Pasco tries to plan for future growth

Mired in the aftermath of the housing meltdown, Pasco County commissioners are scouting a new path away from a dependence on sprawling residential growth for revenue toward a more balanced economy.

County officials want to channel future growth into a central urban core that could support mass transit, in part, by transferring development rights from rural areas that would be preserved. They also hope to increase sales taxes to fund buses and light rail and want to lure more high-income jobs to areas near major highway interchanges.

It's a long-term effort that could have more effect on children just starting kindergarten than on their parents and grandparents. The fate of the plans county officials are just starting to discuss, though, may lie outside of Pasco.

The outcome of two referendums next November - Hometown Democracy's statewide drive to put all land-use changes on the ballot and Hillsborough County's vote on a proposal sales tax hike to support transit - could determine how successful Pasco will be in reinventing itself.

Pasco officials are rushing to get crucial land-use changes passed before the Hometown Democracy vote. They're also seeking state permission to launch their own transit-related sales tax hike a decade from now.

In the meantime, they're banking on Hillsborough's plans for light rail. The first leg of that system could be up and running by 2018.

The early phases of the rail line would link Westshore, which is near Tampa International Airport, downtown Tampa and the University of South Florida. Pasco commissioners envision that rail system coming up Bruce B. Downs Boulevard from USF to Wesley Chapel in 20 years. They expect light rail to help convert Pasco's miles of gated subdivisions and strip centers into a more concentrated pattern of growth.

Reinventing Pasco

Transit is just one element of the broader strategy to remake Pasco in the coming decades.

"We're reinventing Pasco," Commissioner Ann Hildebrand said. "We're going to have to have the political will to get things done."

Pasco officials have decided to move ahead on their own, without the security of knowing what the Legislature and Hillsborough will do. But County Administrator John Gallagher said he's willing to take that risk.

"I would prefer that we take bits of this so we can plan our own destiny," Gallagher said. "If we're successful, we could be the model."

Next year could be when Pasco swears off runaway residential development in favor of smart growth. That strategy calls for more focused developments that grow up - not out - and blend living and working, particularly along the county's southern border.

Along U.S. 19, commissioners see the need to redevelop aging structures such as Gulf View Square mall and decades-old neighborhoods where families have replaced retirees.

A model of what the county wants is under construction at Connerton in Land O' Lakes. County officials recreated an entirely new zoning category, New Town, enabling developer Stew Gibbons to build a community that concentrates homes, business centers and recreation.

Gibbons, past president of the Pasco Economic Development Council, has become a vocal advocate for reimagining Pasco's coming decades. Gibbons, who attended a four-hour workshop Tuesday where county officials laid out their strategy for 2020 and beyond, said now is the time to act.

"As long as people have choices, we can make it work," Gibbons said.

Pasco had help getting on the smart growth wagon. The collapse of the housing market cut off the flow of money that built new roads, extended utility lines and replaced grazing cattle with cul-de-sacs. And the credit crunch made borrowing from the municipal bond markets almost impossible.

A glut of approved housing prompted the state Department of Community Affairs, which oversees growth, to warn Pasco against seeking clearance for more any time soon.

Last year's visit by the Urban Land Institute was a kind of intervention that showed county officials just where the county stood: enough approved housing to last 60 years, a lack of commercial and industrial land ready for large employers and a development process so convoluted ULI officials struggled to understand it.

In the 18 months since the ULI visit, county officials have pledged to clean up their act. They've begun streamlining the jumbled rules that govern growth. They've set aside $2 million to lure major employers to Pasco and another half-million to help existing businesses expand. And they've earmarked two highway corridors - U.S. 19 and S.R. 54-56 - as the places where they'll focus future growth, possibly by shifting development from more rural areas.

A dramatic change

Pasco's new strategy represents a dramatic change from the approach county officials have followed for decades, an approach that left many development decisions in the hands of builders and landowners. This new mindset calls for county officials, who have long deferred to landowners' property rights, to take more control over where development happens and what shape it takes.

The new approach will take political will and support from "aggressive advocates" amid the general public, Growth Management Director Richard Gehring has told commissioners.

"These things are easy to say," Gehring said. "They're hard to do."

Which brings us back to that prospective rail line from Tampa.

If demographers' predictions pan out, Pasco could add 250,000 more residents in the next 20 years. That will make gridlock the likeliest outcome of a transportation strategy focused on cars, highway planners say.

County officials see commuter rail as the key to linking bedrooms in Pasco with jobs in Hillsborough without turning the roads in between into 10-lane highways.

At the same time, commissioners want to turn Pasco from a county that exports workers to one that keep them close to home or even lures some from neighboring counties.

Commissioners are still crowing over their big catch this summer: T. Rowe Price, which announced plans to build a 100-acre campus at S.R. 54 and Sunlake Boulevard that could eventually bring 1,600 financial planning jobs here. Commissioners want more companies such as T. Rowe Price to take root along the S.R. 54-S.R. 56 corridor, putting those jobs within easy reach of commuters from the south and Tampa International Airport.

Pasco's transportation planning committee - comprised of county commissioners and the mayors of New Port Richey, Port Richey, Dade City and Zephyrhills - this month proposed a $9.3 billion outline of the county's transportation needs through 2035.

Roads will get 80 percent of the money with the rest going to buses, bikes, sidewalks and, eventually, light rail. The largest chunk of that $9.3 billion will come from impact fees on new construction and from the expanded sales taxes for which county officials are hoping. County officials hope to offset some of that local money with more federal funding, commission Chairman Jack Mariano said.

County commissioners are asking state Sen. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey, for a bill next session that would let them and the other junior partners in the Tampa Bay Regional Transportation Authority expand their county sales taxes to build local legs of the proposed Tampa commuter rail.

If Fasano succeeds, Pasco officials would put their transit tax referendum to voters in 2020 with an eye toward having rail moving through Wesley Chapel by 2025.

Like the leaders of TBARTA, Pasco officials are taking their cue from Charlotte, N.C., and other metropolitan areas that have begun the shift toward light rail. Pasco and Hillsborough officials made a day trip to Charlotte to ride those rails and see how they're reinventing the neighborhoods around them.

ULI consultant Michael Maxwell of Miami, who sharply criticized Pasco officials last year, praised them last week for rewriting their future.

"The economic slowdown is the time for people to change things," Maxwell said. "This is a clarion call for change."