Refining Mill Ideas

From the front porch of her tidy brick house, Betty Franklin can look across Hines Avenue to the rusting hulk of the former Cummer and Sons Cypress Co. sawmill, whose rhythms once ruled this corner of northeastern Pasco County.

"It was really nice when it was running," Franklin said.

The mill, which turned cypress logs into citrus crates, provided jobs, homes and health care for thousands of people for nearly 40 years, until closing its doors in 1959. In the decades since, the old mill buildings have disintegrated as a dwindling number of residents have waited for a new employer to come to one of Pasco's few sites set aside for heavy industry.

After decades in the shadows, Lacoochee is moving closer to the light as the county's planning department turns its attention to northeast Pasco. Planners have begun work on a strategy for both preserving the region's rural character and revitalizing sites such as the Cummer property.

It could still be years before the county has a final plan, said Sam Steffey, the county's growth management director.

In the meantime, the property can use all the friends it can get, said John Walsh, vice president of the Pasco Economic Development Council.

"The property has to be positioned properly," Walsh said.

The Cummer site has major problems, primarily a lack of roads robust enough to carry large amounts of heavy truck traffic and a lack of public utilities, according to the county's economic development experts. But it also has something few sites in Pasco have: a rail link to Polk County and the Port of Tampa.

The rail spur enticed Lake City-based Columbia Grain to buy the mill property in 1998.

"The construction of a spur is real expensive," said Daryl Ward, Columbia Grain's operations manager. "To find one already existing is a real treat."

Columbia Grain brings corn to the property by rail from the Midwest and trucks it out as chicken feed to farms across the state.

The company uses just 25 acres of the 140-acre property. It has put the rest of the land up for sale and invited a salvage company to dismantle the mill's beleaguered buildings for the scrap metal.

"There could end up being several uses out there," Ward said.

At the moment, efforts to recruit more tenants for the mill site have stalled because of the poor condition of the roads around the property.

Cummer Road, which connects the mill site with U.S. 301, runs past Lacoochee Elementary School, a fact that would complicate regular use of the road. Bower Road, which runs along the site's west flank, is narrow, poorly maintained and crosses the CSX line just before linking up with State Road 575.

Two potential tenants - a gravel maker and a junked car recycler - visited the site this summer but decided against moving there because of the road problems, Walsh said.

"You get a serious user there that's got 40 trucks, that's 80 trips a day," Walsh said. "Where would they go?"

To meet the needs of a major employer, the roads around the Cummer site would require widening and other major upgrades, said Manny Lajmiri, a county transportation planner who visited the area recently with Walsh.

Who would pay for the road work remains an open question, though.

The Withlacoochee River Electric Cooperative failed last year to land a federal grant to study Lacoochee's needs. Spokesman David Lambert said the company will try again this year for the grant.

State grants for targeted industries require the county to have a company on the hook or close to it to secure the money, said EDC President Mary Jane Stanley.

Pasco County has a long-standing hands-off policy when it comes to investing in industrial infrastructure - a policy that drew frowns when development experts from the Urban Land Institute visited earlier this year to advise county officials on how best to do business.

County Commissioner Ted Schrader, who represents east Pasco, shied away from supporting a publicly funded upgrade of Lacoochee's roads. Those improvements need to fall to future users of the site, he said.

"I think the EDC's going to have to look at companies that really need rail accessibility," Schrader said.

For Franklin and her neighbors in Lacoochee, just about any development on the property would be better than the decades of idleness they've seen.

"There's no real easy answer to this thing," said 58-year resident Eulin Dean. "If they had something out there that benefited people, I could stand a few trucks."