

"If we can be left with a lake and appropriate types of rural uses around it, that will be the payoff." "We have survived all that, and we're now hoping it's over," she says. Marcella O'Steen, vice president and former longtime president of the Balm Civic Association, says the big lake has dried up neighboring wells, and the truck traffic and dust were detrimental to the community. "He's one of our better operators in the county." "Reggie really tries to tend to his neighbors," Stevenson says. Stevenson says Joyner has responded quickly to all complaints. The problems were corrected before he was cited for environmental violations, said Bob Owens, a supervisor in the EPC wetlands division. In 20, he received warning notices from Hillsborough's Environmental Protection Commission for encroaching on wetlands. In the pit's heyday, he received two citations for dirt spilled by trucks in the public road, both of which were corrected promptly and incurred no fines, according to Mike Stevenson, who oversees land excavation operating permits for Hillsborough County. Joyner says he has tried to be a good neighbor. There were public hearings where people opposed the business. He had to get an operating permit, an environmental resource permit and a water use permit. "It takes over a year and $100,000 and a lot of sleepless nights." "It's extremely hard to get a permit," he says. He still expects last year to be his worst ever.įrom the start, digging has been a messy business, Joyner says, tangled in red tape. Explore all your optionsīusiness picked up late in 2011, so much so that Shelley Lakes opened for business the week after Christmas for the first time in years, Joyner said. Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started. Joyner's dirt has settled at Tampa International Airport and provided the underpinning for the widening of Interstate 275 from downtown to Himes Avenue.
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Truck drivers took tickets showing how much they received and the price. "That's when I had two ticket booths and a person walking up and down the lane with a book of tickets," Joyner recalls. The dirt was doled out by an excavator, typically three big scoops per truck, in about one minute, 15 seconds. Time was when dump trucks lined Shelley Lane from daybreak to dusk, dozens at a time, hundreds by the end of the day, all waiting for dirt - dirt that lined the county landfill, mounds that went into roadbeds and parking lots, earth that shored up the foundations of countless homesites. "How many tickets?" he asks the employee inside. Joyner steers his red pickup truck down Shelley Lane, the dirt-and-concrete road for which the sand mine was named, and stops briefly at a wood-frame booth with a window. "I never in 100,000 years would have thought I would be in the dirt business," he says. Joyner, 66, who traded a high-profile bank attorney job for a business selling dirt, stands at the site where it all began and shakes his head. The property, dubbed Shelley Lakes Mine, has grown to 242 acres, of which 185 hold water - a big lake flanked by two ponds.Īnd it's for sale.
