CITRUS COUNTY, Fla. — When they spend quality time with their two sons, Jessica and Rick Biddlecom opt for a lot of activities that can be done indoors.
Monday night, the family sat around their coffee table assembling an image on their Lite Bright.
“This is a car. This is a truck. It’s a monster truck, I think,” Jessica laughed. “We need one of these.”
They need a monster truck because their Citrus County home is a work in progress. The home itself is perfect and beautiful, but the neighborhood streets surrounding it are unpaved and, at times, almost impassable.
They live in Inverness Village 4, a growing neighborhood outside Inverness. They moved there in 2021 to escape the cold weather of the Buffalo area.
“After many, many years of extensive illness throughout the winter months, our pediatrician specialist recommended that we try a different climate,” Jessica Biddlecom said.
Their two boys, who are 21 and 14 years old, not only have respiratory diseases, but they also have autism.
Inverness Village 4 should have been a place for them to play outside and become more socially and physically independent.
Instead, their mother says the silty sand that comprises the neighborhood’s streets, which gets kicked up by traffic during dryer months, has made her boys’ breathing more difficult. That, combined with the neighborhood’s ubiquitous potholes and canyons, which are formed when surface water runoff erodes the sandy streets and surrounding landscape, has kept her sons — Kaden and Dryden — indoors more.
“To send them out on their bikes would just be an accident waiting to happen,” she said. “It’s impacted them negatively. With having autism, one of the goals is to be more independent, and we’ve taken that independence away from them.”
As ABC Action News has reported for months, a complicated, confusing saga has created the problem in Inverness Village 4. There has been finger-pointing from both Citrus County government leaders and the people who had a hand in selling lots and building homes there.
Though the county owns the streets, it does not maintain them. Neighbors were made aware they would need to foot the bill to have them paved.
They thought a Municipal Service Benefit Unit (MSBU) would be established between them and the county. Such an agreement would have allowed homeowners to pay for the pavement on their tax bills over the span of ten years.
Homeowners are expected to pay around $6,500 per household.
However, more recently, they learned the price could be a lot higher because the neighborhood also needs drainage ponds and stormwater infrastructure. Such an infrastructure was never installed as homes were built over time.
The price tag for paving and drainage could be $109,000 per household.
That cost, which many homeowners have said is unaffordable, has led to a standstill and mounting frustration from homeowners who feel misled.
“How would I describe it? It’s surreal,” Jessica Biddlecom said. “It’s — there really are no words for it. You would not expect this to happen in a city in America, let alone Florida.”
Though government leaders are aware of the issues and have taken some steps toward resolution, at this point, there are still no firm answers or solutions.
In the meantime, families like the Biddlecoms are trying to stay positive and trying to understand how the situation they deal with daily was allowed to happen.
“It’s a mess. It’s a disaster,” Jessica said. “It’s like a bomb went off and blew up the roads.”
Rick Biddlecom thinks it’s becoming increasingly likely that Inverness Village 4 homeowners will need to seek a legal remedy.
“I believe we all need to get lawyers because, at this point, I don’t see the county coming to help out because they haven’t shown any signs of that at all,” he said. “The lack of compassion that we’ve seen throughout the county of [coming here] and doing something for us — that’s the most shocking part for me.”
