COLUMN: Murdock Village saga has a good ending

I’ve written about a lot of things in 27 years at this newspaper, but perhaps none more controversial than Charlotte County’s Murdock Village idea.

It was a vision that started small and erupted into a project that gobbled up most of the sparsely populated area between State Road 776 and U.S. 41 in Murdock — about 1,100 acres, extending from near the mall to the Charlotte County Fairgrounds.

County commissioners wanted to have a downtown. And they wanted to expand the nearby industrial park to make it handier for workers to get to their jobs. But as excitement about the project grew, so did its scope and cost.

When builders, developers, real estate agents and the Metropolitan Planning Organization finished giving advice on the plan, it had evolved into a multi-million-dollar challenge that eventually meant using eminent domain to oust property owners who wouldn’t willingly sell their homes or lots.

It was the use of eminent domain — the forced sale of property — that created the greatest ire from the public and made the project an unpopular one and one that was a burr under the saddle of commissioners for two decades.

Former Commissioner Adam Cummings said the process was stressful at best.

“The thing I’ll never forget is during a commission meeting we had this little lady crying and telling us ‘I don’t care what you pay. This is my home.’

“I had to tell her we were buying it anyway. If (we) didn’t tell her that, other commissioners were going to have to tell 60 ladies the same thing.”

Cummings said the original idea was to increase the area where landscapers, painters, pool cleaners and others could be located and to ease what was going to be $14 billion in transportation and infrastructure costs in coming years, according to a study by the MPO.

He said late Commissioner Matt DeBoer had an alternative plan that was not approved.

“If I had it all to do over again, I would have gone with Matt’s alternative,” Cummings told me. “He wanted to develop a commercial node on the southern end of Flamingo that would have been a better option, because it was farther away from the existing commercial property.

“It would have been a smaller project and we could have paid for it outright and waited for the market to get right.”

The final plan was exciting. We supported it as a newspaper because it promised lots of new housing, a downtown and parks.

The county opened bids and got a developer who promised he could make it all work.

But if anyone remembers, this was coming on to 2007 and by the end of that year our last big recession hit.

The developer dropped out and Murdock Village sat vacant for years.

Kolter Group Acquisitions LLC has proven to be a good partner in pumping life back into Murdock Village.

When its purchase of the last 151 acres of land was approved last week, you could almost hear the collective sigh of relief from commissioners who approved it.

For almost 20 years, the critics never stopped reminding commissioners — even though none of them had nothing to do with the original deal — what a mistake they made.

Maybe it was a mistake. Intentions were good, though.

You could go with two familiar phrases here. “The road to (you know where) is paved with good intentions.” Or, “All’s well that ends well.”

I’ll take the latter. It’s going to be fine.