(The following story by Billy Townsend appeared on the Tampa Tribune website on April 8.)
WINTER HAVEN, Fla. — The state has called it the “mother of all rail yards,” the vital cog in a plan for Orlando commuter rail.
CSX Transportation Inc. calls it an “integrated logistics center,” a statewide rail-to-truck distribution center unlike anything in the Southeast. Winter Haven calls it the city’s economic future.
The project’s first phase, a 318-acre rail-to-truck hub for shipping containers, could open by 2009, pushing 1,150 trucks daily onto State Road 60 just south of Winter Haven. An unknown number of those trucks will be bound for the markets of Tampa, St. Petersburg and other Tampa Bay area communities.
All in all, you would be hard-pressed to find a single development that has exerted such logistical gravity so quickly on the transportation future of the Interstate 4 corridor. The CSX center bears directly on State Road 60, the future of the Port of Tampa, the proposed Heartland Parkway, Florida’s current freight rail system, and plans for a three-county Central Florida commuter rail service.
The unknowns
It also brings uncertainty.
Will the center’s trucks clog Brandon as they roll toward West Central Florida markets? Will the commuter rail plan for the Orlando-area spur the Bay area’s own rail aspirations? Will rerouted freight trains damage smaller cities, such as Lakeland? How much money will state and local governments need to spend on infrastructure to support this statewide distribution center?
At a time when “regional planning” has become the buzz phrase of choice for I-4 governments and planning groups, those are some of the unanswered questions.
Yet the center’s approval process has moved forward rapidly since plans for the entire 1,250-acre complex were announced publicly in January 2006. An eager Winter Haven City Commission unanimously approved zoning for its first phase in August.
Approval for a development of this size and intensity typically takes years. By splitting the project into two pieces, CSX and Winter Haven have avoided time-consuming regional reviews.
The first piece is the new hub, which is the center’s engine. It falls just below the 320-acre threshold that would make it a “development of regional impact,” triggering an extensive multi-agency review process. Based on the acreage of the first phase, CSX asked to be “cleared” of regional status.
The state Department of Community Affairs obliged in a letter dated April 12, 2006.
“That’s idiotic,” says John Ryan, a Polk County planning commissioner, longtime environmental activist and Winter Haven resident. “There’s no doubt that this project has regional and statewide impact.
“Even if I supported the project, this is a compromise of the intent of good planning,” Ryan added. “From a growth perspective, this is insane.”
Mike McDaniel, the state official who cleared CSX, did not return several messages for this story.
Whatever regional infrastructure impact there is, no one expects them to diminish over time. CSX makes it clear the Winter Haven rail center is designed both to drive and to take advantage of Florida’s long-term population and economic growth. Its second phase is an adjacent 900-acre distribution park where CSX expects to lure millions of square feet of warehouses and offices and 1,800 of the 2,000 jobs at the center.
Said Rick Hood, assistant vice president for CSX real property, “What’s really causing us to come to Winter Haven is a bet on the growth of Florida.”
The state does have a regional incentive for encouraging quick approval of the rail-to-truck hub.
It is integral to a $491 million deal that would reorganize CSX’s Florida freight traffic to allow commuter rail for the Orlando area.
Geography makes it almost inevitable that such a deal would run through Polk County.
Jacksonville-based CSX operates two major rail lines in peninsular Florida, dubbed the A and S lines. The A-line runs through Jacksonville and Orlando, roughly following Interstate 95 and Interstate 4 into Polk County. The other line, the S-line, runs through Baldwin and Ocala slightly west of the center of the state. A CSX spokesman calls the lines “our I-75 and I-95.”
The two lines touch near the Florida-Georgia border, then split and intersect again only in north central Polk County. There they essentially merge in an east-west line between Auburndale and a spot just west of downtown Lakeland.
Consolidated traffic
The deal with the state will consolidate most of CSX’s existing and future freight traffic onto the S-line. It will shut down CSX’s aging Taft rail hub in Orlando and transfer all its operations to the Winter Haven center.
Those moves will free 61 miles of CSX track between DeLand in Volusia County and Poinciana in Osceola County, which the state plans to buy for $150 million and use for commuter rail.
To sweeten the deal, the state is kicking in $198 million to upgrade the S-line with features such as double tracks allowing for better train traffic flow and roughly $150 million for various train and track projects.
The new Winter Haven center and its focus on shipping containers carrying consumer goods will come at a fortuitous time for the Port of Tampa. The port and CSX already work closely in shipping commodities such as phosphate.
About 18 months ago, the port opened a 25-acre container terminal, worked by three container cranes known as “gantries.”
Port officials think that terminal — which was built with much room to expand — will serve as a prime gateway to what they see as an underserved and growing I-4 corridor market. The Winter Haven hub brings a major container distribution center nearby with truck access to all parts of the state and rail access to the rest of the country.
“Tampa’s recently become a serious player in the container market,” said Wade Elliott, senior director of marketing for the port. “There’s a tremendous amount of momentum for distribution (in the Central Florida area). We certainly see the CSX center as a positive for what we want to accomplish.”
The rail center will sit on a line that runs southeast of Winter Haven. The city, which owns and has annexed the property, will sell it to CSX.
The property offers two out of three factors CSX was looking for in a potential site: a single owner of a large parcel and at least two miles of rail frontage.
The third factor
What’s the third factor, which the Winter Haven site lacks? A well-developed surrounding transportation infrastructure.
From CSX’s point of view, the first two are difficult to find. The third can be built.
“You sort of have to sacrifice transportation (to get a single-owner of massive rail frontage),” Hood said, adding that CSX “could work with city and county staff to develop the infrastructure around it.”
CSX is building a two-lane access road north from S.R. 60 to the rail center site, projected to cost $10 million.
A glance at a road map shows the center’s 1,150 daily trucks will need to travel aging and often crowded State Road 60 and U.S. 98 and U.S. 27 for access to Florida’s interstates and large metro areas. That’s not counting the distribution traffic that the much larger second phase will create.
Winter Haven city planners say S.R. 60, where the trucks will enter it, can easily handle the traffic for the first phase.
But Ryan, the Polk planning commissioner, warns that the public — through state or local governments — can expect to pay big money for upgrades to all those roads and whatever additional infrastructure the rail center requires.
He envisions this scenario: After the hub is built, CSX will have to submit the larger second phase as a development of regional impact. That will trigger a review of the regional transportation system, which will be found lacking. But the intense, regional effects of the hub’s operations will create political inertia for state or local government to widen and upgrade the roads.
“They’re going to use this to do a lot of projects that have been on the backburner for years,” said Ryan, who long has knocked heads with Winter Haven.
In 2001, prior to his appointment to the Polk planning commission, Ryan helped lead the effort to defeat a power plant proposed for the same site.
In considering a development of regional impact, the Central Florida Regional Planning Council and Polk’s Transportation Planning Organization, which is made up of elected officials from across the county, would have prominent roles to play in considering the project and its effects.
Asked to comment on the project’s regional impacts, the staff directors of those two organizations said they won’t get involved until the larger warehouse phase.
One alternative to Ryan’s prediction is the proposed Heartland Parkway, a 150-mile toll road linking northeast Polk and Lakeland to the outskirts of Fort Myers.
Parkway debate
Debate about the road has tended to focus on the prospect of opening rural southwestern Florida to greater development to the benefit of its large landowners.
But the northernmost part of that road, a proposed 40-mile half-loop stretching from south Lakeland to near the Polk/Osceola County border, is closest to becoming reality. That’s because of Polk County’s growth, according to Randy Fox, who is in charge of planning for Florida’s turnpike system.
That loop, which circles most of Polk’s population, would intersect with S.R. 60 and virtually touch the CSX project, according to rough route projections.
To the west, it would link directly to the Polk Parkway in south Lakeland, which itself links to I-4. To the east, it would cross U.S. 27 and link up with I-4.
That path would allow the CSX traffic largely to avoid the busiest stretches of S.R. 60, U.S. 27 and U.S. 98 on its way to Tampa or Orlando.
If lawmakers green-light the highway, supporters expect to pay for Polk’s $1 billion portion and the rest of the $8 billion highway through a combination of tolls and private financing.
Several Polk county commissioners spoke glowingly about the road during a recent meeting.
Fox said the CSX center, which he learned about after planning for the Heartland Parkway was under way, “provides further justification” for the Polk loop of the parkway. But he emphasized that county growth projections used to justify further study of the road did not include the CSX center.
Though CSX has had discussions with Fox and the Heartland Parkway’s private-sector backers, no one interviewed for this story said they are actively working together. But Rick Dantzler, the public face of the group of landowners, business people and government officials lobbying for the highway, often cites the CSX traffic in making the case for highway.