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Proponents hail the Suncoast Parkway, set to open Feb. 4, as a bipartisan accomplishment.
By DAN DeWITT
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 28, 2001
Twenty years ago, Don Crane lived in Pasco County and frequently commuted by private plane to downtown St. Petersburg.
Though Pasco had been developing rapidly for years, he could see from the air how much open land remained just a few miles east of the clogged U.S. 19 corridor -- cypress swamps, pine plantations and pastures -- most of it owned by a few ranching families.
"I was always wondering when all that land would get gobbled up, and we'd never get a chance to build a road," said Crane, now the president of Floridians for Better Transportation, a private, industry-supported group in St. Petersburg.
"I thought, "There ought to be a way to get this facility through here before it's too late,' and I thought we could get a good start on the land between (State Roads) 52 and 54."
This is one version, at least, of how the idea for the Suncoast Parkway germinated. From this, Crane said, came support from a gradually widening ring of government officials and business people, money for studies, right of way acquisition and construction, and, ultimately, the completed expressway.
When the first 32-mile stretch of the 42-mile, $507-million toll road opens a week from today, it will represent the most ambitious public works project on the North Suncoast at least since Interstate 75 was built in the mid-1960s.
Getting it done was largely a matter of marshaling political forces, and those who were part of the effort are proud of it.
"This all started back in 1983, and I'm just really excited to see that it is finally here," said Ann Hildebrand, a Pasco County commissioner since 1984. "It is just fantastic, and it is certainly going to be wonderful for all the residents of Tampa Bay."
Environmentalists dispute that. To them, the Suncoast Parkway not only is unnecessary and destructive, it is an example of how politics rather than objective studies drive road construction in Florida.
Most of the people who pushed for the parkway had something to gain from its construction, opponents say. And, to make the road seem more palatable, these advocates drastically underestimated its cost and overestimated its ridership. Continued improvements to U.S. 41, they say, would make better sense as a way to relieve congestion on U.S. 19.
"From a conservation perspective, this (parkway) is a heartbreak. For people who care about efficient government, this road is heartbreak," said Lesley Blackner, the lawyer who filed the Sierra Club's unsuccessful lawsuit to stop the toll road. "The people who thought this up should get a lot of credit because it is a brilliant circumvention of good environmental and governmental policy."
Whatever view is valid, the parkway was undisputedly propelled by a few key events:
1983: Ric Pottberg, whose family owned a 7,000-acre ranch that stretched most of the way between State Roads 52 and 54 in Pasco, offered to donate right of way for a north-south highway. The Pottberg property, once the site of the proposed Serenova development, was eventually bought by the state to compensate for the road's environmental damage.
1985: Pasco County Administrator John Gallagher persuadedthe Pasco County Commission to put up $60,000 and Pinellas, Hillsborough, Hernando and Citrus counties to donate $12,500 each for a preliminary study. Crane solicited an additional $40,000 from the Florida Department of Transportation.
1987: The DOT set aside $800,000 for a much more detailed analysis of the project. This study, which would not be completed until 1994, produced ridership estimates -- which have since been scaled back drastically -- that helped convince officials that the project was feasible.
1990: The state Legislature included the parkway on a list of Turnpike District projects. This happened just as the district had paid off the bonds for the Florida Turnpike, meaning huge sums produced by that road would be available to expand the state's network of toll roads.
"When the Turnpike District took it over and made it financially feasible, that's when it took off," Gallagher said.
1990: Jim Kimbrough, CEO and chairman of SunTrust Bank/Nature Coast and an advocate of the parkway, was named to the state Transportation Commission because of his long friendship with former Lt. Gov. Buddy MacKay. Over the next eight years, as a member of the commission, Kimbrough was able to make sure the project stayed on track.
"I was fortunate to make a lot of wonderful contacts and generate a lot of credibility in a short time," Kimbrough said. "(Former DOT Secretary) Ben Watts and (Turnpike District Secretary) Jim Ely, we struck up a good chemistry."
Though Gallagher disagrees with Crane on one point -- who came up with the idea for the parkway -- Gallagher agrees on the inspiration.
By the early 1980s, U.S. 19 had become so jammed with commercial development and local traffic that it had ceased to function as a thoroughfare; the same was true, to a lesser degree, of U.S. 41.
As a result, Gallagher said, the booming west sides of the three North Suncoast counties -- Pasco, Hernando and Citrus -- were being sealed off from access to big cities to the south.
Gallagher was also aware that an expressway could be built relatively cheaply through the empty swath of land that Crane had been looking over from his airplane. He began thinking seriously about it, he said, after Pottberg made his offer.
A short time later, when Gallagher was meeting with Crane, who was then employed by the engineering firm Gee & Jensen, "I happened to tell Don about Mr. Pottberg," Gallagher said.
"The federal government was talking about spending multimillions of dollars on U.S. 19. My pitch to Don was, "Instead of spending all this money on 19, let's build a parallel expressway."
After that meeting, Gallagher said, he and Crane began lobbying for money for the initial study and, generally, seeking political support for what was then called the North Suncoast Corridor.
This work eventually resulted in the approval of the more complete, state-funded analysis of the project. Though the analysis would not be completed until 1994, the planners working on it soon produced cost and ridership estimates, and proposed and discarded a variety of possible routes.
Both Gallagher and Crane originally thought that hooking the road up with Pinellas County was crucial. But the Department of Transportation determined, in 1989, that the costs of buying rights of way and building in such a congested area could sink the entire project, said Don Skelton, director of planning and production for the DOT district based in Tampa.
"I still think it was shortsighted that we didn't provide for (access to Pinellas)," said Curt Kiser, a former state senator from Palm Harbor.
In Hernando County, the same considerations moved the path of the parkway, which was originally to pass through developed areas of Spring Hill, farther to the east.
The DOT was particularly enthusiastic about an extension that Gallagher said he considered too ambitious -- one that veered east in Citrus County and continued to Jacksonville. That was scrapped because of opposition from residents in towns it would go through, including Dunnellon and Micanopy.
If the future of the project ever seemed in doubt, it was during this period, in the late 1980s, said those who supported it. The road was still dependent on state Department of Transportation financing and, in 1989, the department cut the plans for the northern section.
"Everything was going fine," Crane said in a 1989 article in the St. Petersburg Times, after a meeting to encourage Brooksville business leaders to lobby for the expressway.
"Then all of a sudden the DOT money falls through a hole on us, and they stop us on the Citrus County portion, which we consider vital."
This road is a fraud.
The road's prospects improved considerably with the turn of the decade.
Kimbrough got his appointment. Plans were firmly in place for the Veterans Expressway in northern Hillsborough County, giving the Suncoast Parkway a logical southern terminus. And, mainly because of the efforts of Kiser, the state senator, the road was placed on a list of Turnpike projects.
"Initially, I had trouble because the DOT was saying they didn't see much ridership in that area," Kiser said. "I told them, "Look guys, the way this area is developing, in a few years that's not going to be a concern.' The next thing you know, it made the list."
Because of the Turnpike District's power to fund projects by issuing bonds, most of the parkway backers felt certain from that point on the road would be built.
After all, the numbers seemed so convincing.
As late as 1989, proponents said the road could be built for about $120-million. Though that climbed to $400-million during the next two years, the higher figure seemed reasonable considering the first revenue projections, released in 1992.
The San Francisco-based consulting company URS Greiner Woodward Clyde said the parkway would take in $70-million in tolls in its first year of operation.
That estimate dropped to $31-million in early 1995; later that year, after the new Veterans Expressway began to fall far behind its revenue projections, the number dropped to $19-million. By 2000, it had tumbled to $14.5-million.
Terry Denham, director of planning and programming for the Turnpike District, said that if the revenues meet current projections, the project will fulfill the requirements of state law, which states that tolls must pay at least half of a road's annual debt five years after it opens.
Denham acknowledges the first estimate was imprecise. The numbers became more exact, he said, when URS knew that the revenue would have to support bonds.
"The difference between $70-million and $15-million is the difference between looking out and saying, "Hey, there could be a lot of money out there for this thing' and getting down to decide whether we really want to go into this business," Denham said.
What Turnpike District officials are actually saying, said Blackner, the lawyer for the Sierra Club, is that the numbers were fabricated.
"This road is a fraud," she said.
This has become a common, costly pattern for Florida's toll roads, she said. Numbers are inflated early to get support for planning and to pass feasibility tests, then reduced when the bonds are issued. Several new Turnpike projects have brought in less money than anticipated, she said: the Veterans Expressway; the Seminole Parkway near Sanford; the Polk Parkway, which loops around Lakeland; the Garcon Point Bridge near Pensacola.
Garcon Point is also known as "Bo's Bridge" because it was pushed by former state House Speaker Bolley "Bo" Johnson. Its revenues have fallen so short that analysts have twice downgraded the rating of the bonds.
There is a simple reason powerful people open roads into areas that don't need them, said Beth Connor of the Sierra Club's St. Petersburg office: They can make money by developing the newly accessible rural land.
"This road is a can opener to the countryside. It is a way of injecting sprawl," she said. Many of the main players have already benefited directly or will in the future, Blackner said.
The engineering firm Crane worked for through most of the '80s -- Post, Buckley, Schuh & Jernigan -- received the contract for the preliminary study of the parkway. That put it on the inside track to later win the bigger state-financed study. The firm will receive $18-million this year as the primary consultant for the Turnpike District, with which it shares an office in Orlando.
Kimbrough and his bank will be enriched as development opportunities expand. Gallagher was interested in expanding his county's tax base; so were elected officials who pushed for the project, including former Hernando County Commissioner Len Tria.
Yes, some people stand to make a great deal of money off the road, its advocates say. And, certainly, the prospect of economic development was always part of the plan.
"If you can't move people and you can't move goods, where is your growth?" said Tria, who now works for Coastal Engineering Associates Inc. in Brooksville. "I've always said that our destiny is tied to the south, and if we are going to grow, we are going to have to be a part of Tampa Bay."
But he and Crane also say -- disingenuously, the environmentalists say -- that the road does not have to promote sprawl. For Crane, the issues of the parkway still revolve around the land he used to look down on from his airplane: the relatively open corridor through which the parkway now passes and the hopelessly congested one around U.S. 19.
As soon as the first begins to look like the second, he said, the point of the parkway will be defeated, from an environmental and transportation standpoint.
"People will say, "All this did is open that area to sprawl,' and I would look them in the eye and say, "That's your local government's fault.' And if it (growth management) doesn't get done, it's going to be a big problem," he said.
"My worst dream is that Pasco will continue like it is, with unbridled growth. If Hernando gets in the same pattern, then we would have a bad project."