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Commute dispute

Pasco County will widen Gunn Highway while Hillsborough County plans to leave it alone.

By BILL COATS
Published June 10, 2005

KEYSTONE - Drive up Gunn Highway and you pass nurseries and pastures and horse paddocks: Hillsborough County's northwest rural frontier.

Continue across the Pasco County line, and you pass factories, offices and gated neighborhoods: Pasco's southern urban frontier.

Last month, Pasco launched the design work to expand Gunn Highway to four lanes down to the Hillsborough County line.

But five years ago, Hillsborough decided nobody would widen the 6 miles of Gunn south of the Pasco line. Hillsborough enacted this language into its binding land-use law: "Rural roads that transect the Keystone-Odessa community will remain in their present form."

So over the next seven years, Pasco plans to spend $10.6-million to four-lane a road that will funnel down to two lanes at the county line.

"It's like sending all the traffic into the bottom of a Coke bottle, isn't it?" said Pasco County Commissioner Ann Hildebrand, who represents southwest Pasco.

These clashing plans aren't likely to change any time soon, because they're rooted in contrary philosophies by the two counties.

The Hillsborough County Commission voted in 2000 to preserve rural and semirural land uses in Keystone-Odessa and Lutz - including two-lane country roads - despite the exploding suburbs on all sides of them.

Hildebrand and other Pasco leaders, meanwhile, face pressure from more than 30,000 Pasco residents who commute daily to jobs in Hillsborough, including up to 70 percent of workers living in Land O'Lakes, Wesley Chapel and Trinity who leave Pasco for work.

"For us to drive on all two-lane roads is like us trying to drive a Model A," said Hildebrand.

In their path is Keystone, which civic leaders contend is entitled, like any other community, to determine its own destiny. They want to hear crickets and frogs rather than semis and SUVs.

"It's obvious that people want to expand all the roadways and make us a cut-through community," complained Rich Dugger, who heads the land-use committee of the Keystone Civic Association.

Each weekday morning, they begin pouring this way like a tide drawn by the earliest rays of sun.

Commuters from the north swarm down the Suncoast Parkway, until they hit the jam at the Veterans Expressway toll plaza. More flood down U.S. 41 and I-275, until the flow thickens like syrup north of Fowler Avenue. Others join the processions down Dale Mabry Highway and Bruce B. Downs Boulevard, until they reach the hurdles of traffic lights.

Over the last decade, the state widened all these roads. It built the Suncoast from scratch.

Hillsborough County also is widening roads for commuters, but in its more suburban areas. In New Tampa, the county plans to someday double Bruce B. Downs to eight lanes; Pasco County is planning to six-lane its portion of the same road.

But a different attitude emerged in the 1990s in Keystone and Lutz.

Activists from both those communities were fighting off suburban-style developments. They complained that Hillsborough's countywide, one-size-fits-all land-use laws were undermining preservation. So they asked for customized sections of the law for rural Keystone and semirural Lutz.

By 2000, it was done. The Hillsborough County Commission adopted "community plans" for each area, meant to preserve open spaces, dark night skies and country roads.

Nothing of the sort was happening just across the county line. The state was rapidly converting State Road 54 from a country road into a regional highway, and builders were launching massive subdivisions along it.

So Pasco's population has been mushrooming, primarily upstream of Hillsborough, increasing the rush-hour demands on the Hillsborough roads.

In March, a U.S. Census study found that the average commute time for Pasco residents was 28.5 minutes each way, second only to Miami-Dade County as the longest in Florida.

This frustrates leaders on both sides of the Hillsborough-Pasco line.

Hillsborough transportation officials cope with roadways jammed by out-of-towners who don't pay Hillsborough property taxes. Pasco officials confront the nagging reality that the county's growth area is a bedroom community moreso than a well-rounded economy.

"Our population is increasing faster than we can create the equivalent jobs," said Mary Jane Stanley, president of the Pasco Economic Development Council.

Given the accelerating growth, Stanley estimates that half of Pasco's total work force, or about 70,000 people, now leave the county on the way to work.

Commissioner Hildebrand noted that Saddlebrook Village West was developed in the 1980s as an office park hugging Interstate 75, but couldn't sign a tenant.

"Nothing happened for about 20 years," she said.

Now, houses are planned there.

Stanley said Pasco has always lacked the "critical mass" of workers to attract major office and manufacturing centers. But larger companies finally are expressing interest. At the eastern corners of SR 54 and the Suncoast, developers are planning more than 2-million square feet of offices.

"Are we there yet?" Stanley asked. "Or are we two years away, or five years away or 10 years away? I don't know."

In the meantime, commuters flow back and forth, and governments debate how to handle them.

Lutz and Keystone have made sacrifices, accommodating a raft of widenings, argued Lorraine Duffy, planning manager for Hillsborough's planning commission, which helped develop the community plans.

"Highway 41 went through a semirural area," Duffy said. "Dale Mabry partly went through a semirural area. The Suncoast comes through a rural part of the county. It's very sensitive and well worth preserving."

The Suncoast is great, said Hildebrand. But commuters from Pasco County - not to mention from Hernando and Citrus counties - drive down the Parkway into a bumper-to-bumper morass on the Veterans Expressway.

In five years, the state hopes to begin widening the Veterans, starting with the southern 4 miles.

Hillsborough plans to four-lane Gunn, but only for a half-mile north of Sickles High School.

That's not encouraging for Bob Vigneron, who moved to Pasco County in 2002 after his company, Increte Systems, moved there from Tampa. Increte sits just north of the Hillsborough line on Gunn, and Vigneron has become well acquainted with the road.

"There's too much traffic in the morning," he said. "It really needs widening all the way down."

Vigneron, a 55-year-old credit manager, was pleased to hear of Pasco's widening plans, which are to be completed by 2013. He said that especially will help along the industrial stretch where he works.

"You have a lot of slower-moving trucks and a lot of fast-moving cars, and you need four lanes with that," he said.

But the relief will be fleeting as drivers approach Hillsborough's line.

"It'll get a little bit hairy down there," Vigneron said. "You're going to just about get up to speed, then you're going to have to slow down quickly."

Keystone residents, he said, "have got to realize they've got more than a country road."

Dugger, of the Keystone Civic Association, counters that people have to realize that a widened road does more than solve a traffic problem. It attracts commercial developers to its intersections, and the stores attract new traffic. Additionally, drivers who previously used other, slower routes switch to the new road.

A wider road, and the traffic and stores it brings, ruins the character of the community, he said.

"Traffic flows like water. It's going to find the path of least resistance," Dugger said. "People flood to it."

"A few years down the road, is it any better?"

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

[Last modified June 9, 2005, 10:29:11]