All the talk about a proposed elevated toll road along the State Road 54/56 corridor has put it years and years in the future.
But if the Florida Department of Transportation finalizes an agreement with International Infrastructure Partners LLC, such a project connecting Zephyrhills and New Port Richey may come much faster, with the first public presentation of the road’s conceptual plan scheduled for next month.
Public meetings will be in three locations across the county beginning in late spring, the same time IIP begins its negotiations to lease the right of way along the corridor needed to build the elevated road. They would take place on the east and west sides of the county, as well as in between.
“We’re having further discussions about what is going to be happening after those public hearings, but it’s all kind of a simultaneous thing over the next several months,” said Lee Royal, a public involvement director with the FDOT, during last week’s Pasco County Metropolitan Planning Organization meeting. “There will be possible lease negotiations depending on the outcome of those public hearings.”
Which way the pendulum swings will depend on who shows up for those meetings. Pasco County Commissioner Jack Mariano says he’s received nothing but negative emails about the project in recent weeks, while county planning and development administrator Richard Gehring said a good number of people from a meeting he had in Wesley Chapel chose the elevated road as the best solution for long-term traffic woes in the county.
Negative public sentiment might kill the project before it even gets going, Mariano said, based on how IIP has reacted to bad news in the past. When a member from the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Land Institute recommended against an elevated road, IIP took a step back from its request, and asked for more time to think through its proposal.
“I have not heard anything back positive from the public,” Mariano said. “I think it’s disingenuous to keep those things rolling down the road when all they are going to do is step back again.”
Yet if the elevated road isn’t built, the county and the state will still have tough decisions to make when it comes to fixing pending traffic congestion issues along the corridor while Pasco County continues to grow.
“I am not 100 percent in favor of this managed toll lane … but we have to evaluate everything,” Commissioner Ted Schrader, another MPO member, said. “If (IIP) withdraws their proposal, we still have an issue to deal with because people will be stuck in traffic.”
Another possibility facing the county is that IIP might not build all 33 miles of the road as initially proposed, Gehring said. The prospective traffic problems in the near future will focus on the 10-mile stretch of State Road 54/56 between the Suncoast Parkway and Interstate 75.
Connecting those two major north-south roads might be the best option for everyone in the long run, he said. And while there are some eyeballs on State Road 52 to the north as an east-west connector, the county still has limited options to build since much of the central part of Pasco is protected conservation land.
“There are a lot of natural constraints in this system that we are trying to deal with,” Gehring said.
Published Feb. 19, 2014
