Mall Sprawl Reaches Pasco

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WESLEY CHAPEL - At 10 a.m. today, developers of The Grove at Wesley Chapel will welcome customers to their sprawling shopping center, completing the first step in south-central Pasco County's transition from home of "the road to nowhere" to host of a retail mecca.

Over the next 12 months, three national shopping-center developers will open nearly 3 million square feet of retail space - all of it on land that held cattle and oranges as recently as the first of this year.

The plazas are the latest step in central Pasco's shift from rambling ranch land to suburban sprawl. The retail boom also promises to reverse long-standing traffic patterns that forced Pasco residents to drive to Hillsborough to shop.

Together, the three malls form a triangle - about five miles on a side - that encompasses some of the fastest growing communities in the Tampa Bay region. In the past half-decade, home builders have erected thousands of houses within easy reach of those malls. In the coming years, they plan to build thousands more.

Some Cite Benefits

For Meadow Pointe resident Bill Kervick, the coming retail boom shows that Wesley Chapel is moving beyond being a bedroom community feeding commuters into Tampa.

"It makes me feel good that someone's willing to invest capital in this area," Kervick said, standing outside Best Buy recently with a purchase in his hand. Best Buy, Toys R Us and Dick's Sporting Goods quietly welcomed shoppers during the past week.

"I've been waiting for them to open," he said of the electronics retailer.

The potential for thousands of jobs and millions in future tax revenue pleases community boosters and government officials alike.

"Instead of all our wages being spent somewhere else, the reverse will happen," said Randall Stovall, chairman of the Greater Wesley Chapel Chamber of Commerce.

But the growth isn't without its drawbacks.

Challenging Demographics

Developers and county government collectively will spend more than $100 million in 2008 to widen Bruce B. Downs Boulevard - long derided as "the road to nowhere" - County Road 54 and State Road 54, in part to handle traffic to and from the malls.

Retailers such as JCPenney and Toys R Us have abandoned Fowler Avenue in Hillsborough County for new homes in Pasco, leaving residents of that area to do without or drive to Pasco.

And despite the expectations for continued residential growth in the region, it's unclear whether there will be enough customers to support three major malls so close together.

The developers have set their sights on drawing shoppers from as far away as Brooksville in Hernando County and the University and Carrollwood sections of Hillsborough County. But all three developers have said they think the region can support only two of their projects.

With that in mind, the developers spent the past few years scrabbling together the government approvals, building permits and tenant leases they'll need to succeed.

So far, the race has gone in favor of Pittsburgh-based Echo Real Estate Services, which is building The Grove on land formerly owned by the orange-farming Oakley family. Today's grand opening will be followed by another round of openings in the spring.

Echo avoided many of the delays that have hamstrung its competition, Cleveland-based rivals Forest City Enterprises and the Richard E. Jacobs Group. Those delays - traffic concerns at the Shops at Wiregrass and environmental issues at Cypress Creek Town Center - forced both Forest City and Jacobs to push their projected opening days into next year, giving Echo a head start in the race for shoppers' dollars.

After a groundbreaking in the spring, Echo spent the summer erecting the chain of "big box" stores that forms the plaza's backbone. Those stores, visible from Interstate 75, are expected to help draw visitors to the restaurants and movie theater expected to open next spring.

Echo chief Bill Krahe has promised to reveal more tenants during today's opening ceremonies.

South of The Grove, at State Road 56 and Bruce B. Downs Boulevard, workers are erecting the steel framework for the western corner of the semi-circular Shops at Wiregrass. Part of that work is attached to the eastern face of the JCPenney store that opened in late 2005 and remains the nascent plaza's lone tenant.

Forest City Enterprises and its partner, The Goodman Co. of West Palm Beach, expect to have their plaza finished by early next year. The tenant roster is a retail who's who that promises to make the plaza a magnet for high-end shoppers.

But before Shops at Wiregrass can open in its entirety, its developers must help extend S.R. 56 eastward from its terminus at Bruce B. Downs. That work could begin as early as January.

County officials are trying to coordinate Wiregrass' work with the widening of Bruce B. Downs that also will begin early next year under the direction of Crown Communities, developers of the Seven Oaks community.

Legal Maneuvering

West of Wiregrass, beyond S.R. 56's growing corridor of furniture stores, earth-moving continues at the Cypress Creek Town Center site.

The regional mall complex was the first of the three shopping venues to win county approval, but a complex maze of environmental regulations and legal challenges have guaranteed it will be the last of the malls to open.

The complex will straddle S.R. 56 with Jacobs' open-air mall south of the highway and a 600,000-square-foot "power center" strip under development by landowner John "Hi" Sierra on the north side. The complex also will include hotel rooms, offices and some apartments.

Building permits are pending for Wesley Chapel's second SuperTarget, a Kohl's department store and Justice Just for Girls, a clothing store catering to preteens.

The mall has been plagued by complaints from environmentalists, who repeatedly tried to derail the project by asking the courts to overturn its zoning or its federal wetlands permits.

Environmentalists contend the project's acres of asphalt will wreck nearby Cypress Creek, which has been lauded as an Outstanding Florida Water. The creek also feeds Tampa's water supply as a tributary of the Hillsborough River.

In their deal with the county, the developers have promised to make the mall a laboratory for largely untested ways of managing storm runoff in ecologically sensitive ways. County and state officials will monitor the mall's stormwater system for five years to ensure it's minimizing the risk to Cypress Creek.