(The following story by Billy Townsend appeared on the Tampa Tribune website on April 16.)
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 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.
Generally, 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 freight rail system, and plans for a three-county central Florida commuter rail service.
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 Tampa 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 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 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 multiagency 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,” said 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 said . “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 effects there are, no one expects them to diminish over time. CSX makes it clear the Winter Haven rail center is designed 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 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.”
A glance at a road map shows the rail center’s 1,150 daily trucks will need to travel aging and often crowded S.R. 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 those roads.
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 back burner for years,” said Ryan.