Research by Joel Provenzano
Earlier this year, we told you about Hillsborough County’s plans to build an indoor recreation center at Pride Park, just south of Pride Elementary.
The problem the county faced was how to fund the nearly $7 million needed to build the 16,000-sq.-ft. indoor Pride Recreation Center, which is planned to include space for basketball, volleyball, pickleball and even space for meetings, after-school programs and perhaps an outdoor splash pad.
Well, for many years, as part of the development of Live Oak Preserve, Hillsborough has owned an unused 61.89-acre parcel a little bit west and north of where the Pride Rec Center is planned that abuts the boundary between Live Oak in the county and the City of Tampa’s K-Bar Ranch/Easton Park development.
The same parcel, which is shaped like a much smaller version of the state of Nevada (see map), also extends north to the Hillsborough/Pasco County line, basically to where Kinnan St. (in the city) meets Mansfield Blvd. in Pasco — where there currently is a gated arm that only opens for emergency vehicles, as Pasco has rejected all attempts over the years to open that patch of roadway to regular vehicular traffic.
On Apr. 5 of this year, Hillsborough County sold this nearly 62-acre parcel of land — which countywide District 2 County Commissioner Ken Hagan said was not in the plans to be developed into a park by the county — to Anand Vihar, LLC, for the price of $6,001,200. It just so happens that Anand Vihar, LLC (and its development group, Convergent Capital Partners) is the same group that owned and developed the property immediately to the north, in Pasco County, as an age 55+ community by the same “Anand Vihar” name.
That Pasco-based property, which is home to a large number of doctors and engineers originally from India, was just turned over to the community’s condo association in June 2023, and is now home to 167 attached townhomes.
However, Santosh Govindaraju, the chief executive officer of Convergent Capital partners, says that when plans are filed in November with Hillsborough County, Convergent will seek approval for 111 single-family homes on the new property, with homes ranging in price from $550,000 to $1 million, and from 1,800-2,500 square feet. The property in Live Oak also is expected to be developed as an age 55-and-older community.
Although the original zoning approval for the site would allow for 143 homes, Govindaraju has said that with only 111 homes, there will be more open “green” space available. In other words, whether the Hillsborough-based community also will be called Anand Vihar or not, it will prove to be a more upscale community than Anand Vihar in Pasco.
What remains to be seen, of course, is whether or not the two separate communities can ever be connected by anything other than the nature trail that is in the current site plan for the Hillsborough County property. At the present time, the residents of the Hillsborough County Anand Vihar property would only be able to access Pasco County by taking K-Bar Ranch Pkwy. east to Meadow Pointe Blvd., turn north to Beardsley Dr. and then back to the west on Beardsley Dr. to access the Anand Vihar property on Mansfield Blvd.
Is there a possibility — with former Dist. 2 Pasco Commissioner Mike Moore — who never budged on allowing the connection at Kinnan St./Mansfield Blvd. — now replaced by Commissioner Seth Weightman in Pasco’s Dist. 2, that a road connection between the two Anand Vihar communities could be allowed? That remains to be seen.
As for the Pride Recreation Center, Commissioner Hagan says the $6-million in proceeds from the Live Oak park site sale will pay for most of the cost of its construction, which is scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2024 and be completed by the end of next year or early in 2025.
“There was an additional funding need of about $750,000 or $775,000 to build the rec center,” Hagan says. “But, we already have that additional funding worked out in our fiscal 2024 budget.”
Hagan adds that he is excited that the rec center is now coming to fruition.
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