| Another Ranch and a Cloud of Dust
There’s no way in this report to include all the communities, retail cen-ters and commerce parks on Pasco’s drawing board. Among the larger is the massive 5,022-acre Wiregrass Ranch, near State Road 56 and Bruce B. Downs Boulevard, that includes a mix of homes, several million square feet of office space, as well as acreage set aside for a 750,000-square-foot retail lifestyle center – the Shops at Wiregrass – and space for county government offices, a regional hospital, schools and a national tennis center, says John Dowd of the Goodman Company, commercial devel-oper of the project.
 Equally large at 4,800 acres, Con-nerton bills
itself as the “new town” on Florida’s west coast with plans calling for 8,700 homes; 3.5-million square feet of office space; room for light industrial in Connerton Commerce Park; a large retail component; and sites for a hospi-tal, government center, schools, parks and more. “We’re looking at a conve-nient orientation of residential, services and employment for Connerton,” says Stewart Gibbons, president of Con-nerton and vice president and general
manager of Terrabrook.
Even Trinity, one of the first residential master-planned
communities in Pasco, is now maturing and adding
significant retail and commercial development.
The ICC Financial Group is planning Trin-ity Town
Center, a pedestrian-friendly retail, restaurant
and office complex on 13.5 acres near Little Road
and Trinity Boulevard. Nearby, CEK Schluter LLC
is
developing the 70-acre Trinity Corporate Center,
says Dewey Mitchell, a partner in the new venture
and president of Pru-dential Tropical Realty. He
says Trinity Corporate Center will be a mixed-use
business park with the potential for light manu-facturing,
freestanding companies and professional offices.
What is it about Pasco that is drawing so many
develop-ers? “Pasco is centrally located and less than two hours from Orlando,” says Beat Kahli of New River Township. “Hills-borough is built out and everything is pushing north.”
An even bigger reason for Pasco’s growth can be attrib-uted to the development of the Veterans/Suncoast Parkway, the north-south toll road that starts in Tampa’s Westshore office district and extends north through Hernando County. The interchanges being developed off the toll-road are the focus of much of the burgeoning growth.
“There is immense growth in two major corridors: both sides of I-75 and around the Suncoast Parkway,” says Pat Kelly, president of Rubin Real Estate. “The entire swath between the Suncoast and 75 is booming. Residential is the driver, then retail follows and third is the speculative devel-opment with freestanding buildings.”
Also smack in the middle of this new hot spot,
Rubin Real Estate is marketing, leasing and manag-ing
ComPark 75, a new 150-acre industrial park off
State Road 54 just west of Interstate 75. Says
Kelly: “The vision is to create Pasco’s first Class A flex development for offices, showrooms, warehouses, light manufacturing and similar businesses.”
 When Dilip Kanji of Impact Properties broke ground
last August on a 10-acre business park at State
Road 56, 85 percent of the space had already been
sold, he says. The business park, part of the Cypress
Creek master-planned development that includes
multifamily homes, restaurants, hotels and a regional
shopping mall, will house 94,000 square feet of
office space. “We’re basically offering indi-vidual professional office buildings,” says Kanji.
The Hogan Group also has high expectations for
NorthPointe at Suncoast Crossings, a 216-acre industrial
park at State Road 54 and the Suncoast Parkway.
It is part of a 688-acre Development of Regional
Impact that includes a residential compo-nent (North
Pointe Villages) and approximately 1.1-million
square feet of retail and office.
An Empty Plant
Rejuiced
The former Pasco Beverage plant has been
remade as the 70-acre Dade City Business Center,
a new business park with CSX rail access. The center
is now home to a growing number of companies such
as Citrus County Groves, Precision Coat of Florida,
SureCrete, Habitat for Humanity, Florida Conserva-tion
Corp., All Natural Botanicals and Performance Honda.
A Comprehensive Plan
As developers rush to bring their plans to fruition, of primary con-cern is the balance between residential and commercial projects. The challenge is to ensure that residential developers don’t grab the most desirable land for new homes and golf courses...
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“We needed a place to assemble our product,” says Darrin Hovater, general manager of Perfor-mance Honda, the second-largest Honda motorcycle and jet ski distributor in the state. “We needed a sizeable amount of warehouse space … This
area is right off I-75 and very convenient for
us.”
Shopping News
Pittsburgh-based ECHO Real Estate
Services is developing The Grove at Wesley Chapel.
The 835,000-square-foot Grove has a large retail
com-ponent and restaurants, an entertainment complex
with a movie theater and 300 residential units.
With
more than 1.3-million square feet of retail space,
Cypress Creek Town Center, Pasco’s new “mega-mall,” is scheduled to be the largest shop-ping center in the Tampa Bay area when it is com-pleted. Mall developer Sierra Properties is building the center with the Richard E. Jacobs Group of Cleveland. The project has often been mired in con-troversy over environmentally sensitive wetlands in the area, but William Fullington, a spokesperson for the project, says the Jacobs Group expects to receive the final go-ahead in the near future and is still pro-jecting a fall 2007 completion date for the mall.
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