CITRUS COUNTY, Fla. — When will it ever change? When will Inverness Village 4, a Citrus County neighborhood, get passable streets? And when will homeowners like Janeen Eddie and Ross Fredericksen get the neighborhood they deserve?
Answers to those questions remain as elusive as ever.
“I’m at a point — we both are — everyone in here’s at a point where we’ve had enough,” Fredericksen told us in a recent interview.
He and his wife are two of hundreds who call the neighborhood — which is located just outside Inverness city limits — home.
Even though they say they were told roads would be paved, somehow the neighborhood was built with no paved streets or drainage system, so the streets have become treacherous sandy canyons. Each rainy season worsens the condition of the streets, which is already laughable.
While the streets are publicly deeded, Citrus County has refused to maintain them since they were never paved. A dispute between the county and those who built the homes has led to a stifling stalemate, and home-owners are unsure if the problem will ever be fixed.
Now, many of the homeowners, fear for their safety after a Citrus County Fire Rescue fire truck got stuck in the sand at of the neighborhood’s worst intersections back on Feb. 28.
Mike Wright, the publisher of the blog Just Wright Citrus, has written about the neighborhood’s plight for more than a decade.
“You would think a fire truck stuck in the sand — in a sandy street — would move something along,” he said Monday.
“It needs solutions that are outside the box, because the box isn’t working. We have the box,” he continued.
To that end, in a recent blog post, Wright offers four solutions for Inverness Village 4:
- Allow neighbors to donate easements to Citrus County for the construction of swales and a drainage system
- Pick one street for paving and drainage solutions and allow the homeowners on that street to pay for those fixes
“At least you have in the community that’s in good shape,” Wright said.
Wright’s other two solutions would likely require government approval, which might be hard or impossible to get for various reasons:
- Allow neighbors to pay to put down gravel to improve the crumbling dirt roads
- Or, allow them to pay someone to grade and scrape the roads occasionally
According to a spokesman for Citrus County, the county would not be able to grant such permissions for the latter two solutions. Southwest Florida Water Management District rules and regulations might also constrain such solutions.
Regardless, Wright believes something more can and should be done.
However, he believes a solution will require all sides—the county, home builders, and homeowners—to cooperate and collaborate, which they have not been able to do so far.
Without that collaboration, the current situation will probably persist.
“Unless there are people that are going to get together and say, ‘Okay, everything that we’ve done so far has not worked, so let’s forget about everything that has not worked and stop pointing fingers at each other.’ And say, ‘What can we do to get the roads paved or passable?’” Wright said.
Despite the impasse, and elusive answers, homeowners will attend Tuesday’s county commission meeting. Fredericksen and Eddie, for example, will reiterate their worries after the fire truck got stuck and plead with county leaders for a break to the impasse.
“At some point in time, we’re not asking for the moon,” Eddie said. “We’re asking for a safe place to live.”
To read more from Wright, visit his blog, Just Wright Citrus.
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