INVERNESS, Fla. — A snowbird from Iowa, Gwen Martin knows a lot about shoveling snow, but it wasn’t until she got settled into her new home outside Inverness that she learned about shoveling something else.
Sand.
“It’s like being at the beach without the ocean,” she said with a laugh.
But her situation is no laughing matter. She and dozens of others live in a still-growing neighborhood called Inverness Villages 4. While beautiful homes line the neighborhood’s many streets, the streets themselves are unpaved.
“We were told in the office when we purchased the land and the home that the roads would be paved when the last home was done,” said Martin.
To this day, the sugar sand streets are still unpaved. In some spots the sand is so thick vehicles occasionally get stuck. In other spots, the streets are scarred with deep potholes and fissures.
On rainy days, neighbors said their streets turn into streams of silty, sandy slurry.
“When it rains hard, you can’t get through some of the streets. There’s residents that have to put sandbags up just so it doesn’t go in their house,” she said. “It goes into people’s pools in the back.”
Though Citrus County owns the roads, it does not maintain them.
Homeowners like Martin said they were well aware that they had to pay to pave the roads when they signed the paperwork for their homes.
Martin thought a Municipal Service Benefit Unit (MSBU) would be established between neighbors and the county. Such an agreement would have allowed neighbors to pay for the pavement on their tax bills over the span of ten years.
Homeowners are expected to pay around $6,500 each.
Now, however, they have learned that the price could be a lot higher. According to Citrus County, the neighborhood needs more than just paved roads. It also needs drainage ponds and a stormwater infrastructure, which it also lacks.
“Each homeowner would have to pay $109,000 to get the infrastructure and the paving in,” Martin said.
That’s a price neighbors are not willing to pay, and Holly Davis — a commissioner who serves as the chair of Citrus County’s Board of County Commissioners — completely understands.
“It would bankrupt a lot of people in this neighborhood, and we’re not willing to do that,” she said.
Davis doesn’t yet have a solution, but she blames Anton Van Usen, who owned the land and sold the lots one by one, and the company that built many of the homes, Van Der Valk Construction.
“I find it shameful,” Davis said. “It should be a delightful, beautiful neighborhood had it been developed correctly.”
Earlier this year, Citrus County commissioners put a pause on building permits for the construction of new homes in Inverness Villages 4.
Davis said that since then, other state agencies have taken action.
In late November, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection filed for an injunction to stop the home building because it alleged Van Der Valk Construction and its partners were doing work on almost 100 lots without proper stormwater permits, and the work caused polluted stormwater to flow into a nearby wetland.
According to documents sent to ABC Action News, the construction team was also charged by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) in Aug. 2023 for the destruction or disturbance of multiple gopher tortoise burrows in the subdivision.
In Apr. 2023, Davis made the complaint that initiated the FWC's investigation. Now, she's planning to contact another state agency about the construction work.
“I am just a few days away from sending to Attorney General for the State of Florida, Ashley Moody, a whole packet with a narrative of what’s going on here,” Davis added.
ABC Action News reached out to Van Der Valk Construction for comment but did not hear back.
Anton Van Usen, the man who sold the lots to many of the Inverness Villages 4 homeowners, did respond.
Van Usen said he did nothing wrong by simply selling land he acquired in 2009 as collateral for a loan.
“I want to get my money back,” he said. “I hate it that people suffer now.”
As Van Usen explained, the subdivision was originally platted in 1972. Homes were still being built until the moratorium was established earlier this year.
According to Van Usen, previous county leaders were aware of the problem but chose not to act.
Van Usen himself said he takes no responsibility for the current situation.
“None,” he said. “I don’t know what I did wrong.”
He believes the county can and should do more to fix the drainage problem.
He also said he would give the county a fair price for the acquisition of land that would be required to install drainage ponds.
“I think the solution can only come from multiple lot owners, homeowners, and the county together,” he said.
Meanwhile, Martin isn’t holding her breath. So far, no solution has presented itself.
While she said there is plenty of blame to go around, Martin is most upset with the role Citrus County has played in the debacle. She believes county leaders did not provide proper oversight as dozens of homes were built in the subdivision over the course of decades.
“They issued the permits. They allowed this to happen without the infrastructure and drainage,” Martin said. “The county has a land development code. The builder nor the landowner has followed it.”
For the retired snowbird, her Florida retirement hasn’t been everything she dreamed it would be.
“I know a lot of people that have lost sleep over this,” she said. “There’s an elderly lady that was at a meeting — she just cried her eyes out because she can’t do it mentally, she can’t do it physically, and she can’t do it financially — and she has a new home in here.”
Correction: A previous version of the story said Van Usen acquired the land in the nineteen-seventies. Van Usen said he acquired it in 2009.
