Show Business Zoning Proposed for Tropical Acres

It’s been a longtime winter home for carnival workers. And now the carnies living in Tropical Acres in Riverview want to legitimize their right to store carnival rides, game booths and midway food trucks on their properties.

Hillsborough County will host a public meeting to discuss a proposed amendment to the Residential Show Business regulations in the Land Development Code on Thursday, March 7, at 6 p.m. at the Riverview Civic Center, 11020 Park Dr. in Riverview.

The proposed amendment would recognize certain show business operations, primarily located in the Tropical Acres area in Riverview, as legal nonconforming uses, which would grandfather them in with restrictions.

The amendment would allow the grandfathered operations to remain until they are voluntarily removed from the property or are required to be removed because of the cessation of use for a stated period of time.

Also to be discussed is a related text amendment to the Hillsborough County Comprehensive Plan, which will be proposed to direct future rezonings for show business uses to the Gibsonton area.

Residents of neighboring Gibsonton have long grown used to seeing trapeze apparatus erected in front yards and an elephant grazing in a nearby field.

For more than 70 years, the Hillsborough County community has been the national winter home of circus performers and carnival workers.

To accommodate the unusual uses in Gibsonton, the county enacted a special Residential Show Business zoning laws allowing residents to keep circus animals and carnival rides and exhibits on their properties.

Now the county is proposing to extend that zoning to the Tropical Acres subdivision off Balm-Riverview Road in Riverview where 1,550 people live including 39 show business families.

Those 39 families applied for the show business zoning two years ago so they can keep their carnival equipment and related paraphernalia on their properties.

The subdivision is now zoned for one unit of single-family or manufactured housing on a 1-acre lot.

But many of the carnival families in the neighborhood, including John Arnold, owner of Arnold Amusements, have been storing their carnival equipment on their properties for decades. They believe that use should be grandfathered in.

Opponents of the proposed amendment argue, however, that the use doesn’t conform to the Riverview Community Plan, which was approved in 2008.