And the award goes to . . . really?

There's a reason the Seminole Hard Rock won an award for pedestrian safety. And it isn't due to state-of-the- art safety features.

By MICHAEL VAN SICKLER
Published June 15, 2005

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TAMPA - Tampa has a national reputation for being brutal to cyclists and pedestrians.

So the inaugural Livable Roadways Award seemed like a good idea. With great pageantry at an evening banquet, local planners in April bestowed the award upon the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino.

Nearly eight weeks passed before anyone pointed out the obvious.

The casino's stretch of Orient Road, the so-called model of pedestrian safety, lacks entire chunks of sidewalk, multiple crosswalks and, at the casino's main entrance, a wheelchair ramp.

Livable. That's what the Hillsborough County Metropolitan Planning Organization called the roadway. The Seminole Tribe built a casino that "paid close attention to the needs of transit users and pedestrians," the awards program stated. "Safe and convenient."

But employees dodge cars when they haul trash bins along a service road. No sidewalk actually leads to the casino. A bus shelter is stashed in the rear of the property, near a trash bin. A 10-foot wall built by the project on the other side of Orient Road blocks a sidewalk, forcing pedestrians into the road.

"Shameful," William Schnell, a former Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority planner, told the MPO Tuesday.

"This award represents a complete collapse of government regulatory responsibility," said John Dausman, another former HARTline employee.

Okay, so maybe it wasn't the best project, said City Council member Linda Saul-Sena, who chaired the committee that awarded the prize.

"A lot of opportunities were missed," she said, calling sidewalk gaps "extremely concerning."

So why again did it get the award?

Saul-Sena knew exactly why.

"It was the only application."