By B.C. Manion
Pasco County commissioners approved an agreement Feb. 5 that settles a dispute over required road improvements in connection with the development of Wiregrass Ranch, a mixed-use project that covers thousands of acres in Wesley Chapel.
County staff and William Merrill, an attorney representing the developers of Wiregrass Ranch, have been working for months to hammer out a settlement agreement.
The completed document spanned hundreds of pages. It calls, in part, for the Porter family, the developers of Wiregrass Ranch, to create roads, provide right-of-way and accommodate transit.
The settlement also reduces or eliminates some of the requirements that were contained in the original development approval and extends project deadlines.
Entitlements for development were also changed.
The new plan calls for a total of 10,472 residential units, a decrease of 343 units from the previous plan. It also calls for approximately 1.26 million square feet of office space, which is a 200,000-square-foot increase. The maximum number of hospital beds has been boosted to 371 hospital beds, an increase of 271.
Other entitlements, which remain the same, are: 300,00 square feet of attraction and recreation space, 480 hotel rooms and 707 community college students.
One element of the agreement calls for developing the project’s town center with short blocks, a mixture of residential and commercial uses, bicycle and pedestrian connections and a grid road network.
Those design elements, which the county calls mixed-use trip reduction measures (MUTRM), will encourage people to use their feet to get around, rather than tooling around behind a steering wheel.
A study by Tindale-Oliver & Associates projects an 11 percent decrease in vehicle miles traveled when using this planning approach, said Cynthia Spidell, senior planner and Development of Regional Impact coordinator for the county.
The plan also calls for an elementary school within the town center, prompting Commissioner Kathryn Starkey to suggest the county needs to work more closely with Pasco County Schools to create opportunities for shared use of public projects.
Starkey said the county should approach Pasco Superintendent Kurt Browning to see if the new school’s play areas can be set up to be accessible for public use.
The walkable town center is just one of hundreds of details approved in the settlement between the county and developers.
The county and developer worked out myriad issues regarding the master plan for the Wiregrass project, which is so massive that it is considered to be a development of regional impact.
But the developer’s attorney told commissioners the two sides had not reached an agreement regarding the potential alignment of a planned road to link Bruce B. Downs Boulevard and SR 54.
Maps within the agreement show a road linking the two, and the agreement spells out that the developer must construct a four-lane road, but provide right-of-way for six lanes to allow for future widening.
The developer has agreed to build the road and provide the right-of-way.
But the alignment has not been decided, and the developer wants to know the general area where the road could go so it can sell land that is not within that area, Merrill told commissioners.
Merrill asked commissioners to remove any lines from the map that show a potential alignment and to instead use a red triangle to indicate the area where the road could go through.
County administrator John Gallagher and growth management administrator Richard Gehring warned commissioners about taking any action that might be later construed as an agreement to limit the options for where the road can go.
They said the whole point of making the connection between Bruce B. Downs Boulevard and SR 54 is to divert traffic to the east to decrease the volume at the existing intersection of Bruce B. Downs and SR 54.
That intersection is too close to Interstate 75, and the traffic volume is degrading the effectiveness of the area’s road network, Gehring said. The proposed road is intended to address that problem.
No matter what the map says, however, transportation experts told commissioners the specific alignment will require approval from the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) because the new road will connect two state roads.
Starkey called for granting Merrill’s request, noting the Porters will have to disclose to any potential buyers that the specific alignment has not been determined and any alignment would have to be approved by FDOT.
Her motion passed unanimously.
