"Allowing urban expansion" AKA allowing builders to add to the congestion without having to pay for it.

http://www.tbnweekly.com/pubs/pinellas_park_beacon/content_articles/111110_par-03.txt

Allowing urban expansion

By JULIANA A. TORRES

Article published on Thursday, Nov. 11, 2010

PINELLAS PARK – The Pinellas Park City Council approved a measure Oct. 28 designed to allow businesses to build and grow in the city’s densely urban areas without having to pay for otherwise-required expansions or improvements to roads like Park Boulevard.

The amendment to the comprehensive plan creates what is called a transportation concurrency exception area in the southeastern portion of the city, including especially the downtown Community Redevelopment District and the Gateway Centre Development of Regional Impact. Within the exception area, developers will be able to bypass growth requirements that might otherwise hinder their ability to build.

“That will give developers more incentive to locate in that area and then redevelop that area,” said Bob Bray, Pinellas Park community planning director.

The city’s new exception area, which extends as far north as The Mainlands and as far west as 66th Street and Park Avenue, was originally requested by the owner of Pinellas Park’s portion of the Gateway Centre. Hardy Huntley, longtime owner of the Wagon Wheel Flea Market, bought the vacant lots in the Gateway Center DRI last year. Though he wanted to offer the land for the Tampa Bay Rays’ new stadium earlier this year, the area has gone largely undeveloped.

The 585-acre Gateway Centre DRI, 400 acres of which lies within Pinellas Park city limits, has been slow in coming to fruition in general, Bray said.

“Anything (that) could help initiate development there, is good for the city,” he said. “It’s good for the county, it’s good for the entire economy, because if they get new business in there, that means more jobs for the area.”

The opportunity to create the exception areas comes in the wake of what is commonly referred to as Senate Bill 360, passed into state law in May 2009. The contentious new law set several new growth management standards for Florida. One is the ability for municipalities to create transportation concurrency exception areas, which could prove vital for the continual development of the downtown area, Bray said.

As it stands, if a developer wants to develop in the downtown, a study has to be done to determine if the new business would create more traffic on Park Boulevard than that of the former business. If it does, the new business would have to pay for improvements to Park

Boulevard, to allow for the expected increase in traffic.

However, Park Boulevard is considerably restrained in the improvements that could be made to it.

“When you can’t build, make Park Boulevard wider, that really does limit how they can mitigate their impact,” Bray explained. “We’re not going to ever see Park Boulevard expand into eight or 10 lanes. We’re not going to see Park Boulevard double-deckered.”

In the mid-’80s, a study was done to calculate the cost of expanding Park Boulevard, Bray said. Just the cost of property alone exceeded $88 million, not to mention the cost to the affected businesses themselves.

“The business impacts would have been much greater,” Bray said. “You really literally would devastate the entire center core of the community.”

However, Senate Bill 360 establishes Pinellas Park, and all of Pinellas County in fact, as a dense urban land area, and allows local governments to establish the exception to its concurrency requirements with less of an approval process from the state, freeing up developers to create the kind of business and vibrancy the city hopes to see in the downtown and Gateway Centre areas.

“If a developer wanted to come in and buy a block and take out all the buildings and rebuild something new, they could do that and not be impacted by concurrency management rules,” Bray said.

However, the potential for new development in Pinellas Park, prompted by these new exception areas, has not caused the excitement in the developer community that the city might have wanted, Bray said. That’s partly because Senate Bill 360 itself, though currently a law, has been a moving target. In August, the law was declared unconstitutional in a Leon County Circuit courtroom. An appeal overturned the ruling and reinstated the law Sept. 24, according to the Florida Department of Community Affairs website.

But even now, state legislators could reconsider the controversial policies the law established.

“The bigger picture of what’s happening in the courts and the legislature has kind of overshadowed what we’re doing,” Bray said. “The whole development community is wondering as to what’s going to happen with the issues of Senate Bill 360 in the next legislative session.”

The county and all its municipalities are currently working on a general mobility plan in response to Senate Bill 360 that will address mobility fees and do away with transportation concurrency fees as they currently stand, Bray said. Pinellas Park’s new transportation concurrency exception areas could encourage development in the city until that happens.

“A few developers in the area are very pleased to see this go through,” Bray said. “We’re hopefully ahead of the curve and we’re going to stay ahead of the curve … and have those benefits come in earlier. But when the legislature is in session, I can’t tell you what they’re going to do.”

The amendment to the city’s comprehensive plan still has to undergo an appeals process at the state level, which will hopefully conclude around the second week of December, Bray said.

Article published on Thursday, Nov. 11, 2010

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