Congratulations To Freedom High’s Class of 2018 Valedictorian & Salutatorian


Catherine Weng says she’s never been interviewed before. She has, however, conducted plenty of interviews, as the editor of Freedom’s school newspaper, Revolution.

That’s far from her only role, however. The Class of 2018 Freedom High valedictorian is the definition of well-rounded.

She loves to dance and has studied at the Jansen Dance Project in Tampa Palms since middle school. She’s president of Freedom’s math honor society, Mu Alpha Theta, and has participated in competitions for that club since she was a freshman. She’s also the president of a club she created at Freedom for students who want to learn American Sign Language. Catherine also says she loves to bake, especially cookies and birthday cakes. Oh, and she has a part-time job as a tutor.

Catherine has finished her high school career with an impressive GPA of 8.9. She boosted her GPA well above a “perfect” 4.0 with a combination of honors, Advanced Placement (AP) and dual enrollment (DE) classes, which varied from computer programming classes to astronomy, to American Sign Language, which she really enjoys and isn’t offered at Freedom.

She says she got her first B this year in AP Spanish, where the challenge of being the only non-native speaker has made it hard to understand the wide variety of accents and vocabulary among those in her class. But, she says she doesn’t regret the hard class, “I really like linguistics,” she says. “I speak English and Chinese at home.”

Catherine is part of a large, blended family, and she says she’s especially close to her older sister Diana, who has earned both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Florida in Gainesville. Diana is still a student at UF, now working toward her Ph.D. in Accounting.

Knowing Catherine’s love of baking, Diana tried to sweeten the deal to get her sister to choose her school.

“She promised me a stand mixer if I came to UF,” Catherine laughs.

Despite exploring options as far away as New York and Seattle, Catherine ultimately decided to join her sister at Florida. She is a Bright Futures scholarship recipient, National Merit Scholarship finalist and a recipient of the Benacquisto Scholarship, which provides incentives for high- achieving students to go to a state university in Florida.

“I have such a good opportunity at UF,” she says. “I’m proud to say I’m a Gator.”

Given Catherine’s love for such a broad range of activities, it shouldn’t be surprising that she hasn’t quite nailed down what she’ll major in at UF. She’ll be in UF’s Honor College, and says she’ll most likely be a business major.

As Catherine leaves high school, she says she will take with her a philosophy to try to absorb the best things from the people around her.

“I’ve made a lot of amazing friends,” she says. “They have different skilIs and virtues and amazing things about them. I don’t know if I just got lucky to be at Freedom or if people are amazing everywhere.”

She’s about to find out about the people in Gainesville, at least.

“I’m happy to go to a ridiculously big school,” she says. “I’ll never run out of people to meet or things to do.”

Salutatorian Alejandro Michel
Freedom’s Salutatorian is Alejandro Michel, who had a GPA of 8.8. Alejandro also is a well-rounded student, who has excelled in both academics and athletics.

On Saturday, May 4, Alejandro graduated from Hillsborough Community College in the morning, after earning enough credits through dual enrollment classes — while a student at Freedom — to receive his Associate of Arts (AA) degree.

After the ceremony, he traveled to Jacksonville for the Florida Class 4A High School Track & Field State Championships, qualifying this year for the first time. He is primarily a cross country runner, but found success running track this spring, as he moved on from excellent finishes at the District and Regional meets to run in the State meet, too.

Before attending Freedom, both Alejandro and Catherine attended Liberty Middle School and before that, both attended Chiles Elementary, also in Tampa Palms, since kindergarten.

They have something else in common, too. As Alejandro heads off to Florida State University in Tallahassee, he is choosing to go to school with his brother, Max, who graduated from Middleton High and HCC this spring, as well.

“We plan to have our own apartment together, close enough to ride a bike to campus,” Alejandro says. “I’ve been riding my bike to school since Chiles and I want to keep doing that.”

Alejandro says he has two main loves — running and math. At FSU, he plans to major in statistics and minor in computer science. He is on an accelerated track so that he will finish both his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in just three years.

He says for his junior and senior year, he’s taken three math classes every semester, including AP Statistics, AP Calculus A/B and B/C, Calculus II and III and others. This year, he needed one more class at Freedom to keep his full-time status, so he chose Honors Trigonometry. “The teacher knows the level of math I have and lets me teach the class sometimes,” he says.

Alejandro intends to become an actuary — a mathematician who specializes in risk and probability. “Really, I would have loved to be a math teacher or professor,” he says, “but there’s a work/life balance you can get with being an actuary, working only 40 hours a week.”

He thinks that will leave him with enough time and financial stability to also pursue a career as a professional runner, with the flexibility to continue to train and run.

He says that on his journey so far, he’s learned about pursuing his passion and how that leads to success.

“Do you just want to be successful, or do you really enjoy waking up every day and getting out there and having a runner’s high?,” he asks. “You have to love the process, not just the idea of being successful.”

New Tampa Weighs In On Traffic, Parks & More At New Tampa Council Meeting

To District 7 Tampa City councilman Luis Viera, there is nothing like the sight of a filled room for one of his town halls and New Tampa Council meetings.
This time, on May 2, it was the Jeri Zelinski Community Room at the New Tampa Regional Library, which was filled with local residents with questions about water, fire and emergency service, traffic and future developments.

But mostly, traffic.

Hillsborough’s countywide District 5 Commissioner Ken Hagan — who is running for the District 2 seat that represents all of New Tampa — was the guest at the May 2 New Tampa Council meeting. Viera actually had to recuse himself and leave the room halfway through the meeting when the discussion turned to an issue — the connection of Kinnan St. to Mansfield Blvd. (see stories on pages 1 & 4-5) about which he had a hearing the next day.

What did you miss?
Here’s some of the more interesting tidbits from the hour-long meeting:

Parks, Parks & More Parks
Comm. Hagan was asked about building a cricket field in the area, which turned into a conversation about the progress of a park on 50-plus acres of land in K-Bar Ranch. Hagan said the park will be paid for by the county — which has already set aside $5 million for the project, he added — but will be maintained and run by the City of Tampa in a rare city-county collaboration.

Ken Hagan

He says the park has the blessing of Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn, and the two parties are working on a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), a non-binding agreement that lays out the terms, details and each party’s responsibilities as they pertain to the park.
As for the what amenities the park would offer, Hagan is unsure. He said, however, that sports fields will not be one of them. At one point, an athletic complex was envisioned, but according to the commissioner, “the city felt that was too intense.”

Another park, this one a public-private venture, is planned for the Branchton Park area, south and west of the intersection of Cross Creek Blvd. and Morris Bridge Rd.

The county bought 10 acres of land for $1.17 million to complete its holdings in the Branchton Park area and open the way for development, as reported last November in the New Tampa Neighborhood News.

Hagan said he is hoping for a creative project. He also said that he expects there will be some commercial development on the corner of Cross Creek Blvd. and Morris Bridge Rd., with the developer funding a lot of the potential amenities, like a splash pad, dog park or zip line.
Hagan also said that he is excited about the The Village at Hunter’s Lake project across the street from Hunter’s Green, saying it will break ground in October. As for the New Tampa Cultural Center, he said that planned jewel will be opening in 2020.

“It will be a centerpiece for the community,’’ Hagan said.

The Zombie Road Returns?
Plans to build a 3-mile East-West Road (E-W Rd.) connecting New Tampa Blvd. and I-275 died in 2008, but it never fails to draw some conversation at Viera’s New Tampa Council and town hall meetings.

That’s probably because some local residents remain convinced it would actually help solve some of New Tampa’s current traffic woes. As originally proposed, the E-W Rd. would direct traffic through West Meadows and connect from where the Gateway Bridge ends at Commerce Park Blvd. in Tampa Palms to a new interchange on I-275. The roadway was expected to help decrease the delays at the I-75/S.R. 56, I-75/BBD, and I-275/Bearss Ave. interchanges.

As Hagan recalled, most of New Tampa was in favor of the road, but residents of West Meadows and Tampa Palms Areas 4 & 8, where the road was proposed to go through, banded together as a formidable opposition group.

There were other problems with the proposed road as well, from environmental concerns to whether or not to make it a toll road.
“I would still support taking a look at it and making another run at it,” said Hagan, whose parents lived in West Meadows at the time, but still supported the E-W Rd. “I can certainly see how that would relieve a significant amount of congestion.”

At the other end of the same road, Hagan also was asked if there are any plans to extend Cross Creek Blvd. to U.S. 301, but he said there are not.
“When you look at our unfunded list of projects, priority-wise that would be pretty far down the list,” he said.

The same goes for widening Morris Bridge Rd., north of Cross Creek Blvd. Although it is a constrained road and currently prohibited from being widened due to environmental concerns, with the extension of S.R. 56 and the continued development in K-Bar Ranch in that area, the two-lane, well-worn Morris Bridge Rd. has “future problem” written all over it.

Surprisingly, no one complained about the intersection of Cross Creek Blvd. and BBD, which continues to be a major nuisance for commuters in peak hours, although the City of Tampa is currently studying it.

A BBD Pedestrian Bridge?
The idea of a pedestrian bridge, or a foot bridge, crossing over BBD from Live Oak Preserve (or even the Pebble Creek area) was presented again by Sigrun Ragnarsdottir and, is it just us, or does it make more and more sense every time it is brought up?

Think of it — a bridge for students to be able to walk, ride a bike or otherwise cross over an extremely congested road to get safely to Wharton High. It would be safer than relying on traffic lights — and the common sense of drivers probably holding their cell phones in one hand — to cross BBD, and surely more parents would let their kids walk or bike to school, reducing the number of cars piling up on BBD for drop-off and pick up.

Yes, a pedestrian bridge recently collapsed in Miami, and the cost of construction probably kills any chance of making this happen. But, when you look at the other high schools in Hillsborough County, there are aren’t any others – even Chamberlain (Busch Blvd.), Plant (Dale Mabry), Sickles (Gunn Highway) — where the majority of its local students have to cross a busier and more dangerous road than BBD to get to and from school.

Police On The Radar?
As the population of New Tampa continues to grow, so does the need for a police substation in the area, according to a few local residents.
Viera said that, at the moment, however, a police substation is a “want…whether or not it’s a need is a point of distinction.” He added, however, that the idea of a police substation is on his radar.

“It’s something that, as we see more growth in this area , we are going to want to take a look at because right now, we’ve pretty much got police hanging out at 7-11, and that’s not the most amenable plan,” he said.

Hagan said a Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO) substation is being put at a new park in Carrollwood he is championing, and then it hit him — maybe it’s something that could be done at the proposed K-Bar Ranch park. “I hadn’t thought of that before,’’ he said.

The Elephant In The Room
You kind of got the feeling from the start that people were just killing time waiting for someone to bring up the whole Kinnan-Mansfield thing, and of course, it came up.
Short recap: Nothing has changed.
Hagan wants it connected, and said it was a travesty that the issue has dragged on this long. It appeared everyone in the room pretty much agreed.
Someone in attendance joked about sneaking in there and connecting them overnight, another said they could just borrow the equipment being used to widen BBD, and another suggested a boycott of Wiregrass Ranch businesses.
Judging by our stories on pages 1 and 4, however, it is a situation that hopefully is entering its endgame this summer.

City Council Puts Hold On K-Bar Expansion

Craig Margelowsky says he is one of many residents of K-Bar Ranch that would prefer to see more roads built before allowing more homes.  The Tampa City Council agrees. (Photo: John C. Cotey)

 

Stop!

That’s the message from Tampa’s City Council, which is tapping the brakes – something quite familiar to New Tampa residents trying to get around our already congested roads — on allowing any more new homes to be built in K-Bar Ranch, at least until there is a way for the people that buy those homes to leave the community in their automobiles.

Ideally, the city says, connector roads into Pasco County would help reduce some of the transportation issues facing New Tampa.
At the City Council’s May 3 meeting in downtown Tampa, District 7’s Luis Viera led the charge have the Council postpone a decision to allow 698 more homes to be built in K-Bar Ranch, located in the northeast corner of New Tampa between Kinnan St. and Morris Bridge Rd.

A final vote is scheduled for Thursday, June 28.

Pasco has concluded it’s Wesley Chapel Roadway Connection study by then, which is expected to clarify some of Tampa’s issues.

That study, commissioned more than a year ago, is looking at three connections between Tampa and Wesley Chapel — at Kinnan St.-Mansfield Blvd., at K-Bar Ranch Pkwy. and Meadow Pointe Blvd., and at a two-way connection where Wyndfields Blvd. would connect to K-Bar Ranch Pkwy. as well as to Morris Bridge Rd.

Until they are agreed to, Viera says new homes will just exacerbate a major problem in the area, where residents currently only have one road (Kinnan St.) out of K-Bar Ranch.

Any connections are dependent upon the City of Tampa and Hillsborough County finding a solution to the decade-long standoff with Pasco County, which has been resistant to the idea of connecting Kinnan St. to Mansfield Blvd.

Negotiations have been, at times, very contentious.

“The way I see this is, we have a constant crisis in the New Tampa area and it’s not just the things we’ve heard today (about traffic),” Viera said at the May 3 meeting. “This is really a crisis of governments not really working together.”

Viera was the only council member who opposed the plan to build more homes in K-Bar Ranch when the first reading of the plan was held in April. But, between then and May 3, he gained an ally in District 2 councilman Charlie Miranda.

“Although I supported this the first reading, I was hoping between the first and second reading Pasco would come out of its coma,” Miranda said. “Evidently, it has not.”

Miranda lamented the speed of development in the current economic environment, without the sufficient infrastructure to support it. Those two things, he said, need to go hand in hand.

“It’s a problem for the whole area, the whole city, they whole county, the whole state, the whole country,” Miranda said. “When you do not invest in infrastructure, something is going to give….we can’t continue to have prosperity with no parking or transportation.”

The decision to delay any further development in K-Bar Ranch was greeted with a clap of the hands by Craig Margelowsky, the president of Heron Preserve in K-Bar Ranch.

“Nobody wants it,” he says of more development. “Not without the roads.”

K-Bar Ranch already has 700 homes built, with another 500 or so already approved and coming. If M/I Homes, the developer, is successful in gaining approval for another 700, more than 2,000 homes will complete K-Bar and add thousands of cars to New Tampa’s already congested roads.

A member of the New Tampa Council, Margelowsky has long been a proponent of making the connection between Kinnan St. and Mansfield Blvd., as well as pushing for speedier construction of K-Bar Ranch Pkwy., which will run from Kinnan St. east to Morris Bridge Rd. Because morning traffic currently only has one road out of K-Bar Ranch, it backs up to the point of taking residents 10-15 minutes just to get out of their neighborhoods.

An accident last month near Pride Elementary blocked traffic for 45 minutes. And last summer, Margelowsky said there were traffic jams during Hurricane Irma evacuations.

“There’s a choke point there,” he says. “There was nothing anyone could do.”

Margelowsky says he warned the city and developers last year that the roads in and around K-Bar Ranch cannot support any new homes. He told the Tampa City Council, “We can’t get out”, and asked that before issuing any more certificates of occupancy (COs), that K-Bar Ranch Pkwy. should first have to be completed out to Kinnan St.

COs, however, were issued in March of 2017 he says, but the parkway wasn’t completed to Kinnan until two months ago.

“We have 1,200 homes, and we still don’t have two exits out,” Margelowsky says. “We have Kinnan. What are we supposed to do?”

Connecting Kinnan St. and Mansfield Blvd. has been argued as one solution, but the City of Tampa is now demanding that all three connections be made.

If not, no more homes in K-Bar Ranch.

“We need to connect them all,” said Melanie Calloway, the senior transportation planning engineer for Tampa. She said the city is stipulating that if Meadow Pointe Blvd. is connected to K-Bar Ranch Pkwy — as they believe Pasco desires, — “then Kinnan gets done at the same time.”

If Pasco does not agree, then the Wyndfields Blvd. extension connections to K-Bar Ranch Pkwy. and Morris Bridge Rd. — connections that Pasco officials want to see built — will not be considered.

“We hope that it gets done,” Calloway said. “We can’t make another municipality connect to our roadways. But, we try our best to let them know we are open. All connections. Not just pick and choose. It is important for traffic distribution.”

No one on the Tampa side seems overly optimistic that all of the connections can be agreed to, but all fingers at the May 3 meeting pointed to Pasco County for being at fault.

Attorney Donna Feldman, who is representing M/I Homes, the developer, said the City of Tampa has gone out of its way to get the connections made, but Pasco “is really standing in the way.”

Feldman pointed out that the two counties were able to work together on a Sunlake Blvd. extension from Land O’Lakes in Pasco County into Hillsborough a few years ago, but can’t solve their current quandary.

“That was done cooperatively,” Feldman said. “Okay, Pasco, so what’s wrong with these? That’s the question.”

Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan, who says he has worked on connecting Kinnan-Mansfield for a decade, said that years ago, Pasco County commissioners agreed to make the Kinnan-Manfield connection.

He said at the time, he had stats showing that large numbers of Pasco County residents were flocking to New Tampa to use the recreation center, library and parks.

However, as Pasco County Dist. 2 commissioner Mike Moore has noted, the tide has turned. Because of the massive growth along the northern end of Mansfield Blvd., in Wiregrass Ranch and along S.R. 56, he doesn’t think Meadow Pointe’s residents desire or need the connection to be made anymore.

And despite the City of Tampa’s claims, he says it is Tampa that has declined to work with Pasco in the past, perhaps missing its chance.

Even at a time when metropolitan planning organizations and transportation boards in Hillsborough, Pasco and Pinellas counties seem to be urging regional cooperation and connectivity, the gap between Kinnan St. and Mansfield Blvd. continues to be more of a cavernous valley than the 30-foot patch of grass, dirt and trash that remains there.

North Tampa Bay Chamber First To Get Behind Effort To Keep Rays

Former Rays manager Lou Piniella is on the Tampa Bay Rays 2020 team.

For years, Major League Baseball (MLB)’s Tampa Bay Rays have drawn sparse crowds. Many in the Bay area have questioned the local support for the team and the Rays as an organization have apparently concluded that the team can not survive in its current St. Petersburg home at Tropicana Field.

The non-profit group Tampa Bay Rays 2020 (TBR2020), however, is working quickly to show the Rays that things will be different if the team moves to Tampa, by organizing community and business support for the Rays’ possible future move to Ybor City.

TBR2020 has enlisted the help of the North Tampa Bay (formerly Wesley Chapel) Chamber (NTBC), which was the first Chamber of Commerce to pledge its support.

“It was very strategic on their part,” says NTBC CEO Hope Allen. “They sought us out, they came to us, they knew we were a vital key to the whole corridor. A chamber like ours that represents Pasco County can help them.”

Having the NTBC sign on was just the beginning for TBR2020.

“Just in the last couple of weeks here, we’ve had four chambers sign on formally to support this initiative,” said Mike Griffin, senior managing director at Savills Studley Occupier Services and the immediate past chair of the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors. “The exciting thing about that was the first one that got behind us was the North Tampa/Wesley Chapel group. The excitement we’re seeing outside of downtown and outside of the city is really, really important. It’s good getting folks that normally aren’t at the table for major regional issues.”

Founded by Chuck Sykes, CEO of Sykes Enterprises, and Ron Christaldi, a partner at the law firm of Shumaker, Loop and Kendrick, the TBR2020 group held a standing room-only press conference last month at the Tampa Baseball Museum in historic Ybor City to announce its plans. Also last month, Jason Woody, the President/CEO of the Lions Eye Institute for Transplant & Research, Inc, and a member of the Advisory Board of Tampa Bay Rays 2020, was the featured speaker at the NTBC’s April 3 Business Breakfast.

The goal of TBR2020 is to help keep the Rays in the Bay area, by raising awareness and rounding up local community and businesses willing to pledge their support to the team’s proposed move to Ybor City, where the selected 14-acre stadium site is expected to breathe new life into that area, as well as into what is becoming a lifeless baseball franchise.

TBR2020 also announced the Rays 100, a select group of businesses and corporations willing to pledge financial support in the form of corporate boxes and sponsorships.

“This has opened up a dialogue,” Griffin said. “The biggest questions we hear now are what’s next and how can we help. The ultimate goal is to have a very diverse and vast coalition of supporters that ultimately leads to a conversation about sponsorships and tickets. It’s tough to get there, though, if we don’t know and haven’t identified our supporters.”

Rumors have swirled for years about the Rays possibly moving to a city that might offer more support. Allen is one of those who thinks that such a move would be devastating to the Tampa Bay area.

“My opinion is we need to fight hard to keep them here in the region,” Allen said. “Major league sports franchises have a huge economic impact on a region. Very significant. You don’t want to lose that.”

One issue that TBR2020 won’t be addressing, just yet anyway, is the thorniest – how to pay for a new stadium. The price of a new stadium could range anywhere from $600-800 million, though it is hard to zero in on a figure without a design. The Rays owners have pledged $150 million to the project.

“Right now, we are all about building engagement, awareness and excitement,” Griffin said. “If we couldn’t fill the Rays 100, if we couldn’t get the local organizations to endorse, it would be a totally different conversation with the county and the team. The reality is, we’ve been able to demonstrate it is the complete opposite.”

Those willing to participate can sign the online petition at TampaBayRays2020.com. 

Wesley Chapel Roadways Study Released

The long-awaited and 450-page traffic study requested by the Pasco County Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) has been posted here.

The year-long study looked at the pros and cons of connecting New Tampa’s Kinnan St. with Meadow Pointe’s Mansfield Blvd., as well as making connections from Meadow Pointe Blvd. to the not-yet-completed K-Bar Ranch Blvd., and Wyndfields Blvd. to K-Bar Ranch Blvd.

Kinnan-Mansfield was not under study to be the lone connection. The study primarily considered three connections: Kinnan-Mansfield and Meadow Pointe Blvd.; just Meadow Pointe Blvd.; and all three connections.

The study also dealt with myriad of other suggested road improvements such as repaving, widening and additional traffic signals — roughly $13.8 million worth — in the area bordered by Bruce B. Downs Blvd. to the west, Morris Bridge to the west, S.R. 56 to the north and County Line Rd. to the south.

If any connections are made, that would increase the costs to $15.4 million.

We are still making our way through the detailed and thorough report. You can read it all for yourself, or just wait until Tuesday, May 29, from 6-8 p.m. when an open house will be held at Pasco-Hernando State College, Room B-303.

Pasco County District 2 Commissioner Mike Moore and MPO Staff will provide a brief introduction, followed by a condensed version of the report that hits on the major points, and public comment session.

You also can comment here through June 15.