Six hundred and four acres of the Sand Hill Scout Reservation could turn into rooftops instead of campsites, and the county hasn’t even gotten to a final vote yet. The Greater Tampa Bay Area Scouting Council is asking to rezone that chunk of its 1,300-acre property — stretching from recreation into a planned development district that would allow commercial, mixed-use and residential building.
The Scouts have owned the land since 1978, left to the organization in the will of former property owner Larry Die Polder. According to information presented at the public meeting, that will stipulated something specific: if the Scouts ever stopped wanting the property, it was supposed to become a county park — not get sold off piece by piece. That detail is doing a lot of work in the opposition right now, and it’s worth saying plainly that it traces to what was presented at the meeting, not to an independently reviewed copy of the will itself.
Hundreds of residents, environmental advocates and current and former Scouts packed Nativity Lutheran Church in North Weeki Wachee on Oct. 6 to say no. The core worry isn’t nostalgia — it’s the aquifer. Sand Hill sits over ground that feeds the Weeki Wachee River, the same spring system that draws manatees, swimmers and the mermaid shows the county markets itself on, and residents argue that commercial or residential development on top of it threatens the thing the rest of Hernando’s tourism economy depends on.
The Scouting Council’s side of it: proceeds from a sale would go toward infrastructure work and Scouting programs elsewhere in the council’s territory, which covers more than just Hernando County. Whether that’s a fair trade for 604 acres over a sensitive recharge area is exactly what the public meeting was arguing about.
Nothing is decided. The rezoning application goes to the state for review first, then back to the Hernando County Commission for a final vote — so the version of this that actually gets built, if anything does, is still months away at minimum.
Photo: the Weeki Wachee River, by Gzuraski, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.