David Healey, planner who quietly shaped modern Pinellas, dies

David Healey was not one for the spotlight. Over the course of his two decades overseeing the development of Pinellas County, Healey only occasionally appeared in the press. He didn’t make political splashes. His work was behind the scenes and in the weeds, which is how he liked it, people who worked with him said.

To those who understood what Healey did, though, it was impossible to overstate his role in shaping what Florida’s densest county looks like today.

“I do believe that he had more influence during that 25-year period than any other person in Pinellas County by virtue of his professional role,” said Ed Armstrong, a land-use attorney who’s been working in Pinellas for four decades. “It’s not close, candidly.”

Healey died July 18. He was 79. His family did not give a cause but said Healey died peacefully, surrounded by friends and family at his home in Clearwater.

As the longtime executive director of the Pinellas Planning Council, an advisory board focused on growth and development, Healey played a core role in deciding how the county’s land was used.

He created the Countywide Comprehensive Plan that brought the county and its two dozen municipalities onto the same page when it came to planning and regulation. He spearheaded Pinellas By Design, the early-2000s community-visioning effort that set the table for the last 15 years of redevelopment.

He helped quell the annexation wars that raged throughout his tenure, and he brought his agency to the precipice of a new era, retiring around the time it was folded into the county’s transportation-focused Metropolitan Planning Organization. The agencies now operate under the name Forward Pinellas.

Healey’s work established growth and development policies that are still influential today, said Forward Pinellas Director Whit Blanton. Some of those policies, such as a hardline effort to preserve industrial land, are changing now, Blanton said, but were crucial at the time. Others, such as designating some stretches of major roads as scenic or noncommercial, remain in place.

Though Blanton only joined what’s now Forward Pinellas after Healey had retired, he said Healey left another footprint with his fierce insistence that the Planning Council be independent, not beholden to a local government.

“He was the buttress against the county just imposing its will,” Blanton said.

For someone in Healey’s position, Pinellas County presented great challenges, with its myriad local governments and its geographical constraints. But he could view it from an unusual level, Armstrong said — Healey saw not only how development in one part of the county affected another part, but how those linkages might change over time.

“I think he really was a visionary who thought about development patterns and development impacts 15, 20 years down the road and tried to bring that into decision-making on Day 1,” Armstrong said. “There’s not a big project around he didn’t have his fingerprints on.”

Healey grew up in Potsdam, New York, a small town near the Canadian border, according to a family obituary. He attended Colgate University on a hockey scholarship, then went to Ohio State University for a master’s degree.

After a few years at a consulting firm in upstate New York, Healey moved to Clearwater, where he became the city’s chief planner, then its planning director. He cultivated a reputation “for being even-handed but tough on developers, an image he apparently liked,” the St. Petersburg Times reported in 1987.

“He once called himself ‘the one who protects the sheep’ from the developers’ teeth, and that’s how a lot of residents see him,” according to an earlier Times article. “They credit Healey with doing more to limit development in this city than any other single individual.”

Healey became director of the Planning Council in 1989 and would stay for 21 years. Armstrong, who had to go before the council frequently while representing developers, said he quickly came to see Healey as his most formidable opponent: Armstrong would tell clients that if Healey didn’t like an idea, they were in trouble.

“He was so good at what he did” that those hearings became fun challenges, Armstrong said, especially during a hot period of development from the late 1990s into the 2000s. “It was, how can I make the best case I can, because if I don’t, there’s a real chance I’m going to lose.”

Karen Seel, who joined the Pinellas County Commission in 1999 and retired last year, worked closely with Healey on Pinellas By Design. She recalled Healey’s skill at building consensus between municipalities and the county. He was patient, she said, but she remembered the huge smile he’d get when he could tell a plan was coming together.

“If he cast his eye on the end game, he was going to figure out how to get there,” she said.

Mike Meidel, the county’s economic director from 2004 to 2021, also worked on that project and said Healey excelled at summing up the connections between disparate parts of the county — how affordable housing on the mainland would affect economics in the beach communities, for example, or how encouraging growth in concentrated areas would help maintain the suburbs and green spaces.

“We all are interconnected here,” Meidel said, summing up Healey’s philosophy, “and what may not benefit you directly is critical for you indirectly.”

Healey is survived by two daughters, Diana Villalobos and Kristyn Healey Bartlett, and four siblings. Outside of his work, his daughters said in an email, Healey remained passionate about hockey — he was a longtime Tampa Bay Lightning fan — and had “a fierce love and protection for his children.”

“He was a wonderful speaker and possessed a disarming directness and keen intellect,” they wrote. “He was the leader of our pack, and always our champion.”

After retiring from the county in the early 2010s, Healey kept working. He did piecemeal consulting work for smaller municipalities without their own planning departments, and he made some expert-witness appearances for Armstrong, who had the joy of seeing his greatest opponent become his greatest ally.

“We had more fun working together after having beat each others’ brains out for 25 years in the public arena,” Armstrong said.

The rarity of their relationship was not lost on Armstrong, he said. Healey’s death has hit him hard, not just as the loss of a friend but of a foil, someone whose career was intertwined with his own.

Healey’s career “will never be replicated,” he said. “That was a one off.”