Dan DeWitt, Times Columnist
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Developer Charlie Sasser, who died on Nov. 20, didn't like talking to reporters. Family members have made it clear, by declining to comment or by not returning my telephone calls, that they're not interested in the kind of feature obituary typical for people of Mr. Sasser's stature.
Still, we can't ignore him. He left too big a mark.
That's a neutral word, you'll notice, "mark," neither good nor bad. I'll leave it up to you to determine the ultimate value of Mr. Sasser's developments, which include Hernando Beach, High Point, Brookridge and Southern Pines.
Dredge-and-fill projects such as Hernando Beach were once as common as dirt, or maybe we should use the technical term, spoil — the material dug out of the finger-shaped canals that gave lot owners access to the open water. These lots were worth owning because this same dirt was used as fill, turning marshland into high, buildable lots.
But in 1959, eight years before the founding of Spring Hill, it took guts for Mr. Sasser to start building Hernando Beach, maybe even "vision,'' as Brooksville engineer Cliff Manuel called it. It meant Mr. Sasser thought he could bring buyers to the wilderness.
And he did, eventually. But in the meantime, the rules for development changed.
The project was halted in 1971 when the state claimed ownership of the wetlands Mr. Sasser was excavating, and the Army Corps of Engineers told him he didn't have proper permits. Two years later there was a lawsuit. Mr. Sasser ultimately agreed to restore state-owned lands. He got the right to build the last phase of his project, Hernando Beach South, but access to the gulf was available only by boat lift.
Nobody will confuse Hernando Beach with the posh coastal communities farther south, but it did grow into, I think, a pleasantly salty place. Some people even say it's a bit of a mess. I say a seaside community needs some mess, that a few piles of crab traps are a nice feature.
Without Hernando Beach, the county would have virtually no waterfront development, no way to capitalize on its coastline, none of the substantial tax revenue the community generates.
So, what's the problem? Well, the environmental destruction of dredge-and-fill is total. If the corps and the state hadn't stopped them, developers such as Mr. Sasser might have dug up or covered up most of the state's fertile coastal marshes. Gulf access wouldn't matter so much because other than sunsets, there wouldn't be much to see. There certainly wouldn't be many fish to catch.
Old developers — and Mr. Sasser was 83 — usually get a bye on such matters. People say they were products of their eras. If so, Mr. Sasser was a product of several eras.
Brookridge or High Point were reasonably well-planned developments in the 1970s, when manufactured home communities were the rage. But drive into them now (and, since my in-laws live in High Point, I do all the time) they don't have much eye appeal. Neither does the much newer Southern Pines, east of Brooksville Regional Hospital on State Road 50.
These boxy, mostly uninhabited "luxury'' condominiums are representative of another era. Mr. Sasser, like a lot of property owners, mistakenly thought the time was right to cash in on residential development. That's the final part of his legacy as a developer, good or bad.