The mystery about what grocery store might be coming to The Grove at Wesley Chapel has brewed for more than a year, since it was first teased on social media, but the answer finally may be close to being unveiled.
According to records filed with Pasco County, potential unnamed developers will meet with county planners Oct. 18 in a pre-application meeting.
The preliminary plan filed with the county reveals a 147,000-sq.-ft. retail building, with nearly 500 parking spots located on the parcel of land just south of The Grove’s main property, right across Pink Flamingo Ln. from Cost Plus World Market.
The bad news — if that is the size of the building, you can likely rule out any of the trendy and hip grocery store ideas bandied about online. The square footage of the proposed building is more than twice what you would find at any Publix, Sprouts, Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s.
If The Grove still plans on adding a grocery store component to its massive redevelopment, then we are conjecturing that all signs seem to point to a Super Target, a combo of a regular Target store that sells the usual clothing and other household items, combined with a full-size grocery store.
Neighborhood News graphic with conceptual plans overlayed on a Google map.
According to Target.com, the average Target is roughly 130,000 square feet, with some ranging to over 200,000 square feet.
However, there already is another Super Target in Wesley Chapel, located at the corner of County Line Rd. and Bruce B. Downs Blvd., although proximity to their other stores doesn’t stop big names like Publix, Walmart or Starbucks. And, with the S.R. 54 corridor the future home of thousands of new homes and apartments, there would be still be enough of a second Super Target to go around.
According to The Grove, nothing has been signed with any grocer, so we’ll have to wait and see.
If the grocery store plans have been scrapped entirely — we don’t think they have — than your guess to what the large retail building might be is as good as ours.
Angie Ng, top left, celebrates swimming the length of the Loch Ness Lake with her team of friends, and poses in front of the stories lake the day before the swim. (Photos: Courtesy of Angie Ng)
As it turns out, there is a Loch Ness monster.
Her name is Angie Ng.
Swimming the final 1,500 meters on a four-person relay, after already logging 6,000 meters on two previous legs, Angie (above) churned her arms and fluttered her legs faster than she ever remembered, cutting through the famous Scottish Lake Loch Ness, the seconds ticking away.
When she finally reached the end, tripping and falling on the rock-covered beach, the Seven Oaks resident had helped set a Loch Ness record for a 4-person relay team in the 23-mile long lake.
Not bad for a 52-year-old mother of two.
Angie, and her friends Eliza Chang, Ryan Leung and Chun Kong Mak, finished the July 27 swim in the frigid lake in 11 hours, 29 minutes, 27 seconds. The British Long Distance Swimming Association still needs to certify the record, but for now it tops the 11:38.20 mark set in 2019 by a four-person all-male team.
“Two days before the swim, we realized breaking the record was doable,” Angie says. “But our goal was just to complete a skin swim (without a wet suit) in the cold Loch. We tried our best and are very happy with the results.”
It was an eventful final leg.
Angie, who didn’t think she would be needed again after her two previous legs, was told by one of the observers she needed to swim the final 1,500m. Oh, and she had to do it in roughly 38 minutes if they wanted to set a record.
“At that moment, I realized the burden to break the record has landed on a 52-year-old mom who has not been competing in 30 years, and who just re-started training barely six months ago,” Angie says.
Those months of doing laps in the early morning at the Seven Oaks Clubhouse pool were about to pay off. It was a tough swim – the current seemed to be taking her to the right, so much so that, at one point, the boat had to move from her left side to her right to keep her from swimming into a channel where there were other boats.
“I sprint and I sprint,” Angie says, adding that she focused on her breathing and keeping her shoulders loose.
She swam the final 200 meters alone, as the boat could go no further, due to the depth of the lake.
Because her luggage was lost when she arrived in Scotland, Angie was without her contact lenses and prescription goggles. She says that all she could see was a big patch of yellow, which was the beach, “and I was told just swim straight into it. So I swam and swam, yet the beach was so near yet so far, like it can never be reached.”
She finally saw some rocks on the lake floor, and crawled and fell and crawled and fell again across the slippery rocks on the shore. When she was completely on shore and not touching any water, the swim was officially over.
“I raised my arms, signaled to the boat and there, we completed our marvelous Loch Ness swim,” Angie said.
Not only did Angie finish her swim in borrowed goggles, she was fortunate enough to get the last one-piece swimsuit in her size from Primark, a discount store, for six pounds, or seven U.S. dollars.
Angie has been swimming since she was 3 years old, her mother starting her in the pool to combat her bronchitis. She continued to swim as she grew up, competing on the Chinese National Team in international and Junior Olympic events.
Angie trained for her swim almost every day at the Seven Oaks clubhouse pool.
She also swam competitively for two years at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, before work, marriage and children took her out of the pool.
Despite participating in the mile-long Hong Kong Cross Harbour Race in 2016 and 2018, the last year the event was held due to Covid (until resuming in December 2021), she barely has had time to get in the pool.
But, now that daughter Kristen is at the University of Central Florida and son Kelvin is at the University of Washington (in Seattle), Angie’s mornings are free for swimming.
She just needed a mission.
In January, she found one when Eliza called with the crazy idea to swim Loch Ness. Angie eagerly jumped into training to be part of the first relay team from Hong Kong to even attempt the challenge.
While Angie trained at the 89º Seven Oaks pool, the water in Loch Ness averages around 59º in July. It was 55-57º during her swim.
Because she was rusty, she could only swim 500 meters when she started training, but soon added more distance, with 24 laps becoming 250 laps and more this summer. Most days she swam 5,000 meters, or a little more than three miles, and even managed a few longer (10,000m) workouts.
In preparation for chilly Loch Ness, she filled her bathtub at home with ice and water 3-4 times a week, taking 15-minute soaks hoping it would prepare her for the lake.
Angie and her team started a Facebook page documenting their preparation, and to raise money for charity. A nurse practitioner at the University of South Florida, Angie is donating 100% of her portion to Doctors Without Borders.
As for Nessie, Angie can’t be sure if Loch Ness’s famed monster was around or not, because she didn’t have her goggles.
But, if Nessie was there, she wasn’t the only monster in Loch Ness that day.
JD Porter isn’t looking to develop Wiregrass Ranch with just anything.
He wants earth-shakers and difference-makers. He wants heart-stoppers and jaw-droppers.
He wants unicorns.
AdventHealth Wesley Chapel? That was a unicorn.
“No one believed that was happening,” he says of Wesley Chapel’s first hospital.
The Shops at Wiregrass?
“I don’t think our family thought that was possible,” he says of Wesley Chapel’s first mall.
Pasco Hernando State College? The Wiregrass Ranch Sports Campus? Raymond James Financial (which chose Wiregrass Ranch out of 78 different sites, according to Porter)? And, most recently, Orlando Hospital (see story on pg. 4)?
Unicorns.
“Every time there’s been something that would be the holy grail, whether by chance or we’ve just done things the right way or a combination of both, we’ve gotten them,” Porter says. “Then, when you get them, you’re like, ‘okay, what’s next?’”
Those unicorns, which have provided jobs and people to the area, now surround what will be the centerpiece of the 5,100-acre Wiregrass Ranch Development of Regional Impact (DRI) — the long-awaited Wiregrass Ranch Town Center.
Porter says the Wiregrass DRI, which is being developed by his family’s Locust Branch, LLC, and extends from S.R. 56 north to S.R. 54, and west to east from Bruce B. Downs (BBD) Blvd. to Meadow Pointe Blvd., will soon have its biggest missing piece.
While it doesn’t have any publicly announced tenants just yet, Porter and Scott Sheridan, the chief operating officer of Locust Branch, LLC, are making the kind of careful choices that will cement the roughly 100-acre Town Center as what they expect to be the downtown area of not only Wesley Chapel, but north Tampa as well.
“We are laying the groundwork,” says Sheridan. “We are having active conversations with users who will be a key part of the Town Center. It’s all about finding the right blend.”
There are plenty of options, and Porter and Sheridan are in no rush to make any of them.
“No town center, no downtown has had this much space set aside ahead of time,” Porter says. “In today’s environment, there’s nobody that would sit on property that valuable in order to let it grow We’ve already started planning by how we’ve oversized it in order to see what it actually could be, versus what can we throw in here just because we sold everything around it. That, to me, makes it much more attractive as a canvas. Nothing is forced.”
The map above shows the approximate location of the planned Wiregrass Ranch Town Center.
One major component of the Town Center, which Porter hasn’t mentioned before, will be a potential four-year college, keeping with the education corridor concept hatched years ago along Mansfield Blvd. (home to an elementary and high school and Pasco Hernando State College, a two-year institution).
“I think (a 4-year college) would be a great fit,” he says. “It would benefit everyone in the county.”
Porter also says that he’d like to see an ethnic grocery store, maybe a local butcher, baker and seafood guy, among a large assortment of small family-run businesses.
“I want it to be somewhere you go if you want something authentic,“ he says. “Where people don’t mind paying a little extra for something real.”
Porter wants plenty of civic uses. He says he’d like to see someone relocate their Master’s degree, MBA or nursing programs to the Town Center. According to Porter, Pasco County already has asked to reserve 75,000 sq. ft. of office space at the site in order to build a county center.
Also exciting are the possibilities – and there’s already been talks — of mid-rise buildings with structure parking.
“That changes the skyscape,” Porter says. “It changes what we’re going to look like. It’ll be done better than anyone else in the county….and in North Tampa, by far.”
Restaurants, Too
When it comes to restaurants, high-end establishments like Cooper’s Hawk, which will open next year, will be chosen over many of the national chains you see on the west side of I-75. In fact, Porter says he can see another 5-6 restaurants coming to Wiregrass Ranch in the same category as Cooper’s Hawk.
Although he can’t say which ones until later this year and early next year, he says to get a good idea, take a look at some of the more upscale restaurants along Boy Scout Rd. in the Westshore area of Tampa, where you’ll see at least two or three restaurants that will be coming to Wiregrass Ranch in the future.
“We’re looking at higher caliber and quality,” says Sheridan. “We’ve turned down quite a few places and elevating who we’re talking to.”
Sheridan says some smaller restaurants that will bring a more local hometown feel also fit into the plans. Both Porter and Sheridan say finding the right balance between big and small, and local and national, is the key to building a successful Town Center.
When it comes to preserving the country feel of his family’s land, Porter says “We will create something everyone talks about, but never delivers. We’ve probably spent as much time planning that out as what the streetscape will look like.”
And, for those who worry that brick and mortar is going to one day envelop the remaining country charm of Wiregrass Ranch, Porter says he is not just giving lip service to making sure plenty of the land he grew up on survives.
“There’s going to be programmed green space throughout the Town Center,” he says. “We will create something everyone talks about, but never delivers. We’ve probably spent as much time planning that out as what the streetscape will look like. It’s ever-changing. We’ve got the ability to do some really creative stuff. It will shine in a way that nothing else has, I think that’s fair to say.”
With careful direction — “It’s critical that it comes off as well-designed,” Sheridan says — Wiregrass Ranch’s Town Center is set up to succeed.
With housing developments like Esplanade 55+ (860 homes), Estancia (1,184), Persimmon Park (450) and an entirely new, yet-to-be-named 2,000-home subdivision to be built east of Wiregrass Ranch Blvd. behind the proposed Town Center, there will be plenty of customers for whatever Porter brings to town.
“The most important aspect of getting this stuff is making sure that you’re not only successful on a Thursday and Friday night, but that you’re staying busy as hell all the time,” he says. “When your doors are open, you’re all packed up. That’s the thing we’re addressing way more than anybody else in the county.”
To feed those future retail and commercial tenants, the Town Center will receive the benefit of foot traffic from Orlando Hospital and Raymond James Financial employees, which will number more than 5,000 once both places are built, a sports campus that already attracts thousands of athletes and their parents every month, not to mention the schools and a mall that will be walking and biking distance away.
And, that doesn’t even include the rest of the Wesley Chapel, Zephyrhills and New Tampa residents that are within a short drive. In fact, from K-Bar Ranch in New Tampa to the proposed Town Center will be less than a 10-minute drive.
Patience, Porter says, will soon pay off for everyone in Wesley Chapel.
“As soon as you see Orlando Hospital start doing stuff, you’re going to start seeing the infrastructure in the Town Center come at the same time,” Porter says. “Then, it becomes a reality vs. we have cow pens there now. It becomes easier to sell it. Now that we have an announcement, now that we have permitting, we’re actually set up to start telling a significant story.”
New signs and crossings will bring added safety to the Compton Dr. intersection with Tampa Palms Blvd., one of Tampa Palms’ most dangerous, according to the City of Tampa.
The City of Tampa may have had some grander plans for Tampa Palms Blvd., but after some back and forth with residents, the road to getting the project completed appears to be…well…paved.
A second online presentation by the city went better than the first and, barring any major changes, the plans for repaving and adding safety enhancements to Tampa Palms Blvd. should be ready by October. If the city can settle on two contractors — bids are in, so it should be a timely process — for the roadwork, the $3-million-plus project should begin sometime in the first half of 2023, if not sooner, and will be completed by the end of next year.
One full-depth reclamation project contractor will be hired to basically churn up the base material, take out all of the old asphalt and repack it, while a paving contractor will “come in and makes it look all pretty,” said Cal Hardie, the City of Tampa’s capital projects manager, who added that the repaving should only take roughly three months.
“The good news is that Mayor Jane Castor has put some ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act Grant Program) money into the project, so we’re able to expedite the repaving,” Hardie told those participating in the online presentation. “It’s a high priority.”
The repaving of Tampa Palms Blvd. will go forward in two segments — the south loop (or Segment 1), which runs from the north intersection of Bruce B. Downs (BBD) Blvd. to the south intersection through Tampa Palms Area 3, and the north loop, or Segment 2, which runs from the south intersection of BBD to Ebensburg Dr. in Tampa Palms Area 2.
Not only will the road — which is showing its nearly-40-year-old (in some sections) age and has been labeled “failed” by a few city officials — be repaved, a number of enhancements will be added in the hopes of addressing a number of concerns, including speeding, intersection safety, pedestrian access and school pick-ups and drop-offs.
The multimodal paths, used by pedestrians, skaters, bikers and even golf carts, will not be reconditioned as part of the project.
“We only have the budget for inside the curbs,” Hardie said. “I’m reserving funds because construction costs are skyrocketing. Even though we have a healthy budget, I’m actually a little nervous about being able to fund everything once the bids come in. There is no extra money.”
The city is proposing narrowing the width of the four road lanes to 10 feet each, making room for 2-foot striped buffer on the outside of each lane (curb and median sides).
And, while residents previously shot down the idea of losing a lane which would have made room for a dedicated bike path, there will be shared lane markings added to the outside lanes as a reminder to drivers that bicyclists also may use the lanes.
Hardie said the biggest and most common complaints the city receives about Tampa Palms Blvd. is speeding. The speed limits in various parts of the 4-mile loop are 35 and 40 miles per hour, and the city is recommending a 35 mph speed limit throughout.
There likely will be speed tables or removable street cushions placed at key locations. The removable street cushions are rubber speed tables that are uniquely spaced to allow emergency vehicles (with their wider wheel base) and bikes to pass through unimpeded. If it is determined they would be effective in a different area, they can be easily transferred, unlike your typical cement speed table.
Hardie said enhanced crossings will be added throughout the road at key points. He showed a map that had four marked crossings, and two marked crossings with Rectangular Rapid Flashing Beacons, or RRFBs, at Compton Dr. (southern intersection) and Tampa Palms Trail (the TECO easement). However, since the trail at the TECO easement is not an official road and is on private property, a few residents suggested moving the RRFB to another location, with which Hardie said he agreed.
RRFBs are pedestrian-activated, and Hardie said St. Petersburg installed quite a few of them and found that they were effective in increasing the numbers of cars yielding for pedestrians.
“They (RRFBs) do work very well,” Hardie said.
RRFBs will be a good option at Compton Dr. and Tampa Palms Blvd., which Hardie says is the most dangerous intersection along the roadway. A roundabout was suggested by a few residents.
“A roundabout is not off the table,” Hardie said, “but, with safety needs across the city, we’d have to have a crash history study to fund a roundabout because they are quite expensive. We’re not saying no, but they are not a part of this project.”
The residents online for the presentation, which was followed by a Q-n-A session, seemed in favor of most of what Hardie had to say, a far cry from the first online presentation in September 2021. At that presentation, Hardie pitched the idea to convert the four-lane Tampa Palms Blvd. into two lanes — one in each direction — as a traffic-calming measure. That concept, however, was soundly rejected by residents, who sent more than 100 emails of displeasure to the city.
Despite a number of serious challenges the past few years, New Tampa’s schools continue to be among the best performing in the state.
The Florida Department of Education (FDOE) released its school grades for the 2021-22 academic year, and seven of the area’s 11 schools received “A” grades.
New Tampa’s elementary schools went 6-for-6 when it came to receiving A grades, thanks to two schools that haven’t received the top grade for a while.
Heritage Elementary, which ended a string of four straight years with C grades, received its first A grade since 2012. And, Hunter’s Green Elementary received its first A grade since 2011.
The other four elementary schools — Chiles, Clark, Pride and Tampa Palms — also received A grades, continuing their long-term trends.
Pride and Chiles have never received less than an A, beginning with their first grades in 2002 and 2003, respectively. Clark has received As every year since 2001, while Tampa Palms incredibly has earned all As since 1999.
Benito Middle School received its 19th straight A, and its total score of 610 was tops among all of New Tampa’s schools. The total scores are determined by adding the testing scores in a variety of categories — including English Language Arts, Math, Science, Social Studies and others.
Liberty Middle School got a B grade, down from last year’s A, while Turner-Bartels K-8 School received its fifth straight B.
Both area high schools, Wharton and Freedom, received C grades for the fifth consecutive year.
Grades were up throughout Hillsborough County, which achieved top-20 status among Florida’s 67 school districts following the release of school accountability data, as 100% of the schools that graded F in 2019 improved their grades in 2022.
NOTE: No grades were given in 2020, and 2021 grades were optional.
