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ZEPHYRHILLS – Thousands of people attended the Battle for Veterans from Nov. 8 to 11 in Zephyrhills.

The Zephyrhills Museum of Military History held the event at a 25-acre site owned by the City of Zephyrhills at 5200 Airport Road. The museum needed a space that was 12.5 times larger than its grounds. 

Hundreds of participants from throughout Florida enjoyed their roles while conducting what was billed as the state’s largest Veterans Day experience.

Several military vehicles of World War II vintage that had been used by Armed Forces of both the United States and Germany were displayed. These included Jeeps, staff cars, half-tracks, tanks and a tank destroyer.

People could also see firearms that had been used by the military during WWII. Handguns, rifles and a machine gun that had been used by members of the Russian military were on display. 

Bill Zukauskas, a member of the St. Augustine-based organization, Soviet Weapons of the Great Patriotic War, gave some interesting information about the weapons.

The one garnering the most attention from onlookers was a submachine gun that had been used by a Russian soldier on the war’s Eastern Front. A German soldier gained possession of the weapon after the Russian soldier’s capture. Eventually, an American serviceman on the war’s Western Front secured the submachine gun when the German soldier was captured. That soldier brought it back to the U.S. where it has remained since then.

Two M4AE Sherman tanks at the event were each armed with a 105-millimeter gun.  These medium-size tanks were the first the U.S. ever manufactured with this powerful gun inside a fully traversing turret. That heavily armored turret was large enough to accommodate three of the tank’s crewmembers.

Also on display was a M36 Jackson Tank, which was designed to ambush and destroy German Panther tanks from a safe distance. 

Several participants fired handguns, rifles and submachine guns loaded with blanks as the crowds looked on. The tanks fired several rounds of blanks while reenacting part of a battle. 

The noise was so great that it caused several people living nearby who weren’t aware of the event to call the Zephyrhills Police Department 

Plans are in the works, according to a museum spokesperson, for another Battle for Veterans in 2025.

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INFOBOX: Event presents awards

Two awards were granted during this year’s Battle for Veterans event.

• Grenadier-Regiment 211 – Florida Reenacted was honored for having the Best Living History Display. That group is for representation of the 71st Infantry Division, 211th Grenadier Regiment of the German Army during WWII. 
• A 1942 Humbler Light Reconnaissance Car, owned by Verne Jenkinson, was recognized as the Best Vehicle. The vehicle, also known as a Humberette or Ironside, was a British armored car produced during WWII.

DADE CITY – The Pasco County Planning Commission discussed a rezoning Nov. 7 that would allow the development of the Tall Timbers project in the Connected City.

But members weren’t ready to make a recommendation to county commissioners, opting to discuss the proposal more at their Dec. 12. meeting. 

Xtreme Team 41 LLC in Tampa wants to develop 380 multi-family dwelling units consisting of front-loaded and rear-loaded townhomes and vertically mixed-use apartments on 38 acres on the north side of Tyndall Road.

The applicant also wants to designate 180,000 square feet for non-residential uses, such as offices and associated infrastructure.

Xtreme Team 41 is seeking to rezone the property from an Agricultural District to a Connected City Master Planned Unit Development District.

The Connected City is a new community under development in a special planning area generally located between Wesley Chapel and San Antonio, bordered by State Road 52 on the north, Overpass Road on the south, Interstate 75 on the west and Curley Road on the east.

Neighbors expressed concerns about flooding in the area that Xtreme Team 41 wants to develop. 

Michael Pultorak, who lives nearby on Kenton Road, urged the planning commission to not recommend approval because he believes his home would be flooded if Tall Timbers was developed.

Nancy Hazelwood, who lives in rural Dade City, said she thought it might be “prudent at this time to put some applications on hold until we figure out where that flooding would go.” 

Rodrigo Halveston, who lives on the south side of Dade City, said it seemed to him that building is being done on top of places that are used to drain water out “and you don’t think there’s any correlation.”

The other reason for the delay was that the applicant might not be able to accomplish objectives it had negotiated with Pasco County’s Department of Planning, Development and Economic Growth prior to the Nov. 7 hearing.

The applicant submitted a binding concept plan that indicates it wants a significant amount of the development to occur in the northwest and southwest corners of the property.

Planning commission member Jon Moody said it appeared to him that between 20% and 30% of the property are wetlands and that the majority of those wetlands are in the northwest and southwest corners of the property. It was also noted that floodplains are located in those areas.

Planning commission members also noted that the master plan the applicant had submitted with its rezoning request didn’t show what would happen to the wetlands if they were dredged or filled in so development could occur where they had once been located.

Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection requires permits to be granted by either that department or the Southwest Florida Water Management District to allow either the dredging or filling in of wetlands and other surface waters, according to its website.

“I’m not thinking someone’s going to be able to get a permit to blitz all of these wetlands,” Moody said. 

Moody added that he was hesitant to grant an entitlement for something that may not actually be achieved.

Moody then asked why the non-residential uses and the vertical mixed-use apartments couldn’t be developed instead on an uplands portion of the property.

Chief Assistant County Attorney David Goldstein advised that moving the buildings elsewhere on the property would result in a substantive change in the binding concept plan. William Vermillion, a county planner, agreed that would be true. 

This would cause the applicant to have to come back to the planning commission with a different plan, according to Vermillion.

Jamie Girardi, vice chairman of the planning commission, said there wasn’t anything written in the plan submitted to them on Nov. 7 “to stop this from a townhome project coming in, building out the townhomes, and then trying to negotiate the build out of the more difficult property.”

Planning commission members suggested county staff and the applicant work together to see if a more practicable application could be presented at the Dec. 12 meeting.

In other business on Nov. 7, the planning commission recommended county commissioners approve a proposed development agreement for the Watergrass MPUD. Changes in the development agreement, which are being requested by CKB Development LLC, include the donation of a 2.142-acre site to Pasco County for the construction of a library and the reduction of commercial/retail entitlements from 123,511 square feet to 100,000 square feet in order to add 200 age-restricted multi-family apartment units as a permitted use. 

This item is the first amendment to a development agreement that was originally established and approved by commissioners on June 4, 2019.

Commissioners are scheduled to consider this agreement during their Dec. 10 meeting in New Port Richey.

ST. LEO – Students in one political science class at Saint Leo University are becoming campaign experts while also learning the value of voting.

“It’s of the utmost importance for college students to understand campaigns and elections,” said Frank Orlando, political science instructor. “These are future citizens.”

In his Political Science 304 Campaigns & Elections class, Saint Leo students are “learning something that isn’t just nice to know,” Orlando said. “It’s their responsibility.”

Orlando describes voting and being involved in politics as a habit-based behavior. 

“The earlier you start and the more practice you get, you form a habit,” Orlando said. “We’re getting the students involved early, to start doing their duty as Americans.”

But will younger voters show up at the polls on Nov. 5? What impact will they make? 

Orlando believes it’s up to them. 

“Historically, voter turnout among younger voters is low,” he said. “It really is in their hands. We’ve seen elections where youth turnout has been higher like in 2008 when people were pumped up about a candidate, and even in 2020, when it was relatively easier for people to vote given the fact that it was easier to mail in ballots, even if you were home from college. It remains to be seen in 2024 the extent to which young voters will turn out to vote. If they do, it certainly can sway some of these states at the margin.”

Who young people vote for in the presidential election also is going to be interesting, Orlando said. 

“We know there is a little bit of a gender gap with voters with female voters supporting [Kamala] Harris and males supporting [former President Donald] Trump. Will that pattern continue with younger voters – will we see a kind of bimodal thing where younger men support Trump, younger women support Harris? It remains to be seen. But the numbers that they turn out with will be crucial in who wins each state.”

Junior political science major Erin Johnson said she thinks this election year is exciting. 

“There was the last-minute switch of Harris for [President Joe] Biden, so that’s something we haven’t seen before, and that’s really exciting,” she said. “It’s such a toss-up and it really could go either way. I’m super excited to see who wins.”

Johnson said voting matters because “that is how change is made and how citizens are able to voice their opinions.”

Salvatore Polizzi, a senior political science major from New York, said that current issues such as “housing affordability and immigration policies matter in society and elections help to find solutions­­­ to fix them.”

“This election is one of the closest in history,” Polizzi said, “And I feel like nowadays it’s been a lot closer with the split between the two parties, so I think it’s going to be really interesting to see where these swing states end up.”

For Liliana Kozlowski, a senior religious studies major, the 2024 election is special.

“I’m personally excited because this will be my first time voting in a presidential election,” Kozlowski said. “But then also being from out of state [New Hampshire] and studying at a school in Florida, I’m excited to go through the whole absentee ballot process as well. It’s interesting and it’s something I’ve never done before.”

Students in the Campaigns & Elections course are becoming fully immersed in the November election. They are working on two projects ­— the campaign project in which they have to create a website and “pretend they are running a historical presidential campaign,” Orlando said. “And the big project is the battleground state project.”

Each of the students was assigned a state about which they have to write a 6,000-word profile that includes electoral history and geography and as well as the amount of effort from each campaign.

Then on Election Night, the Saint Leo students will act as pundits for those states providing analysis as the results roll in, and “hopefully providing better coverage than TV,” Orlando said. “Then they have to provide a post-mortem about what happened in their state and why. They truly become the experts on their assigned state.”

Sophomore Hunter Compton, a political science major, is becoming an expert on the state of Florida. While there definitely are some Democratic areas, he believes that Republican Trump will eventually win the Sunshine State. 

“Especially with him doing more pushing [campaigning] toward groups that have a lot of hold on Florida, I do believe that he is going to take the cake,” Compton said. 

He also thinks that while the Senate race will be more contested and could go either way, incumbent Republican Rick Scott will defeat Democratic challenger Debbie Mucarsel-Powell.

Polizzi, assigned his home state for the project, said he has learned a lot about New York, “especially about the different districts and what are the most important areas when it comes to voting and how highly populated the city is and how much it really defines the vote for our state.”

Kozlowski, who is becoming an expert on her home state of New Hampshire, said she learned more about counties other than her home county. 

“I’m learning more about the behind-the-scenes of it [campaigns) – how the Senate races are influencing the presidential campaign,” Kozlowski said. 

While they’re gaining an in-depth look at what it takes to run a campaign and win an election, the Saint Leo students also are learning valuable lessons in civics and why voting can make a difference.