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First efforts to improve road begin

As plans for a new high school proceed, agencies focus on upgrading overburdened Lutz-Lake Fern Road.

By BILL COATS
Published March 6, 2005

LUTZ - People have been wondering what to do about Lutz-Lake Fern Road since last summer, when a high school was proposed there. No government agency anywhere has budgeted a dollar to widen the road.

That may change now. Hillsborough transportation planners have asked the County Commission to reserve $650,000 in next year's budget to study the road, and another $4-million in 2007 to start buying land and making improvements.

At a meeting on March 16, planners also will ask the commission to explore the possibility of a Lutz-Lake Fern interchange on the Suncoast Parkway. That process would begin with the commission inviting Florida's Turnpike Enterprise to make a presentation in Tampa.

"Traffic conditions have worsened significantly over the past few years," Ned Baier, a transportation planning manager, wrote in the proposal.

County contractors could widen Lutz-Lake Fern to four lanes from the Suncoast to N Dale Mabry Highway, at an estimated cost of $27-million. Or they could widen it only near the high school site. The Suncoast interchange, paid for by the Turnpike, could cost as much as $10-million. Current plans call for a Suncoast interchange in 2016 or later.

Lutz-Lake Fern is among 100 roads the county acknowledges it needs to improve, but cannot afford to. The planning staff would like to see it near the top of the list.

Baier hopes the County Commission will require the school system to make some improvements along with building the high school.

Additionally, Baier hopes the county can obtain money from the state Department of Transportation, under the rationale that improvements to Lutz-Lake Fern will relieve congestion on Dale Mabry, a state road.

A decade ago, Lutz-Lake Fern rarely carried more than 5,000 vehicles a day, roughly a third of the standard capacity of a two-lane road. Since then, VillaRosa, Heritage Harbor, Cheval West, Montreaux, Fern Glen and Stillwater have been built, swelling the population along the road beyond 10,000. Between Dale Mabry and Heritage Harbor's entrance, daily traffic recently reached 18,000.

Near the Suncoast, Lutz-Lake Fern has backed up with parents driving their children to McKitrick Elementary School and Martinez Middle School.

The high school, planned next to Martinez, would add the bus and car traffic of about 2,400 students, plus faculty and staff.

When the school system proposed the high school last August, local leaders wondered whether it was legal to widen Lutz-Lake Fern, much less affordable. Community plans for Lutz and Keystone, which are written into Hillsborough's land-use law, seek to keep those areas rural by limiting roads to two lanes.

But since August, a sequence of behind-the-scenes changes has cleared the way for major work on Lutz-Lake Fern.

1. Staffers at the county's Planning Commission, which helped draft the Lutz Community Plan, concluded the two-lane limit governs the older semirural sections of Lutz east of Dale Mabry, not the new suburban sections west of Dale Mabry. The Keystone Community Plan applies west of the Suncoast.

2. Given that, the Metropolitan Planning Commission, which sets Hillsborough's overall transportation priorities, added Lutz-Lake Fern west of Dale Mabry to the list of roads that someday should be four lanes.

3. Two new citizens' groups, the Lutz Transportation Task Force and the Lutz-Lake Fern Communities Coalition, began urging government officials to consider changes. Both recently endorsed improvements to the road.

4. Turnpike officials launched a study of the road and concluded they need a Suncoast interchange sooner than they had forecast. If the interchange receives top priority, it could be built within three years, said Alison Stettner, Turnpike regional planning administrator.

5. In response to the MPO action, the county's transportation planners inserted Lutz-Lake Fern last month into fifth place on a ranking of 106 unfunded county road projects.

"The stars seem to be aligning to make improvements on Lutz-Lake Fern, which did not seem to exist even a year ago," Baier said.

A public meeting in January produced virtually no opposition to the high school plans. Now, school officials have begun land negotiations.

School system consultants are mapping plans for a consolidated entrance for the high school and its neighboring schools, with multiple turn lanes on Lutz-Lake Fern.

The school system expects to pay for those changes. But, school facilities officer MaryEllen Elia said, "The School Board is not in a position to build roads."

- Bill Coats can be reached at 813 269-5309 or coats@sptimes.com

[Last modified March 5, 2005, 08:12:04]