By GARY PINNELL

SEBRING — There’s not enough traffic to support an east-west toll road through Highlands and Hardee counties, the Bradenton Herald is reporting.

Less than 20,000 vehicles a day would use the Heartland Coast-To-Coast highway in 2035, when it is built, the newspaper quoted Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise as saying.

The newspaper excerpted a two-page brochure dated Feb. 20, which was submitted by Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise to the Sarasota/Manatee Metropolitan Planning Organization: “The results indicate that revenues generated from tolls would not cover the project costs of a corridor with an eastern terminus at the Turnpike and would cover less than 6 percent of the costs for a corridor extending (from Interstate 75) to Interstate 95.”

But economic developers in Highlands and Hardee counties are disagreeing.

The Other Side
Mike Willingham, executive director of the Sebring Airport Authority, was sitting in James Ely’s office on Friday when the executive director of Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise released the Future Corridors study.

“It was not a surprise,” said Willingham. “And I don’t think anybody is disappointed. We’ve done a lot of work, and this is a long-term project.”
The road must be built, not just with toll revenues, but with private sector donations from landowners in exchange for development rights,
Willingham said.

But the time to begin is today, not in five or 10 years when the need is critical, said Willingham. Future Corridors seeks to remake rural parts of the state with new toll roads that would accommodate future growth.

Willingham disagreed with a statement by Gov. Charlie Crist on Monday.

Crist said the state needs to “prioritize and have roads where the people are and where we need them. Right now, that’s South Florida, southeast Florida… I want us to expand I-75 south, I-95 south down to Miami and then I-4.”

That sort of reactive planning doesn’t work, Willingham said. State leaders must learn to be proactive, and build roads before they’re needed, before the needed rights of way disappear.

“We have to protect the ribbon of real estate to lay this asphalt on,” Willingham said.  “I don’t want what’s happening on the coasts to happen in Highlands and Hardee.”

Marcus Shackelford, who attends transportation corridor meetings and reports the results to the Hardee County economic development commission, doesn’t believe the turnpike authority’s estimate that only 19,500 vehicles a day will use the Heartland Coast-to-Coast turnpike in 2035.

“But when you get talking about what’s going to happen in 2035, who’s prove either of us wrong?” he asked.

The tollroad, he said, would open up the Heartland to future residential and commercial settlement, and it would become an important hurricane evacuation route.

“There are no good east-west highways though the Heartland,” he said. “I think there was plenty of justification for the road.” But politicians aren’t likely to act until it becomes an emergency.

“Somewhere down the line, we’ve got to address this thing,” Shackelford said.