Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Proposal looks to fix 'crisis? in transit

The Tampa Bay Partnership wants to organize a regional authority that would plan and finance transportation projects.

By MICHAEL VAN SICKLER and JANET ZINK
Published August 27, 2006

With road costs climbing in Florida, the age of unbridled highway construction that characterized the latter half of the 20th century is all but over.

A new era — massive toll roads, express buses, light rail — is already under way.

But just who will shape the transportation mix that the Tampa Bay area needs?

A growing consensus among state lawmakers, local officials and business leaders says the Tampa Bay area is unprepared for the future because of a power vacuum. Without the regional leadership needed to map a new direction, gridlock and economic paralysis are inevitable, they say.

“We are in a crisis,” said Joe Smith, an adviser of special projects for Walbridge Aldinger, a Detroit commercial builder with a Tampa office.

“We need to solve these problems. And we can solve these problems, but only by working collectively.”

So Smith is leading efforts by the Tampa Bay Partnership, an economic development group, to organize a regional transportation authority that can plan and finance projects across county lines.

Sponsored by state Rep. Bill Galvano, R-Bradenton, the proposed authority will be discussed Monday at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Sabal Park with an invited crowd of state lawmakers, lawyers, business leaders and officials from Citrus, Hernando, Hillsborough, Pasco, Pinellas, Polk, Manatee and Sarasota counties.

But the Galvano plan is not alone. Outgoing state Sen. Jim Sebesta has been shopping a different plan that concentrates most of the power with the more populous counties, Hillsborough, Pasco and Pinellas.

The two plans underscore the city vs. countryside schism that makes planning on a regional level so difficult when there’s a dwindling supply of transportation dollars to go around.

Densely settled areas such as St. Petersburg and Tampa sorely need mass transit. Sparsely populated areas such as Citrus and Hernando, not to mention rural portions of Pasco and Hillsborough, don’t have the “masses” to support buses or rail.

Instead, officials from these remote areas tend to prefer new highways or toll roads that could spawn development — and a tax base — but also wind up steering dollars away from the transit projects needed in the urban core.

Of the two plans, Sebesta’s gives greater say to the more populated counties, which are more in need of mass transit.

Public transportation is also part of the Partnership and Galvano proposal, but that plan makes rural counties equal in power to more urban ones.

“It’s kind of like the U.S. Congress,’’ said Ed Mierzejewski, director of the Center for Urban Transportation Research at the University of South Florida. “Do you want the House of Representatives model or the U.S. Senate model?

When you have Citrus having the same number of votes as Hillsborough or Pinellas, it’s hard to see how it would be a one-man, one-vote approach.”

It’s not like there’s no transportation planning now.

The Florida Department of Transportation plans 50 years out for what major projects are deemed necessary.
Counties and cities choose how they want to spend their cut of federal and state transportation dollars and have their own wish list of projects 20 years into the future.

The mass transit agencies in Hillsborough and Pinellas have a slew of planners, as does each airport and seaport (which are adding an increasing number of trucks to area roads).

Fragmented and uncoordinated, transportation planning in the Tampa Bay area didn’t draw cries for an overhaul until recent years, when it became clear that there wasn’t enough money to accommodate population growth.

Just in Hillsborough, the county faces a deficit of $3.6-billion for all of the local roads projects that it will take to meet legislative requirements to accommodate growth, said Joe Zambito, a senior planning manager with the Hillsborough Planning Commission.

The state estimates that there’s a shortfall of $23-billion for all state roads needed to maintain Florida’s current level of service in the coming years.

Meanwhile, the only projects that seem to be getting planned these days are toll roads.

Last month, the Tampa-Hillsborough Expressway Authority announced its intention for a beltway through Manatee, eastern Hillsborough, Pasco and Pinellas counties.

The DOT is studying a 1,000-foot-wide, 150-mile toll facility stretching from Charlotte to Hernando. A 140-mile toll road is being explored by the Florida Turnpike Enterprise that would cross the state, linking Manatee to St. Lucie. That same agency plans another 140-mile toll road connecting Polk and Lee counties.

“Slowly, but surely, (toll roads) are where the U.S. Department of Transportation is pushing projects,” said Clifford Winston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

“Congestion continues to grow, roads are expensive to build, and tolls are really the only thing that can offset the costs.”

It’s in this climate that Sebesta and Galvano propose the regional authorities.

Late in the last legislative session, Sebesta revived a 1990 bill that created the Tampa Bay Commuter Transit Authority. It would have allowed any metropolitan area with a population of more than 1-million people to create such an authority.

“The large metropolitan areas need help today,” Sebesta said.

About the same time, Galvano introduced a bill crafted with the help of the Partnership.

In Galvano’s version, the authority no longer would be restricted to transit projects. Galvano’s bill let it borrow money to build highways, toll roads, airports and other transportation projects.

Neither bill passed.

“We just couldn’t get the two proposals lined up,” Galvano said.

“His was more of a planning organization which encompassed a lot of representation from different entities. Mine was more of an autonomous organization that did more than just plan.”

Galvano hopes the differences between the two plans can get ironed out during Monday’s meeting so local officials will have better luck next year with lawmakers, who must approve the authority. Once approved, an authority would put the Tampa Bay area in better position to nab federal dollars for transit projects, backers say.

The jury is still out on whether either one will draw much support.

“We’re going to wait and see,” said Avera Wynne, executive director of the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council. “The objective is wonderful.

“But the challenge will be forming consensus on the board” of a regional authority, Wynne said.

“Does a representative from Brooksville want a representative from St. Pete Beach to tell it how to plan for transportation?”

[Last modified August 27, 2006, 23:04:38]