wetland impact permit," is one of dozens considered by county regulators each year. Of roughly 75 annual applications, about three-fourths are granted, usually without pushback from the public, according to the commission.

Riverbend's appeal is rare: It was the only permit challenge of its kind this year.

Neighbors say they feel development pressure all around them — another builder gobbled up a separate property on the same block in July. Their fight so far has been mostly confined to a series of banal county meetings.

But it's emblematic, they say, of a difficult, expensive and unglamorous process required to oppose developers competing to pave over Florida's remaining green spaces.

Outside the county center after their August loss, wide-eyed Riverbend residents repeated to each other: "How did this happen?"

Local environmentalists posed a different question: How could residents ever win?

New neighbors Stacks of papers and binders blanket Cramer's dining table. His computer pings every few minutes with emails, mostly from neighb.ors or Sierra Club members. His patio is cluttered with fishing poles and tackle, but, beyond the house, a manicured backyard hems the gently twisting shoreline.

Riverbend, tucked across from Seminole Heights on the west side of the Hillsborough River, has been a middle-class neighborhood as long as Cramer can remember. Even as property values climb, it has retained a unique mix of homes. Well-tended waterfront properties, like Tampa Mayor Jane Castor's home, sit blocks from multi-family complexes like Avalon Mobile Home Park.

Cramer has shared a fence with 6111 North Rome Ave. for 14 years with little trouble — until late.

The grounds, the longtime home of the German-American Club of Tampa, sold in 2023 for $3.3 million to Mize & Sefair Development. Mired in permitting issues and legal challenges, the property has seen little activity since, despite elaborate plans for luxury homes.

A neglected clubhouse and a single-family home are all that remain on the overgrown lot. Plastic wrappers and aluminum cans are piled on a 5,000 square-foot section of the riverbank that is classified as a wetland by environmental regulators. A second wetland, the developers' primary target, lies smack in the middle of the property.

When Cramer caught wind of a housing project that would likely cover that protected land, he was quick to schedule meetings with his new neighbors. Once face-to-face, his suspicions turned to worry.

Developers rescheduled the neighborhood meeting at least twice. When they did accommodate residents, Cramer said they appeared indifferent. Instead of answering detailed questions residents had shared beforehand, residents recounted, the company made a brief presentation that didn't address their concerns about the wetland and issues with density and flooding.

In the months that followed, Cramer filed a legal challenge to their wetland mitigation permit. That's when "almost mafioso-type stuff" started, he recalled.

The day after Riverbend's challenge was heard publicly in a county meeting, the owners dumped dirt fill on the property without getting permits.

"You couldn't help but think this is a message they want to send, like, 'We're going to do this no matter what you say,'" Cramer said.

Cramer reported the developers to the city for a code violation. On a recent day, he drove past the site, proudly pointing to a red stop-work notice pinned to its front gate.

It's clear the developers, who specialize in build-to-rent homes and have close ties to the largest corporate investors in the state , are eager to get started, Cramer said. His appeal to environmental regulators was to slow them down.

Mize & Sefair Development hasn't broken ground, but the company has released site plans and rendered images of the project, dubbed "Rome at Hillsborough River." The mock-ups show children playing outside luxury, three-story homes while speedboats whiz past the waterfront.

The original proposal included 48 townhome units, four riverfront, single-family homes and a 14-slip dock on its 4.6 acres. To make it all fit, developers planned to cut nearly 90% of the property's 260 trees, including eight mature and code-protected "grand trees," which provide the biggest benefits to Tampa's canopy.

In emails between developers and the city, the company agreed to reduce that to 42 units and three homes on the river, "which is the bare minimum number to make the project viable," developers told the city. Now, they are approved to uproot about two-thirds of the trees, including three of the grand ones.

Dan Sefair, CEO of Mize & Sefair Development, declined a phone interview with a Tampa Bay Times reporter and did not answer emailed questions about the plans.

In a statement, Sefair said his company is "committed to collaborating with the community to find common ground and moving the project forward in a way that benefits all parties involved."

Cramer, 70, who worked for decades in commercial insurance and is used to complicated jargon, has struggled teaching himself the legalese necessary to fight the developers and their team of lawyers, he said.

Organizing a movement can be challenging, he has found. Tensions among the half-dozen neighbors in his group are apparent as Riverbend has lost battle after battle. Some roll their eyes when Cramer dominates a conversation. One member said Cramer was driving her "a little nuts," so she stopped coming to meetings. A miscommunication between Cramer and the environmental agency hearing officer also meant Riverbend missed a crucial deadline in their appeal this year.

Cramer, and others in the group, say the hearings at the Environmental Protection Commission's Tampa building and the county board's downtown chambers seem intentionally convoluted. They are often told their arguments are off-topic or irrelevant.

Agency officials counter by saying their process, though "adversarial in nature," also "allows for all parties to be heard."

Alison Date, a member of the Tampa Bay Sierra Club, attended the final August hearing. Without professional legal representation, the appeals process was an "impossible fight," she said.

"I was appalled that there was no one in Hank's group who knew what they were required to present so that everything they shared was considered unacceptable as evidence," she said.

Date said the cards are typically stacked in developers' favor, but it's possible for grassroots opposition to win if they organize well and spend a lot of money. She pointed to a recent win for the Tampa Tree Advocacy Group, who stopped developers from cutting two grand trees in South Tampa.

Riverbend's lacking war chest created their biggest disadvantage, she added.

"In this country," she said, "the people with money get heard and seen and get what they want."

Stormwater ditch or freshwater spring? At that same August meeting, Linda Parups, the neighborhood association's co-founder, played a video for board members. It showed debris floating slowly across the wetland's murky surface.

"See the running water?" she asked the commission. "It's nasty, but it's moving."

Developers have dismissed the wetland as a "runoff ditch" in documents to environmental regulators, but neighbors insist the water body is spring-fed — important for delivering fresh water to the Hillsborough River, the primary source of Tampa's drinking water.

The truth, which Cramer said further shows the environmental commission's negligence, may be somewhere in between.

Ping Wang, a University of South Florida researcher who studies the Hillsborough River, recently completed a project documenting springs and creeks that feed the 57-mile waterway.

While Wang hasn't found evidence of a spring at 6111 Rome, aerial photos from the 1930s that he shared with the Times show a creek flowed from a nearby pond through the wetland.

"That pond has since been covered, and most of the creek has since been covered," Wang said.

The wetland's faint trickle is all that's left. Soon to be filled in, it will be the fourth one Riverbend has lost to development in recent years, according to the neighborhood association.

Michael Lynch, wetland director for the Environmental Protection Commission of Hillsborough County, called his team's wetland delineation process a thorough and "independent review." Lynch also said he knows Riverbend residents challenging the agency's decision mean well.

"I respect their concerns," he said. "We look for compromise."

Cramer often talks about what could have been. He would have liked to have seen the land turned into a city park — an outcome that appeared within reach under previous owners.

He pointed to the second phase of Wang's Hillsborough River project, which will use BP oil spill settlement money to restore three city parks along the river. The plan includes a "rain garden" that will naturally filter stormwater flowing into the river at Rowlett Park.

At 6111 Rome, developers expect to dig a retention pond to meet stormwater requirements, according to site plans. Residents said filling in a natural wetland that could help control runoff, only to build an artificial pond in its place, is baffling.

It seems especially egregious when the city is investing in stabilizing the Hillsborough River's banks through natural approaches elsewhere, Cramer said.

"Why not Rome?" he asked.

In the weeks since Riverbend's challenge was denied by county environmental regulators, Cramer has prepared for the site's rezoning hearing, where city of Tampa officials decide whether to allow multi-use housing on land zoned for single-family homes. It's the final hurdle for developers and isn't yet on the city's calendar.

In the meantime, Cramer knows the mechanical roar of construction erupting on the other side of his fence is likely inevitable, signaling a burial of another marshy pool.