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Politicians welcome the road while environmentalists say it hurts conservation.
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.
He could see from the air how much open land remained just a few miles east of the clogged U.S. 19 corridor, 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.
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.
"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.
"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.
Whatever view is taken on the roadway, it's impetus is clear.
By the early 1980s, U.S. 19 had become so jammed with commercial development and local traffic that it practically had ceased to function as a thoroughfare; the same was true, to a lesser degree, for another north-south route, U.S. 41.
As a result, says Pasco County Administrator John Gallagher, the booming west sides Pasco, Hernando and Citrus counties were being sealed off from access to cities to the south.
Gallagher also was aware that an expressway could be built relatively cheaply through the empty swath of land that Crane had been eyeing from his airplane. He began thinking seriously about it, he said, after 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.
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 political support.
This work eventually resulted in the approval of a 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 cost of buying right 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.
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.
"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 over the next two years, the higher figure seemed reasonable considering the first revenue projections, released in 1992.