DUNNELLON - Driving past the tree-shaded shops fronted by free parking spaces and patronized by laughing and joking customers, you wonder if Dunnellon is what old Florida was like.

It's a vibrant town with just enough hustle and bustle to seem prosperous, but without the soulless sameness that characterizes much of southern and Central Florida.

The Marion County community is also a town that said no to an opportunity to spur growth, a community that said no when Florida's Department of Transportation offered to build a turnpike through the county.

Dunnellon's city commission rejected the DOT's plans to extend Florida's Turnpike from Interstate 75 at Wildwood to U.S. 19 in Levy County. County commissions in Marion, Levy and Sumter counties also said no to the toll road.

Those rejections killed the project. Highway department rules require that a toll road have local support, and that it pass the DOT Turnpike District's environmental and economic feasibility tests. Preliminary studies indicated the turnpike extension also would have failed the economic test.

But a transportation law the state Legislature passed in March has residents worried the project may be revived.

Under the old law, the Turnpike District had to demonstrate enough drivers would travel the toll road to pay back 50 percent of the bonded debt in five years, and 100 percent in 15 years.

Now, however, there only has to be enough traffic projected to show a 50 percent payback in 12 years, and 100 percent in 22 years. Under the new economic test, the turnpike extension could go forward.

"When DOT makes up its mind to do something, it's hard to get them to change their minds,'' said Dunnellon Mayor John Taylor.

Raymond Ashe, the Turnpike District's environmental management chief, leaves the door open for the project's resurrection. At some point, Ashe said, I-75 is going to need relief.

"With the growth we have, I-75 is projected to reach an unacceptable level of service,'' Ashe said, adding that the interstate will be ``back to parking lot status,'' as it was before I- 75 was widened from four to six lanes between Ocala and Wildwood.

Ashe and other highway officials were enthusiastic about the project, but it never resonated with local officials.

Levy County Commissioner Sammy Yearty says the business community never warmed to the turnpike because traffic wouldn't slow enough to help mom-and-pop businesses. The local chambers of commerce were more interested in four-laning U.S. 27 between Marion County and Chiefland.

"I didn't see anybody that cared a lot about it,'' Yearty said. Yet it took a concerted grass-roots effort to sidetrack the turnpike plan, which was rolling like a piano down a mountain of steps in a Laurel and Hardy movie. The project was included in the DOT's blueprint for future highways, which is akin to being written in stone.

"I went to a public meeting, and they were talking like this was a done deal,'' said Emily Lish, who led the opposition.

Lish, who moved to Dunnellon from Fort Lauderdale, found fertile ground in Marion County for her grass-roots revolt. It wasn't just a bunch of tree-huggers who opposed the road. Thousands of refugees from overcrowded South Florida rebelled against the toll road dumping traffic in their neighborhoods.

Lish enlisted 20 volunteers, and together they collected 5,800 signatures on petitions against the road.

"I went to a simple-minded argument: We don't want it, and we shouldn't have it,'' Lish said. Marion County's environmental community sees turnpike-generated sprawl as a threat to the Rainbow River and the 24 springs that cascade into it.

"You blacktop over the top of them, you start losing water,'' said Jack Dennis, founder of the local Rainbow conservation group.

To Ashe, the failure of the project is proof the process works.

"Just because we go in and study a project doesn't mean it's a done deal,'' he said. ``That's the reason we study these, so we can determine the impact and issues.''

Reporter Mike Salinero can be reached at (850) 222-8382.