Dade City's economic front received some good news this month. Local investors acquired 57 acres of the former Pasco Beverage plant just north of the city limits and have plans to turn it into a business and office park.
The plant will become Dade City Business Center, according to plans from Jim Guedry, Don Dueker and Ronnie Triplett, the owners of Citrus Country Groves, which is relocating to the site from its former home at State Road 54 and Interstate 75.
For $1.7-million, the group, officially called JDR Properties, acquired 57 acres of industrial land and more than 400,000 square feet of warehouses and offices.
Prospective benefits are numerous. The new investors are saddled with no debt, having sold their highly visible land in Wesley Chapel for $2.75-million. It means physical improvements could be immediate. The owners want to beautify the site to try to conform to the Main Street appearance of downtown. Toward that end, they plan to replace the chain-link fence with wrought iron and brick. Buildings facing the highway will be sandblasted back to the original brick, if possible. Smokestacks may come off the factory in the back and a giant mural of small-town life could adorn one of the rear buildings. It will be an attractive gateway on the city's north side. The plant could annex into the city limits, boosting a flat property tax roll.
Aesthetics and a new address are just part of the extreme make-over. The onetime industrial giant - the plant employed up to 1,500 people at its peak when owned by Lykes Pasco of Tampa - will be replaced by smaller businesses, each employing 30 to 40, according to plans.
If successful, it should help replace the payroll dollars eliminated with Pasco Beverage's decision earlier this year to shut down and end employment for the 300 remaining workers at the site.
That was just the lastest piece of sour news to hit the local economy over the past five years. Lykes, which generated a diverse line of store-brand products including orange and grapefruit juice, coffee and other beverages, announced layoffs in spring 1999. It hired two other companies, closer to its 40,000 acres of citrus crop in Glades and Highlands counties, to wash and squeeze its fruit. Two months later, it sold the plant to Texas-based venture capitalists.
By the end of last year, the renamed Pasco Beverage had cut employment to 600 as the plant produced about 8-million cases, or 24-million gallons, of beverages a year. It announced layoffs in March and then said it would close entirely by the end of this year, after selling its chilled juice operation to Johanna Foods, of Flemington, N.J. The final shutdown ended more than 65 years of dominating the east Pasco economy with a large-scale, but largely unskilled labor force.
Citrus Country's acquisition could change that. Local ownership is key. Guedry, Dueker and Triplett have been in the area since opening a road-side produce stand in 1979. That means decisions will be made on site, not by an out-of-state corporate parent.
They will move their fruit-shipping business there by the spring and recruiting of other tenants has begun already.
"We're spreading the word to our business folks," said City Manager Harold Sample. "They have the opportunity to take advantage of industrially zoned property."
As residential and retail developments continue to go after the last scraps of raw land in Pasco County, that industrially zoned property may find eager tenants.
