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Roadwork Converges

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By KEVIN WIATROWSKI, The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 13, 2008

WESLEY CHAPEL - If you drive on the roads of southeast Pasco County, prepare yourself for some major changes.

In the coming weeks, work will start on projects to widen or extend several of the region's major thoroughfares. Together, the roads - State Road 54, Bruce B. Downs Boulevard and State Road 56 - carry the bulk of local traffic as well as interstate-bound commuters from Land O' Lakes and northern Hillsborough County.

For years now, the communities of southeast Pasco have hosted unprecedented numbers of new homes, stores and office parks. All that development has led to a road network slowly choking on traffic, as anyone merging from Interstate 75 to S.R. 56 at 5 p.m. can attest.

With three major shopping centers on the horizon in 2008, even more cars are expected to pack onto the region's roadways in the coming years.

For that reason, 2008 looks to be the Year of the Traffic Cone as a mix of developers, state and county crews gear up for major road projects aimed at relieving future congestion amid some of Pasco's biggest developments.

County officials will host a public workshop at 6:30 p.m. Monday to explain the various projects. The meeting will take place at Victorious Life Church, 6224 Old Pasco Road.

Deborah Bolduc, who oversees road projects for Pasco, said the plan is to give local residents the tools they will need to deal with disruptions the road projects are likely to cause.

"We can put faces to these projects, so they'll have a contact person when a crisis arises," Bolduc said.

The fact that so much roadwork will be happening at the same time in the same place is, more than anything, an accident of timing.

"When you have a high-growth area and an urbanizing area, these things will happen," she said.

The widening of Bruce B. Downs should have been nearing completion by now, according to the 2001 development deal between the county and Crown Communities, which is doing the work to offset traffic from its Seven Oaks neighborhood.

Rising road-construction costs - which grew sixfold between 2001 and 2006 - forced Crown to delay the work to secure more funding.

Legal wrangling over zoning, federal wetlands permits and wildlife relocations forced the developers of Cypress Creek Town Center to delay their mall's opening - and the required six-laning of S.R. 54 - to this year.

The same goes for the Shops at Wiregrass, which suffered from more than a year of sometimes acrimonious negotiations between county planners and the developers of the larger Wiregrass Ranch, of which the retail center is a part.

The mall developers, Cleveland-based Forest City Enterprises and The Goodman Co. of West Palm Beach, were forced to take over construction of the six-lane eastern extension of S.R. 56 after Pulte Home Corp., which was originally on the hook for the work, pulled out of the road project late last year.

The Wiregrass and Seven Oaks road projects will converge at the junction of S.R. 56 and Bruce B. Downs. Together, the two projects will create one of the region's largest intersections, say officials with the state Department of Transportation.

The project is expected to take two years. When it's finished, the intersection will have 10 lanes on each side, more than doubling what's there now.

Reporter Kevin Wiatrowski can be reached at (813) 948-4201 or kwiatrowski@tampatrib.com.

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