Viera & Tampa City Council Faced With A K-Bar Ranch Connection Conundrum

Long-Time New Tampa Resident Jim Davison debates roadway connections with Pasco County residents at an open house May 29. (Photo: John Cotey)

When the Tampa City Council met in early May to debate a rezoning that would allow M/I Homes to proceed with building 700 new homes in K-Bar Ranch, council members got stuck on one major point:
There aren’t enough roads in the area to allow residents to get in and out of their new neighborhood.

Without connections to Pasco County, particularly merging Kinnan St. in New Tampa with Mansfield Blvd. in Meadow Pointe, more homes would mean more residents who are essentially trapped with just one road, Kinnan St., out of their neighborhoods.

So the discussion was postponed until June 28 in the hopes that Pasco, with help from a yearlong Wesley Chapel Roadways Connection Study, which was near completion, would provide some answers.
The report is out. And no, it hasn’t.

At a May 29 open house at the Porter campus of Pasco-Hernando State Community College, an executive summary of the report was presented to roughly 75 locals — including politicians on both sides of the argument — but didn’t address actual connections in a way many who attended may have hoped.

How that ends up affecting future development in K-Bar Ranch remains to be seen. The Tampa City Council will take up the debate again June 28. But, any decision they make will have to be made without any promises of any connections between Hillsborough and Pasco counties. And, Pasco is in no rush to make a decision on the issue.

The public comment period about the Roadways Study ends today, and AECOM, the consulting firm that did the study, isn’t scheduled to present them to the Pasco MPO until August. A final study report will be finalized following that meeting, and then Pasco County will run a public opinion poll — basically an up or down vote on each of the connections, as well as combinations of connectors — in September or October.

The Pasco MPO will then meet in October to review the final study and decide what recommendations to make to Pasco’s Board of County Commissioners (BOC). The BOC will have the final say, with no date given for a final vote.

Connecting only Kinnan to Mansfield — the streets still separated by a 30-foot hop-skip-and-a-jump patch of dirt and bushes — without any other connections being made, was not studied.
District 2 commissioner Mike Moore, who represents the Meadow Pointe area, says connecting Meadow Point Blvd. to K-Bar Ranch Pkwy remains his favored option, and is opposed to connecting Kinnan-Mansfield.

“I think some people possibly thought the study would show maybe just a couple of hundred cars a day (added to Mansfield traffic with the connection),” Moore said, “but the study shows obviously that’s not the case. It’s anywhere from 500 to 4,000 (according to traffic projections). If anyone thinks Kinnan-Mansfield can handle 4,000 cars a day, it’s just not reality.”

When it was pointed out to Moore that the gap between 500 and 4,000 is significant, and that 500 cars could be only 250 making round trips, he said “That’s still a lot.”

At the original roadways meeting May 15, 2017, Pasco residents who filled out public comment cards were opposed to the connection, but only by a 37-36 margin.

“Now that we’ve done the study, and people can see the numbers, the true numbers, I have a sneaking suspicion that will change quite a bit,” Moore said.

While extensive, the study included no recommendations. It only went as far as listing positives — alternate routes during accidents, economic benefits, convenient travel to attractions in Hillsborough County, and relieving the traffic of up to 7,000 vehicles per day on Bruce B. Downs (BBD) Blvd. and Cross Creek Blvd. — and negatives, like the increased traffic with minimal congestion relief for Pasco County roads and almost $2-million in additional improvements needed, with connections. The study looked at four alternatives, including a no-build alternative that would put up a gate for emergency vehicles and bicycle and pedestrian accommodations at Kinnan-Mansfield, but no connection for general public use.

Other alternatives studied included:
• Connecting Kinnan-Mansfield and K-Bar Ranch Blvd. to Meadow Pointe;
• Connecting only K-Bar Ranch Blvd to Meadow Pointe Blvd.; and
• Doing all three possible connections: Kinnan-Mansfield, K-Bar Ranch Pkwy.-Meadow Pointe Blvd., and Wyndfields Blvd. to K-Bar Ranch Pkwy.
Tampa’s District 7 councilman Luis Viera, who represents New Tampa, attended the meeting and was disappointed by the lack of specificity in the study. However, he was pleased by the prospect of at least an emergency gate at Kinnan-Mansfield.

Moore said Pasco County proposed one two years ago, and even offered to split the costs, but Tampa rejected it.

“I’m not looking at this from a political perspective,” Viera said. “If we can have a compromise for now, if a gate is built only for first responders, that’s a net positive. We obviously want to go further. That’s getting to first base, and we want a home run. But right now, that would be a net positive for both sides from a safety perspective.”

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.

Here We Go Again — Politicians To Debate Kinnan St./Mansfield Blvd. Link

kinnanThe infamous and befuddling barricades (photo) blocking Mansfield Blvd. in Meadow Pointe from Kinnan St. in the K-Bar Ranch/Live Oak Preserve area of New Tampa continue to stand as the area’s most notorious roadblock. But, whereas the barricades themselves have had zero movement in years, that can no longer be said of talks to remove them.

Pasco County District 2 commissioner Mike Moore and Hillsborough County District 7 City Council member Lisa Montelione sat down for a conversation last month and the two have agreed to re-open discussions to resolve the long-standing Kinnan-Mansfield impasse.

“Lisa and I met and had a great conversation,’’ Moore said. “We agreed to sit down with both of our sides either the first or second week in March. Obviously, there’s a lot of work to get through, but we both agree we want to do what is best for the region and the citizens.”

Montelione placed tackling the Kinnan/Mansfield dilemma — which, if resolved, would give Wesley Chapel and New Tampa drivers an alternative north/south route to Bruce B. Downs (BBD) Blvd. (and the two-lane Morris Bridge Rd.) — on her list of things to do in 2016. She sent a letter, dated Jan. 21, to the Pasco County Board of County Commissioners (BCC) in the hopes of sparking a new debate.

Moore, however, already had agreed to meet with Montelione before the letter even arrived. He said his first priority has been seeing that the S.R. 56 extension was approved, but once that was settled, he was going to set his sights on Kinnan/Mansfield.

“There are a lot of people for (the Kinnan-Mansfield connection),’’ he said, “but a lot of people have concerns.”

Moore said he will be accompanied at the meeting by Pasco County administrator Michelle Baker, assistant county attorney David Goldstein and Ali Atefi, Pasco’s transportation engineer.

A Scary Situation…

In her letter to the Pasco BCC, Montelione laid out the human side of the City of Tampa’s case for removing the barricades. She wrote that in early November of 2015, K-Bar Ranch (located off Morris Bridge Rd. in New Tampa, just south of the Pasco line) resident Otto Schloeter was cooking lunch for his family when a pan caught fire and severely burned his arm.

The 9-1-1 call from a cell phone ended up going to a tower in Wesley Chapel. The Pasco County 9-1-1 Dispatch Center transferred the call to Hillsborough County Fire Dispatch, which then alerted the wrong Hillsborough County station — nearly 20 miles away — in Thonotasassa, when there are two Tampa Fire Rescue stations (Nos. 21 & especially 22, which is only a mile or so from Morris Bridge Rd.) on Cross Creek Blvd. that are both only a few minutes away from K-Bar.

Hillsborough County’s fire truck eventually made it to Schloeter’s, and called in a Tampa Fire Rescue ambulance.

Due to the confusion, it took nearly two hours to get an actual ambulance to Chloeter and get him from his home in New Tampa to the emergency room at Tampa General Hospital.

While Montelione suggests that more updated emergency responder technology be implemented near the border of New Tampa (which has both unincorporated Hillsborough and City of Tampa communities) and Wesley Chapel, she also says that the pathways that should be connecting counties and cities should be open and as easily accessible as possible.

If Kinnan St. and Mansfield Blvd. had been connected, Montelione wrote, Pasco County Emergency Service Station 26 in Meadow Pointe would have been recognized as the closest station:

“With the mutual aid agreement between our governments, I believe it is fair to say that the completion of this road could have prevented Mr. Schloeter from waiting 45 minutes for emergency responders.”

A similar argument was put forward in 2012 by John Thrasher, the CEO of Excel Music (located in the Cory Lake Isles Professional Center on Cross Creek Blvd.). Thrasher organized and submitted a petition with 61 signatures representing roughly 40 businesses on both sides on the county line, to the City of Tampa attorney’s office urging for the completion of the Kinnan/Mansfield connection.

“This is not only about commerce and convenience, but in an area of wildfires, sinkholes, floods and hurricanes, it is a matter of public safety to provide citizens with as many routes as possible in and out of an area,” Thrasher wrote.

The issue of connecting Kinnan St. to Mansfield Blvd has been mired in dispute since the 2,000-ft.-long roadway was paved north to the county line in 2007 by the developer of Live Oak Preserve in New Tampa.

In November of 2012, Goldstein reached out to the City of Tampa attorney’s office about Kinnan/Mansfield and laid out of a list of Pasco’s requirements — which included a commitment from the City and/or K-Bar to pay for traffic-calming improvements at the intersection of Mansfield Blvd. and Beardsley Dr. (which runs along the southern border of Meadow Pointe), as well as at Mansfield Blvd. and Wrencrest Dr. to the north, with a funding commitment by Pasco capped at no more than $500,000.

Those requirements were rejected by Julia Mandell, senior assistant attorney for the City of Tampa, in February of 2013.

Thrasher’s petition a month later also failed to bring about any action.

One of Pasco’s requirements from 2012, however, could be part of any new 2016 negotiations. Pasco asked for four lanes of right of way, or land on which to construct the “Beardsley Extension,” which would link Beardsley Dr. east to Morris Bridge Rd. and take some of the traffic pressure off Mansfield Blvd.

Montelione did not comment on the specifics of the Beardsley Dr. request from 2012, but is open to the extension if the two sides can agree to terms. She did say that it seems unlikely that a Kinnan/Mansfield agreement can be negotiated without the Beardsley Extension being a part of the deal.

Moore says that after years of failed attempts, though, he has hopes for success in 2016.

“I feel good about it,’’ he says.

Welcome To Our Exclusive 2015 Guide To New Homes In New Tampa & Wesley Chapel

WC Home Builder MapWesley Chapel Leading The Growth In Pasco, K-Bar Ranch Driving New Tampa’s Completion

When you’ve been doing the same job for more than 21 years, you’re likely to see a lot of things change.

Well, in my capacity as the publisher and editor of the Neighborhood News for New Tampa and Wesley Chapel since 1994, I’ve seen housing booms and housing busts come and go — with the biggest boom hitting New Tampa and Wesley Chapel in 2004-06 (followed by the bursting of the local housing bubble in 2007-08). Continue reading