Photo: Douglas R. Clifford, Tampa Bay Times
“Residents have complained that the 800-acre project will be ugly and hurt property values.”
“The sky catches fire out near Daly Road, above the open fields east of the yellow house Acy and Christine Akridge bought nearly a decade ago. They’d almost given up looking for a quiet place for their retirement years when they found it: a shell that had spent years in foreclosure and as a party house for local kids. But the barn was good, Christine thought, and the view was great.
They reshaped it into a home, washing their dishes in the laundry room sink while they built a kitchen. The horses moved into the barn. And Christine flooded her Facebook wall with pictures of the fiery skies at sunrise and sunset.
Now change may come to the fields in pursuit of that sun, and the Akridges and their neighbors fear it will intrude on the quiet lives they’ve built in this pastoral pocket of northeast Hernando County. Trustees of Florida A&M University will vote Thursday on whether to approve a proposed deal to let Duke Energy build an 800-acre solar energy farm across the road from the Akridges’ home.
The deal would make money for the university, which got the land in a 2015 transfer from the federal government. And proponents see it as a small, but necessary push in the battle to slow climate change.
But like other projects in rural central Florida, it’s drawing ire from residents, who see it as encroaching on their lives. People who live near the Brooksville site said they haven’t been contacted by the university; they found out about the solar farm idea through a newspaper report.
They fear it will drive down their property values, lead to disruptive glare and noise in their neighborhood and spoil their futures.
‘What was this all for?’ Christine, 62, wondered aloud as she stood in a neighbor’s yard recently, surveying her home and the fields across. ‘We can’t start over again…’
The cattle were still there 20 years ago, when Dan Kavouras and his wife moved onto the hill across the road, and a decade later, when the Akridges moved in. Florida A&M owned it by the time Josh Anderson, a 36-year-old real estate broker, moved onto the property next to the Akridges last year. But he read up on the land transfer and had the same good feeling his neighbors did.
The promise Florida A&M had made to keep it agricultural seemed to guarantee that industry or development wouldn’t intrude on them.
‘It’s almost like it was a safe haven around this property over here,’ Acy Akridge said.
They didn’t expect the federal government to define solar energy production as an agricultural use. That designation, granted by the Department of Agriculture, opened the door for Florida A&M to look for bidders for a solar farm…
…the residents of Daly Road fear the repercussions already have started.
Anderson bought his home just months ago. His wife is pregnant, the baby due in April, and he sees the house as an investment in his family’s future. But the possibility of the solar farm has made his property worth less than when he bought it, he said, and the value will continue to drop if the deal goes through.
He has a real estate term for this: ‘External obsolescence.’ It refers to something that’s outside a property, but makes the property worth less.
Or, as he put it: ‘I’m losing. I’m losing real, hard, green money.’
…Other residents will consider legal action to block the solar farm, just as residents in rural Pasco County have sued to stop a similar project by Tampa Electric Company.
One morning recently, the Akridges and Josh Anderson stood under the sprawling branches of the live oaks in Anderson’s front yard. Acy Akridge looked past two of the Andersons’ horses wandering across a field, to the open land across the road.
‘People paint pictures just for that right there,’ he said. ‘You tell me when someone painted a famous picture with panels in the background.'”
— Jack Evans,Tampa Bay Times
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