Home Depot, after protests, drops plans for east Manatee store

The last thing Esplanade Golf and Country Club resident Lin Harvard says she wanted to see from the fifth fairway of her east Manatee County home golf course was a Home Depot. 

“It’s expensive to live here,” she says. “This just wasn’t what I was expecting to move into my backyard.” 

Harvard and over 2,000 others signed a petition aimed at stopping Home Depot from building a store near the northwest corner of Lorraine Road and Rangeland Parkway in a fast-growing area of fast-growing Lakewood Ranch. 

Home Depot was scheduled for a pre-application meeting Sept. 13 with Manatee County, but the meeting has since been canceled. 

“The Home Depot is dropping the contract on this specific site due to a number of land development challenges,” Sarah McDonald, director of Home Depot Public Affairs and Community Investments, writes in an email to the East County Observer, sister paper of the Business Observer. Home Depot didn’t respond to any follow-up questions as to what the specific challenges for development were. 

The proposed site is a combination of three privately owned parcels. None of the parcels are owned by Lakewood Ranch developer Schroeder-Manatee Ranch. (There are currently three Home Depots in Manatee County, including two just outside Lakewood Ranch: one on State Road 64, just west of Interstate 75, and one on University Parkway, also just west of I-75. This site is roughly in the middle of those two, separated by some 7 miles.)

Local residents made it known they were worried about semi-truck traffic they expected a Home Depot to generate.

“We have several kids in our neighborhood, who go to Lakewood Ranch Preparatory Academy, and they ride their bikes,” says Lorraine Lakes resident Mary Buck, speaking before Home Depot announced its decision to drop pursuit of a store in that location. “This would become a major intersection.” 

Mallory Park resident Maryann Goetsch says a lot of children in her neighborhood attend Gullett Elementary School and Dr. Mona Jain Middle School. 

“It’s alarming to me, as a parent, that we’d want that kind of big box store with commercial traffic plopped in the middle of a residential neighborhood,” Goetsch says. 

Besides starting a petition, within days residents had created a website, opened a Facebook page, bought signs and T-shirts and launched an email drive with a QR code to protest. 

On Sept. 3, Harvard and Esplanade neighbor Dan Creek drove to the corner in a golf cart, set up a chair and took turns waving the one sign the group had at the time. Additional signs were on order. 

Creek says about 30 residents had agreed to wave signs on that corner. He was going to schedule people in pairs for two-hour shifts between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. 

Cars honked in support as they drove by Creek and Harvard. One driver stopped and gave them a $20 bill to help the cause.

Photo by Lesley Dwyer

“I think there’s a floodplain behind the property they were going to build on, and they were having some development concerns,” Creek says. “But I think that we might have pushed them over the edge. They might have continued had they not seen the community was so adamantly opposed to it.” 

Neighbors who signed the petition certainly don’t think the group’s efforts were done too soon or in vain. When the Neighbors Against the Home Depot at Lorraine and Rangeland posted a request to Facebook for $433 on Sept. 8 to cover its costs, $275 came in within a day. 

The cash and Venmo transfers came with comments thanking the group for its hard work. 

Carolyn McDevitt posted: “Once again, there is power in numbers!!! Hopefully, we won’t have to do this again.” 

Creek isn’t letting his guard down.

“The team still needs to be diligent and continue to closely monitor the Manatee County Board of Commissioners agenda items to make sure that this thing doesn’t pop up again in the very near future,” he says. “We’re still engaged, and we’re still going to monitor this stuff.” 

Manatee County commissioners, meanwhile, stayed quiet on the matter. Commissioner George Kruse says there was nothing to actually comment on because commissioners didn’t have all the information yet. 

Robert McCann, who recently won the Republican primary for the District 5 seat on the commission to represent the Lakewood Ranch area, was one of the recipients of the anti-Home Depot email blasts, along with the seated commissioners.

“If (a project) goes to the commission, it’s too late,” McCann says of the protests. “But somebody has to put in a plan to be reviewed, that’s when the timeline starts, so that’s the time to react.”

McCann’s advice is for concerned citizens to go to their district commissioner first to see what they know or can find out about the project when it’s in the pre-application stage. When in the application stage, he says to make sure there are reasons on behalf of public health and safety as to why the project shouldn’t be approved. Then alternatives could be offered. 

Creek and his team had the reasons side covered in regards to Home Depot. 

“Through the success of our efforts, we raised significant awareness to this,” Creek says. “Others are beginning to emulate our actions and become engaged politically in the community.”

This article originally appeared on sister site YourObserver.com.