HART to vote in July on Tampa light rail link
Written by jrood
Hillsborough County transit officials will decide in July whether to include a light rail link to Tampa International Airport in the first phase of a new transit system.
According to a report in the Tampa Tribune, officials and
board members formally introduced the concept of a light rail link to
the airport this morning at its finance committee meeting.
Having
light rail go to Tampa International Airport could tack on more than
$125 million to any transit plans, according to Mary Shavalier, chief of
strategic planning and program development for the Hillsborough Area
Regional Transit Authority.
HART’s consideration of the link comes
a week after the airport’s interim director said he thought light rail
should run to the main terminal during the first phase and Mayor Pam
Iorio said she would be open to the idea.
The $125 million cost
figure, said Shavalier, is based on a 2007 TIA study that said it would
cost $125 million to build an elevated light rail line extension to the
airport and $77 million for a ground-level extension.
She said
that a few weeks ago, the Hillsborough County Aviation Authority staff
asked HART to consider extending the light rail route from the
originally proposed plan to terminate the link at a HART mass transit
center scheduled to be built by next summer near O’Brien and West Spruce
streets, almost a mile from the airport.
Shavalier said HART’s
outreach efforts have shown a great deal of interest from the public in
extending any transit plans to the airport.
Some board members,
like Steve Polzin, however, expressed concern that adding the airport
link this late into the planning process might delay HART’s transit
planning process. The board hopes to have a completed proposal to send
to the Federal Transportation Administration by November.
The
additional planning should not be a huge problem, Shavalier said,
because the airport has already done a great deal of the planning.
The
biggest change would be adding a ridership study to the existing
planning work, she said.
The HART board hopes to vote at its July
19 meeting on whether to include the airport extension into the transit
planning process. The board will then vote on whether to approve final
recommendations at its August meeting, Shavalier said. HART then wants
to hold a public hearing in September.
Ultimately, HART hopes to
be able to present its plan to the FTA in November so the federal agency
can sign off on preliminary engineering plans. The timing coincides
with a referendum in Hillsborough County to add a 1 cent sales take hike
to raise money for light rail and other road and transit projects.
Adding
a link to the airport, Shavalier said, would increase the chances of
obtaining the very competitive federal funding.
