HART will vote in July on extending light rail to Tampa airport

Hillsborough County transit officials will decide in July whether to include a light-rail link to Tampa International Airport in the first phase of a new transit system.

Officials and board members formally introduced the concept of a light-rail link to the airport this morning at its finance committee meeting.

Having light rail go to Tampa International Airport could tack on more than $125 million to any transit plans, according to Mary Shavalier, chief of strategic planning and program development for the Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority.

HART's consideration of the link comes a week after the airport's interim director said he thought light rail should run to the main terminal during the first phase and Mayor Pam Iorio said she would be open to the idea.

The $125 million cost figure, said Shavalier, is based on a 2007 Tampa airport study that said it would cost $125 million to build an elevated light-rail line extension to the airport and $77 million for a ground-level extension.

She said that a few weeks ago, the Hillsborough County Aviation Authority staff asked HART to consider extending the light rail route from the originally proposed plan to terminate the link at a HART mass transit center scheduled to be built by next summer near O'Brien and West Spruce streets, almost a mile from the airport.

Shavalier said HART's outreach efforts have shown a great deal of interest from the public in extending any transit plans to the airport.

"They are saying, 'it's so close, why not just go right in,'" Shavalier said.

Some board members, like Steve Polzin, however, expressed concern that adding the airport link this late into the planning process might delay HART's transit planning process. The board hopes to have a completed proposal to send to the Federal Transit Administration by November.

The additional planning should not be a huge problem, Shavalier said, because the airport has already done a great deal of the planning.

The biggest change would be adding a ridership study to the existing planning work, she said.

The HART board hopes to vote at its July 19 meeting on whether to include the airport extension into the transit planning process. The board will then vote on whether to approve final recommendations at its August meeting, Shavalier said. HART then wants to hold a public hearing in September.

Ultimately, HART hopes to be able to present its plan to the FTA in November so the federal agency can sign off on preliminary engineering plans. The timing coincides with a referendum in Hillsborough County to add a 1 cent sales take hike to raise money for light rail and other road and transit projects.

Adding a link to the airport, Shavalier said, would increase the chances of obtaining the very competitive federal funding.