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Signs Point To Road Cooperation

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By KEVIN WIATROWSKI, The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 27, 2007

WESLEY CHAPEL - The developer of Seven Oaks remains on schedule to begin widening Bruce B. Downs Boulevard by early next year, provided the company can avoid conflicts with work planned by neighboring Wiregrass Ranch, state highway officials say.

The developer, Crown Communities, met Oct. 12 with county and state transportation officials to sort out more details of the $36 million project.

The biggest issue remains coordinating Seven Oaks' work on Bruce B. Downs with Wiregrass Ranch's plans to extend State Road 56, said Dwayne Kile, design engineer for the Department of Transportation's Tampa office.
Seven Oaks and Wiregrass Ranch both need improvements to the S.R. 56-Bruce B. Downs junction for their individual projects to succeed. When they're finished, the intersection will be one of the largest in the Tampa Bay region, with 10 lanes of traffic in each direction. The project is expected to take 18 to 24 months.

The DOT hopes to avoid 'dueling contractors' by sorting out the sequence of work, Kile said.

Among other things, the DOT wants to avoid seeing Seven Oaks put down asphalt, install curbs or add other features, only to have Wiregrass tear them out to do its own work, Kile said.

To that end, the DOT is considering a couple of options. One would have Seven Oaks start work elsewhere while Wiregrass works in the intersection. But that would mean tying up traffic at the junction twice, which would infuriate drivers, Kile said.

A more likely scenario calls for having one developer do all the construction work while the other contributes financially, Kile said.

'They both can't start at that intersection at the same time,' he said.

Under its current deal with Pasco County, Seven Oaks will widen Bruce B. Downs from four lanes to six between the Hillsborough County line and State Road 54. The work is about two years behind schedule.

Crown has built hundreds of high-end homes and thousands of square feet of office and retail space in Seven Oaks in recent years and plans to develop more.

The developer agreed in 2001 to do the road widening to offset the increased residential and business traffic the enormous project was expected to bring to the Wesley Chapel-New Tampa area.

But by the time the work was supposed to begin, the price had ballooned from $6 million to $36 million thanks to skyrocketing costs for concrete and other road-building materials.

Crown balked, causing the county to suspend its development privileges until a new agreement could be ironed out.

Reporter Kevin Wiatrowski can be reached at (813) 948-4201 or kwiatrowski@tampatrib.com.

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