Meanwhile, the historic Black community is facing another challenge: Commercial development.
By Ramon Lopez
Original Air Date: October 15, 2025
Host: For over two decades, it has been David versus Goliath in Tallevast. The historically Black community has been dealing with groundwater contamination brought by a military contractor now owned by Lockheed Martin. Today, still decades away from a cleanup, the contamination actually keeps spreading. And the community is besieged by commercial development spreading from the nearby airport. Ramon Lopez brings us Part 2 of a three-part series on Tallevast.
Ramon Lopez: Remaining residents there are living on 200 acres contaminated by dioxane, arsenic and other dangerous contaminants generated by a now closed industrial plant.
FOCUS—for Family-Oriented Community United Strong, a non-profit—is leading the charge.
The League of Women Voters of Manatee County recently conducted a Zoom meeting on the history, actions taken, and still significant contamination and cleanup ongoing in Tallevast.
Speakers included Jeanne Zokovitch Paben, a Sarasota environmental justice attorney. She has represented Tallevast residents through their decades of efforts to obtain relief and hold Lockheed Martin accountable.
The Bryant Chapel Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Tallevast
Lockheed Martin put in place a remedial action plan for groundwater cleanup, estimated to take between 50 to 100 years to complete.
But Zokovitch-Paben says Tallevast contamination has continued to grow and expand, by Lockheed Martin’s own admission beyond its cleanup ability. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) is overseeing the cleanup effort. But she says the company has resisted all directions from FDEP and pleas from the townfolk.
Meanwhile, research shows that last year’s trio of major hurricanes caused groundwater levels to rise nearly five feet. This has allowed the contamination to spread south onto a business property and onto land planned for housing.
Tallevast homeowners say Lockheed Martin, from day one, has left them in the dark as regards the contamination level and cleanup effort. Zokovitch-Paben:
Jeanne Zokovich Paben
Jeanne Zokovitch-Paben: They went on their own and started looking through files, and that’s how they found out about the contamination. The county, Lockheed and DEP decided to come into the community to assure them that the investigation had been completed—that they were safe and that it was beginning active cleanup. When they came to do that community meeting, one of the statements that they made was that there was no exposure to residents because there was no active pathway for the contamination to reach them. They made this conclusion because they said that all the soil contamination was, in fact, on site, and they said that the groundwater would only be a problem if people were drinking from wells and, as they put it, since no one was using private wells, there was no concern. The problem was half of the community was still using private wells. The county, state and Lockheed dropped the ball in making the conclusion that there were no active wells in the community. Almost half of the community was still using it for drinking water. More were still using their former drinking water wells for irrigation. Also, not a single person in Tallevbast had access to a public water system over wells until the late 1980’s. The contamination, they indicated, started as far back as the 60’s, which means even if you weren’t being actively exposed, your family was likely exposed for multiple decades.
RL: She said the amount of contaminated land continues to grow.
JZP: You have multiple contaminants of concern in Tallevast, and you have multiple affected aquifer units. This plume, at the time of 2009, was almost 200 acres despite the fact that the community was originally told that the contamination was only five acres. In the annual report that they do each year, they have to put this in to show, how big is the contamination? The plume is supposed to be shrinking, and instead, it’s still been growing in Tallevast.
RL: So, for two decades, Tallevast residents have had to contend with the environmental disaster while facing an uncertain future.
Today, they find themselves at a crossroad, as airport-related commerce and industry, including an Amazon merchandise warehouse, move in.
Many homeowners hope to remain in place. And they have put together a multi-faceted effort that includes a preservation of the Black unincorporated Florida town.
Tallevast’s Amazon distribution center
JZP: Working with USF a couple of years ago, we got our first Brownfields grant. It was through FDEP. It was a pass-through grant from EPA. It was a small technical consulting in which Professor Trent Green came into the community and led the community in developing what they think the future vision of their community should look like. That culminated in this plan in spring of 2024, which is planning to stay—a long-term strategy for stability and growth. The crux of the plan is that Tallevast should be preserved, and in order to do that, it now sees a future as mixed use because there’s been so much additional light industry brought into the area that the only way to ensure that the residential portion of the community is preserved is to also start to market it for additional residential, to make it a mixed use community as well as what we call residential amenities, which would be things that directly benefit the community. Amazon does not directly benefit the community. It is fair to say that Amazon economically benefited the broader county, but based on the demographics in Tallevast, which is very mixed income—is a lot of elderly folks but also a lot of high education professionals—nobody from Tallevast works at Amazon.
RL: The fear is people will continue to die of cancer and other illnesses caused by the toxic contamination. And that little by little, the historic community will get eaten up by commercial and industrial enterprise until there is nothing left.
This is Ramon Lopez for WSLR News.
WSLR News aims to keep the local community informed with our 1/2 hour local news show, quarterly newspaper and social media feeds. The local news broadcast airs on Wednesdays and Fridays at 6pm.