ST. PETERSBURG - No company boils the blood of community activists more than Wal-Mart, and whenever the world's biggest retailer wants to build a new store, opponents often gather to fight it. But activists and their lawyers increasingly are battling other retailers and developers, such as The Sembler Co. of St. Petersburg.

Sembler, one of the South's biggest shopping center developers, is starting work on its mammoth Winter Garden Village shopping center near Orlando. At 1.15 million square feet, it will be bigger than Tampa's WestShore Plaza mall but has an outdoor format a bit like Hyde Park Village.

However, getting the government's OK was a slugfest. Sembler faced such fierce opposition from neighborhood groups that the company ran a full-fledged political campaign to win public support. Among its weapons: mass mailings to citizens touting the shopping center, billboard ads, radio spots and straw polls. It eventually won the battle last fall but now faces a similar fight over a Publix shopping center on 66th Street in St. Petersburg.

Not that Sembler is hurting. According to the company's Web site, it has 21 shopping center projects under development throughout the South and in Puerto Rico.

At his St. Petersburg office, Sembler Chief Executive Officer Craig Sher this week discussed during an interview the mounting opposition from not-in-my-backyard, or NIMBY, neighborhood opponents, the changing face of the American mall, and the sky-high cost of construction and property insurance.

There's a rush in Florida to build these large, open-air, village-style shopping centers. In fact, at least three are planned for Pasco County. Given Florida's summer heat and unpredictable rains, the trend seems strange.

I come from Minneapolis, where they're doing it. It's more difficult up north in terms of climate than down south. We're used to being hot here.

I think the reasons are much more fundamental than that. The operating costs to a tenant are much less in an open-air center. You take the roof off; you don't air-condition it. You generally don't have promotion funds. You don't have major security like you do in a mall.

I've heard two figures on the number of regional [enclosed] malls being built in the U.S. right now. It's either zero or one.

Is it going to change forever? No. Maybe in five years someone will blow the whistle and say: "You know, it was really stupid building those open-air centers. We should be enclosing them."

You've had some opposition to some of your projects, including your proposed shopping center-town home complex at 66th Street North and Ninth Avenue North in St. Petersburg. Is community opposition getting more fierce in Florida?

I would say that neighbors have gotten better in opposing. I've said it publicly, "Look, if I lived across the street from the property, I'd oppose it too." It's just what people do. But the farther you are away from a project, the more people are for it, or more importantly, the less people are opposed to it.

I have problems with things like referendums. I don't know if you've heard about this trend called "hometown democracy," where anytime you want a land use change, the citizens decide. I think that's a little over the top.

It didn't get on the ballot in 2004. Rumors are it may get on the ballot in 2008. I just don't think that's the best way to do it. I think that's why we elect our representatives.

You've been vocal about the high cost of business insurance. How much has it risen, and how's it affecting your tenants and, ultimately, consumers?

What's happened has been very quick. We've seen in some cases our insurance rates for completed properties go up three to five times in a few months.

I'll give you an example. Traditionally our insurance over the last five years, on a per-square-foot basis, was maybe 25 cents a foot. We've got some [insurance] quotes on some new projects of upward of $3 a foot. So if it's a 100,000-square-foot center, you're talking about a $300,000 bill versus a $25,000 bill - per year. That's enormous. Everyone says, "Oh, just pass it on to the tenants." But after a while, tenants can't afford it.

The real issue is what's called the reinsurance companies. For years the insurance companies would go to the reinsurance companies and basically insure the insurance. Apparently there's only a couple reinsurance companies in the state of Florida that are willing to do business, because they're in the risk business.

The government's going to have to do something and maybe create in the commercial arena what they've done in the residential arena, with that Citizens insurance.

What about construction costs?

Nasty. We haven't made a budget in two years. We revise our budget. You know what happens? You open a bid at the bid table, it's like anthrax. You don't know what's coming out of there.

In Winter Garden, we invited 12 site contractors to bid. When it came to how many actually submitted the bid, there were two. They were too busy. You're talking about the biggest site job in the history of The Sembler Co.

A big trend in shopping centers is "mixed-use development," which often means building condos on top of retail stores. Creating such dense clusters of shopping, dining and residences sounds fine for a place like New York, which has lots of mass transit. But in Florida, isn't that asking for trouble?

Not to be trivial, but [Florida is] congested compared to what? Look, I lived in Chicago and Minneapolis. So, I moved from Chicago. They would laugh at what we call congestion here. I've been in Florida for 25 years, and every time I go over the Howard Frankland and there's more than six cars, I think there's a traffic jam.

I would hope it gets to a point where we could justify some mass transit. But this is a very difficult place to support mass transit until we get some density.

I've always laughed about this mass rail system. Take a rapid train to Orlando. Then what do I do when I get there? You've got to rent a car. Yeah, you're going to have a little more congestion [from mixed-use projects], but I don't think it's catastrophic."

What do you predict will happen to University Mall in Tampa?

That's a perfect example of a pretty successful center that just needs to be repositioned. ... But it's well tenanted. I would guess that it's 90 percent leased. It's hardly a candidate to be ripped down. If it was empty, yeah.

It could [come down] over the next couple decades, but it's not going to happen overnight. You can't give up all that income, and therefore all that value, and just tear it down. But I think over time it will be gone.