Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

County making builders wait

Developers are in a gridlock of their own so that drivers won't have to be. They're being told: Wait for the roads or pay for what you need.

By MICHAEL VAN SICKLER
Published March 3, 2006

RUSKIN - State Road 674 is a four-lane divided highway with the usual accoutrements of sprawl - fast-food restaurants, a Holiday Inn Express and signs touting new building.

But in Hillsborough County, it's sort of special.

During rush hour on a recent Thursday afternoon, traffic flowed briskly on the route. Cars were spaced apart.

For the first time in years, government has begun saying no to new development, even on roads without congestion like State Road 674. Last year, the county began flagging these roads based on phantom traffic - requiring builders to wait for the necessary road construction or pay for the fixes themselves.

"(Developers) don't see the traffic because it's not there yet," said Bob Campbell, director of the county's transportation planning division. "But it will be."

Telling developers that they can't build is difficult, especially when the problem doesn't exist now. The new regulations have provoked a backlash from developers, who say the rules are not clearly defined and have caused the housing market to slow.

Bill Sperling, who moved to FishHawk Ranch a year ago from Long Island, looks at all the gridlock and asks: "Where was the planning?"

In 1985, a new growth management law passed that required that adequate roads be in place to accommodate new development. The concept was called "concurrency."

But the law allowed each government to define what "adequate" was.

For Hillsborough commissioners, that meant raising the traffic limit on several of its major roads beyond what they were designed to hold. At the same time, growth boomed, especially in southern Hillsborough.

"Because of exceptions to the law, it didn't do any good," said Bob Hunter, executive director of the county's Planning Commission.

When the exceptions expired on the last day of 2003, miles of roadway that had been acceptable for development were reclassified as deficient.

From that point on, developers everywhere had to wait before building - or pay.

As it turned out, 2005 was a busy year.

The county got developers to commit more than $250-million for road construction. On U.S. 301, the county extracted more than $23-million from developers to widen a stretch of the two-lane road to four lanes. Commissioners are expected to sign a second agreement with 13 other projects this month to widen another section of U.S. 301.

By last spring, commissioners were hearing developers' complaints that county planners were "extorting" transportation money from them. The county was delaying about half of the 160 projects reviewed each month because of traffic congestion.

County Commissioner Ronda Storms, whose east Hillsborough district covers most of this high-growth territory, decided to press the question. She scheduled a commission discussion last May.

"We can raise taxes to pay for transportation, which none of us wants to do," Storms said. "Or we can make sure concurrency works and use the resources that we have."

Storms moved that the commission support concurrency, and her motion passed unanimously.

"There were all these people trying to undermine our staff," Storms said last month. "I wanted to provide our employees cover so they could do their jobs."

Many of the jammed roads in the county can be blamed on the development that was allowed when the county barely enforced concurrency, said the Planning Commission's Hunter.

Nowhere is this more evident than along State Road 674, where the county is negotiating with six projects to widen the road to accommodate a combined 500 homes that are expected to generate 4,810 daily trips. But requiring a number of developers to make fixes has led to some confusion about who's doing what, project managers say.

Rich McCall, an engineer with Burcaw & Associates, said the county was going to require his client to build a left turn lane on College Avenue to accommodate a project. McCall said he spent three weeks designing it, including having a road crew count traffic.

But while driving on College Avenue one day, he saw that someone else was building the same lane he was designing.

"This unfortunately happens all the time," McCall said.

After last year's U.S. 301 deal, developers say the county now assumes they work together to solve traffic problems. That can be a dangerous assumption, said Michael Peterson, an Apollo Beach lawyer. "We're all cut-throat competitors," Peterson said. "You can't always expect us to cooperate and lead the county out of congestion."

Building industry representatives said it has been difficult adjusting to this new regulatory landscape.

"We went through a period when no one knew what the rules are," said Everett Morrow, vice president of Landmark Engineering, a land development firm. "Now we've reached a point where we're talking about what the options are. We haven't seen many developers walk away, but it has slowed everything down."

Others say that concurrency is turning away development because of the number of so-called deficient roads.

"We're reaching a crisis situation," said Don Amaden, president of Brooks & Amaden Engineering. "It's leading to a slowdown in the industry."

But Hunter said he doubted that concurrency hampered development all that much. The Planning Commission recently estimated that Hillsborough grew by 32,000 people last year, the largest annual increase in history.

"To my knowledge," Hunter said, "growth has not slowed down."

[Last modified March 2, 2006, 13:55:05]