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Town center with roundabout planned

Trinity joins the bandwagon with a proposed haven full of shop fronts and restaurants.

By JAMES THORNER
Published August 25, 2005

TRINITY - Town centers are the flavor of the month in Pasco County development circles, so it's no surprise that yet another mock downtown is planned for a major intersection in Trinity.

Trinity Town Center is a Spanish-style, pedestrian-friendly retail, restaurant and office complex touted for 13.5 acres northeast of Little Road and Trinity Boulevard.

Plans show 18 buildings ranging from 3,600 square feet - the size of a boutique or small restaurant - up to 25,000 square feet - the size of a furniture or book store.

The developer envisions its project will be Trinity's "Main Street." Since groundbreaking in the early 1990s, Trinity, on each side of Little Road in southwest Pasco, has grown to thousands of homes. The two Trinity subdivisions nearest the town center site are Thousand Oaks and Fox Hollow.

"We want this to be a really nice family-oriented facility you don't mind going to on an afternoon or evening," said Langfred White, senior vice president of ICC Financial Group.

The town center is ICC's first shopping center. The privately held company bought the property in December, paying the Orsi family $5.4-million, or $400,000 an acre.

No tenants have been announced save for Old Harbor Bank. ICC is wooing the usual suspects, including the Outback restaurant family. Construction could start in 2006.

"We're attracting interest, but we're too early in the process to have anyone willing to commit," White said.

The centerpiece of the 205,000-square-foot town center will be a landscaped traffic roundabout that adjoins a pedestrian court ICC hopes to embellish with boutiques, a coffee shop and ice cream parlor.

If the artist renderings are true to form, architecture will have a Mediterranean flair, including two-story buildings with columns, covered arcades, red roofs, balustrades and balconies.

To reduce the visual sprawl, ICC plans to conceal some of its hundreds of parking spaces in a multitiered garage. The property is sandwiched between two boulevards: Chittamwood to the north and Trinity to the south.

Town centers, featuring the sidewalks and shop fronts of traditional downtowns, are all the rage in Pasco. Longleaf began the trend, recently opening a mini downtown north of Trinity on State Road 54.

Other such centers are planned for Connerton in Land O'Lakes, New River near Zephyrhills and Curley and Overpass roads in Wesley Chapel.

[Last modified August 25, 2005, 01:23:19]