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Pasco's 'Burst' Too Big For Fast Fix, Expert Says

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By KEVIN WIATROWSKI

kwiatrowski@tampatrib.com

Published: January 31, 2009

SAN ANTONIO - The good news, economist Mark Vitner told Pasco County business leaders Friday, is the recession should bottom out at the end of this year.

The bad news, he said, is that Pasco will take longer to recover than other areas because of its earlier dependence on the housing market for economic growth.

"The boom was bigger here. The bust was bigger," Vitner told the group gathered at Tampa Bay Golf and Country Club for the keynote luncheon of the West Pasco Chamber of Commerce's Business Development Week.

The county's oversupply of vacant housing lots - decades' worth of them, according to last year's study by the Urban Land Institute - has put the county in a tough situation economically.

"It's going to take a while to clean this up," Vitner said.

Vitner, senior economist for Charlotte, N.C.-based Wachovia Corp., has been widely quoted over the years, first on the topic of the housing buildup and now on its calamitous decline. He was a guest of the Pasco Economic Development Council, which hosted the lunch.

Vitner's audience included developers, county commissioners and their senior staffers, sheriff's office officials, real estate agents and other members of the business community.

Development council President Mary Jane Stanley had mixed emotions about Vitner's forecast.

"I don't think it's everything we wanted to hear," she said. "But it does shed light on things for us."

Vitner compared the current economic situation to a car leaving the road along North Carolina's Blue Ridge Parkway. Last fall's failure of Lehman Brothers investment house turned a momentary slide onto the shoulder of the road into a trip through the guardrail, he said.

In the coming months, the economy will slide down the mountainside, coming to a halt late in 2010.

"At the end of the recession, we'll be in a ditch looking for our cell phone to call" AAA, Vitner said, continuing his metaphor. The long climb out of the ditch could take until 2012, he said.

In the short term, however, job losses and economic performance are likely to get worse in the first quarter of 2009, he said.

"And after that, things will get progressively less bad," he said, prompting a kind of groaning laughter from his audience.

Vitner reminded his audience that things aren't nearly as bad as they might think.

"If we were in a depression, we wouldn't have been able to have this lunch," he said.

Reporter Kevin Wiatrowski can be reached at (813) 948-4201.

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