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Will traffic trample on their tranquility?

A proposal for a much-needed east-west connector to I-75 could invite development into a rural oasis.

By DAN DEWITT
Published July 2, 2006

BROOKSVILLE - The stretch of Hayman Road that runs by Cheryl McCormick's 5 acres is still quiet enough that minutes can pass between one car and the next.

So this part of southern Hernando seemed ideal, two years ago, when she and her husband bought the land. It was rural enough for her to ride her horses, and, according to the county comprehensive plan, it was destined to stay that way.

"This was our retirement home. We built this house for the things we'd been carrying around with us for years," said McCormick, 57, a former pharmaceutical sales representative, pointing out antique doors she had bought in Paris and New Orleans.

"Now it looks like they want to put an interstate in front of it."

That is only a slight overstatement.

A group of developers represented by Tallahassee lawyer Jake Varn has been pressing the county to build a four-lane, limited-access highway on or near the path of Ayers, Hayman and Church roads See map.

They say this is the most efficient way to move traffic across the county, from U.S. 19 to Interstate 75, and would aid in evacuating coastal residents during a hurricane. McCormick and others say the road will open large areas of rural Spring Lake for development, including about 500 acres owned by Bob Sierra, chairman of Sierra Properties Inc., the developer of the planned 1,749-home Hickory Hill subdivision.

The county agrees it needs, in addition to State Road 50, an east-west highway to serve anticipated development, including Hickory Hill and the 12,000 residential units that may be built in the 4,800-acre planned development district that straddles I-75.

The County Commission will discuss the roadway plans to serve these developments at a workshop on Wednesday morning.

But current plans call for this transportation corridor to run farther north, along Powell and Old Trilby roads. This path would more efficiently relieve traffic from SR 50, which is expected to be overloaded soon after development in the area begins, said Dennis Dix, the county's transportation planning coordinator.

By keeping traffic farther north, along with the growth that typically follows such roads, the county may spare the rural heart of Spring Lake, Dix said.

"Any time you have a high capacity roadway you are opening that corridor up for future development," Dix said.

"And that raises another question: Do we want it up for future development? That was the idea behind the Old Trilby (route). To serve and maintain development where it is already occurring."

Besides Sierra, Varn said he represents developers of five subdivisions planned for the development district, including a 4,800-unit development called Sunrise, as well as the people selling the property it will be built on - banker Jim Kimbrough, retired mining executive Tommy Bronson, and Brooksville real estate broker Robert Buckner.

Building a four-lane road along Ayers and Hayman makes sense for several reasons, said Varn and Cliff Manuel, president of Coastal Engineering and Associates Inc. of Brooksville, which represents most of the developers.

The county already plans to connect Ayers to the main east-west corridors in western Hernando - Spring Hill Drive and County Line Road, both of which already have interchanges on the Suncoast Parkway and extend directly to U.S. 19.

Powell, on the other hand, connects to neither of these main north-south arteries.

The widening of Powell and Old Trilby - classified by the county as a canopy road - would be just as destructive to the rural nature of Spring Lake as the route they favor, Manual said.

Also, the northern corridor would cut through the middle of the Sunrise property. Finally, the county and state plan to connect Old Trilby to the SR 50 interchange at I-75 by frontage roads, requiring commuters to drive north every morning before heading south.

Varn's group is proposing, in the short term, what it calls "slip ramps" near where Lockhart Road crosses I-75, meaning a southbound entrance ramp to the expressway and an exit ramp for northbound traffic. Further in the future, they envision a full interchange on the new highway, at the current site of the Church overpass.

Though the route has changed slightly over the years, the county has long discussed similar plans for an interchange in Spring Lake and a highway through southern Hernando; at one point it was part of the county's long-range transportation plan, Manuel said.

"What we're doing is rekindling an old idea."

This was changed partly because of some daunting obstacles, said Dix and Bob Clifford, the planning manager of the state Department of Transportation district based in Tampa.

Though the department has not examined the feasibility of the developers' plan or analyzed its cost, the standard price for new four-lane highway is $27-million per mile while widening a mile of two-lane highway to four lanes costs $11-million.

The price of an interchange at Church, Clifford said, would be "hundreds of millions of dollars." Though Manuel has said the DOT estimates are too high - and added that the developers are committed to paying their share of transportation expenses - Clifford said it is developers who have been throwing out unrealistic estimates for highway construction.

"This is not a subdivision road; it would be a major arterial, and it has to be constructed to a major arterial level," he said.

Also, he said, the Church site may be disqualified by federal regulations that require several miles between interchanges on Interstates. Local governments must also prove that any interchange would "benefit the Interstate system. That's the key question on the test," Clifford said.

"What (the Church interchange) would do is add more traffic to the Interstate. It's not a benefit."

Manuel said the costs of the Ayers route, through a rural area, means acquiring right-of-way would be less expensive than land to the north. But if that land is developed, as it probably will be if the road is built, Clifford said, this will create new traffic and mean that the second interchange would do little to relieve congestion at the SR 50 intersection with I-75.

"Then all you have is two congested interchanges," he said.

Sierra said this does not have to be the case. For the sake of discussion, he said, he has proposed reducing the average lot size in Spring Lake to 2.5 acres (most of it now ranges from 2.5 to 10) and allowing property owners who have no interest in developing to sell these density rights to people who do.

That might allow the owner of 100 acres near the future interchange on Church Road, for example, to build a 300-home subdivision. He said he has no immediate plans to develop his own property and, though he has talked to the Evans family, which owns 300 acres near his horse farm, he has not discussed developing its land in Spring Lake.

And before that could happen, he said, the county should designate areas where clusters of high density development should be allowed.

"It has to be planned and locked - set in stone," Sierra wrote in an e-mail. Varn said that because access to the road will be limited, the county can place entrances and exits where it plans for dense development.

The idea of Varn and Sierra advocating strict planning is laughable to McCormick and others who live on Hayman.

Varn and Sierra engineered the plan to change the comprehensive plan to allow Hickory Hill, one of the largest such amendments considered in the county's history. If the county gives final approval, which it is on track to do, it will render future planning rules in the county nearly meaningless, McCormick said.

Once the highway is built, they say, nothing will prevent Sierra from developing his own land and other large, nearby properties.

"When he tells the (County Commission) he wants to develop (his land) at the top of the hill, what are they going to tell him? No?," McCormick said. "He's a developer, and everything that is going on will let him do what he does - develop."

Dan DeWitt can be reached at dewitt@sptimes.com or (352)754-6116.

"This was our retirement home. ... Now it looks like they want to put an interstate in front of it."

CHERYL McCORMICK, homeowner who feels the widening of Hayman Road in Hernando will ruin the area's rural charm.

[Last modified July 2, 2006, 00:00:28]