INVERNESS, Fla — Imagine buying a beautiful home in what you thought would be a beautiful neighborhood.
Then, you find out your neighborhood was built without a proper drainage system, which has turned its unpaved streets into deeply scarred canyons.
Tania Ruiz-Barreto doesn’t have to imagine such a scenario. She’s living it.
“Very frustrating,” she said. Very frustrating because we want to enjoy our beautiful homes and be able to have visitors.”
Ruiz-Barreto is one of hundreds who live in Inverness Village 4, a Citrus County neighborhood that was somehow built without a drainage system. As a result, years of erosion made the neighborhood’s streets, which were never paved, almost impossible to traverse in some areas.
“I literally had to go by a 4x4 Jeep, so I can get in and out when it’s raining, when it’s, you know, overflowing,” said Ruiz-Barreto.
But even a Jeep struggled to navigate the neighborhood streets this past weekend as heavy rain from Hurricane Debby turned them into whitewater rivers.
The rapids deepened existing canyons and opened new ones, too.
Neighbors like Tania, who bought in Inverness Village 4, thought the roads would be paved and assumed a proper drainage system was in place. They feel misled and are losing hope.
“If you look at other neighborhoods, that’s the first thing they build. The roads. The drainage. You know, they did it all backwards,” said Ruiz-Barreto.
Right now, there’s relentless finger-pointing between the Citrus County government, a homebuilder, and the person who sold many of the lots to homebuilders. A solution has yet to materialize.
Though the neighborhood’s roads were dedicated to the public, the Citrus County government refused to perform maintenance on the right-of-ways because no roads were ever constructed.
Meanwhile, Chris Matser, whose Van Der Valk Construction built many of the homes in Inverness Village 4, maintains it is the county’s responsibility. Some neighbors blame the county for providing insufficient oversight.
Ruiz-Barreto, meanwhile, still has a glimmer of hope that a solution will come.
“Something’s going to happen on our behalf,” she said. “God’s going to work it out for us. But some days, it gets very frustrating.”
Citrus County Commissioner Holly Davis is still looking to the state for help.
She believes homebuyers here were defrauded, and she asked the state to investigate months ago.
“I met with the Attorney General’s office in January of this year and left them the case file, which was then sent to [the Florida Department of Law Enforcement] for investigation. I was told at that time the investigation would take months – not years – so I am hopeful that we’ll hear something before 2024 is out,” Davis said in a statement sent to ABC Action News on Thursday.
A state report says hundreds of frail elderly nursing home residents were stacked side by side, head to toe in a small church with no working air conditioning or refrigerator during Hurricane Helene.
