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By GARY NAGER Editorial
Most Primary Elections, like the one coming up on Tuesday, August 23, tend to have much lower voter turnout than General Elections. My hope this year, with primaries to select Democratic opponents to face Gov. Ron DeSantis and Attorney General Ashley Moody in November, and the recent craziness in U.S. and world politics (e.g., the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Jan. 6 Capitol Insurrection hearings, the economy, gas prices, Ukraine, the Middle East, etc.) that more people than usual from our area will cast ballots on Aug. 23. But, as I’ve said so many times before, even without a “big” national election this year, I wish that more of you would consider casting ballots in local Primary and General Elections as “important,” too. Whether you believe it or not, those who are elected to serve you on the Pasco School Board and County Commission actually have at least as much, if not more, effect on your everyday life than your U.S. Senator, Congressman and even the President. And, if you care about how much teachers are paid and other School District needs, this year’s Aug. 23 Primary also is asking you to vote for or against adding a School Board millage to your tax bill. The millage referendum will not appear on this year’s General Election ballot in Nov. Please note that all of the candidates listed on this page may not appear on your ballot, as different precincts have different candidates. WESLEY CHAPEL’S AUG. 23 PRIMARY ELECTION BALLOT (Cont.)
Representative in U.S. Congress, District 15 (Democratic Primary) Gavin Brown Alan Cohn Eddie Geller Cesar Ramirez William VanHorn Representative in U.S. Congress, District 15 (Republican Primary) Demetries “Commander” Grimes Laurel Lee Kevin “Mac” McGovern Kelli Stargel Jackie Toledo Florida Governor & Lieutenant Governor (Dem. Primary) (*To face Ron DeSantis) Charlie Crist Cadence Daniel Nicole “Nikki” Fried Robert L. Willis Florida Attorney General (Dem. Primary) (*To face Ashley Moody) Aramis Ayala Jim Lewis Daniel Uhlfelder Florida Commissioner of Agriculture (Dem. Primary)*to replace Nikkie Fried Naomi Esther Blemur J.R. Gaillot Ryan Morales Florida Commissioner of Agriculture (Rep. Primary) *to replace Nikkie Fried James W. Shaw Wilton Simpson • - Indicates incumbent in a race
WESLEY CHAPEL’S AUGUST 23 PRIMARY ELECTION BALLOT
County Commission District 2 Republican Primary *To face Write-In Candidate Louie Rodriguez & replace Mike Moore Troy Stevenson Seth Weightman Christie Zimmer County Commission District 4 Republican Primary *To face Write-In Candidate Cory A. Patterson •Christina “Fitzy” Fitzpatrick Gary Bradford Shannon J. Wittwer School Board District 1 (Nonpartisan) *To replace Allen Altman Al Hernandez Stephen A. Meisman James Washington School Board District 3 (Nonpartisan) •Cynthia Armstrong Matthew Geiger School Board District 5 (Nonpartisan) •Megan Harding Charles Phillip Touseull Circuit Judge, 6th Judicial Circuit, Group 22 (Nonpartisan) •Cynthia Newton Nicholas “Nick” Fiorentino Circuit Judge, 6th Judicial Circuit, Group 27 (Nonpartisan) •Keith Meyer Scott Finelli County Court Judge, Group 4 (Nonpartisan) Clementine “CC” Conde Patrick Moore School Board Millage Election Referendum for Public School Students Shall The District School Board of Pasco County levy an additional operational ad valorem millage not to exceed 1 mill beginning July 1, 2023, and ending no later than June 30, 2027, for essential operating expenses to maintain salaries competitive with the market, attract and retain high-quality teachers, bus drivers, and other non-administrative school support employees and with annual reporting to Padco County taxpayers for transparency of the use of these funds? Yes or No U.S. Senator (Democratic Primary) (* To face Marco Rubio) Ricardo De La Fuente Val Demings Brian Rush William Sanchez
Representative in U.S. Congress, District 12 (Republican Primary) (* To face Kimberly Walker (DEM) & Charles Smith, NPA, Write-In)
Gavin Brown
Alan M. Cohn
Eddie Geller
Cesar Ramirez
William VanHorn
Wesley Chapel Neighborhood News
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By JOHN C. COTEY John@NTNeighborhoodNews.com
Orlando Health Wiregrass Ranch Hospital is coming to town, which will give Wesley Chapel three hospitals.
If that seems like a lot, it’s not, says Wiregrass Ranch developer JD Porter.
“Quite honestly, I doubt it’s the last announcement of something of that nature that you will see before end of the year,” Porter says. “A lot of people want to be here.”
For now, Orlando Health has made it official -- it will be Wesley Chapel’s hospital No. 3, joining AdventHealth Wesley Chapel (AHWC) and the soonto-be-finished BayCare Hospital Wesley Chapel, which is scheduled to open in 2023. AHWC and Baycare are both located on Bruce B. Downs Blvd., a few miles from each other.
On July 12, Orlando Health announced it would be building a multilevel hospital in the Wiregrass Ranch master-planned community. Orlando Health Wiregrass Ranch will be a 300room facility at the northeast corner of the S.R. 56 and Wiregrass Ranch Blvd.
The property purchase is expected to close later this fall. The hospital has filed plans with Pasco County and had a pre-app meeting with county planners on July 25.
The New hospital is expecting to break ground by the end of the year.
“At Orlando Health Wiregrass Ranch Hospital, we will provide a broad range of health care services, all in one convenient location,” said John Moore, senior vice president of Orlando Health’s West Region. “Patients will receive exceptional emergency and inpatient care from clinical experts in multiple specialties, the highest quality diagnostic services, and seamless access to all of Orlando Health’s trusted primary and specialty care providers.”
Porter is thrilled to be bringing Orlando Health to Wiregrass Ranch. He said landing AHWC in 2012 was one of his proudest accomplishments, and Orlando Health is another.
As plans for the long-awaited Wiregrass Ranch Town Center progress, Porter was hoping to make a big splash for something to anchor the town center that will both be a job provider, produce daily foot traffic and provide a higher quality of life needed to make the town center a one-of-a-kind success.
“For us to make it successful, we needed something good as an anchor,” Porter says. “Not apartments, not retail, and we need daytime traffic. Having Orlando Health on that corner within walking distance of the town center is an absolute game changer, and it’s what we’ve needed for the past 5-6 years.”
Orlando Health, founded more than 100 years ago, is headquartered in Orlando, and is a not-for-profit healthcare organization with $8 billion in assets. The 3,200-bed system includes 10 award-winning hospitals, 9 hospitalbased emergency rooms and 7 freestanding ERs.
“Their phasing plan and aggressive style and size of the facility they are going to put in makes a big statement, from our perspective,” Porter says.
The five-story Orlando Health Wiregrass Ranch will be the largest hospital in Wesley Chapel. Its 300 planned rooms are more than AHWC (148) and the upcoming BayCare Hospital (60)
Orlando Health Wiregrass Ranch will be an anchor for the Wiregrass Ranch Town Center, and may not be the last hospital built in the area.
combined. AHWC has room to expand to 300 rooms, which could eventually give the Wesley Chapel area 660 total hospital rooms.
A fourth hospital, or specialized medical facility, in Wesley Chapel could be announced by the end of the year. Porter says he can’t say which brand it is, or where it will be located. It appears that it will likely be in the north end of Wiregrass Ranch, and Porter would only say “the Bruce B. Downs corridor will have a strong medical presence.”
According to Porter, the accelerated growth in Wesley Chapel warrants the additional hospital. Before tabbing Orlando Health to build Orlando Health Wiregrass Ranch Hospital, he says several healthcare analysts told him the Wesley Chapel area, which has 10s of thousands of new homes already being built or in planning, was ripe for more hospital beds.
“We didn’t want to oversaturate, but after going through and working with a couple of medical office folks that survey every market throughout the country, they said they have never seen a place that has the potential for growth on the medical, office and hospital side like Wesley Chapel and Wiregrass Ranch,” Porter says.
Orlando Health Wiregrass Ranch will also have a new neighbor. Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute (FCS) has filed plans with Pasco County planners for a two-story, 56,559-sq.-ft. medical facility about a quarter mile east of where new hospital will be located.
FCS will be located at the southwest corner of Hueland Pond Blvd. and S.R. 56. and will be the second major cancer center facility in Wiregrass Ranch. The 28,000-sq.-ft. Moffitt Cancer Center at Wesley Chapel opened on the AHWC campus in May 2021.
FCS was founded in 1984 and has nearly 100 locations in Florida. According to its website, FCS utilizes a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to cancer treatment and specializes in innovative clinical research and cutting-edge technologies. FCS claims to offer patients access to more clinical trials than any other private oncology practice in Florida. In the past five years, most new cancer drugs approved for use in the U.S. were studied in clinical trials with FCS participation prior to approval.
Porter says that along with the nearby North Tampa Behavioral Health hospital, residents of Wiregrass Ranch will have access to a variety of top medical options.
“It’s really creating an entirely different sector than what you have at Advent and what you have at BayCare,” he says. “We’re going to continue to grow that as long as the market remains solid.”
By JOHN C. COTEY John@NTNeighborhoodNews.com
JD Porter isn’t looking to develop Wiregrass Ranch with just anything.
He wants earth-shakers and difference-makers. He wants heart-stoppers and jaw-droppers.
He wants unicorns.
AdventHealth Wesley Chapel? That was a unicorn.
“No one believed that was happening,” he says of Wesley Chapel’s first hospital.
The Shops at Wiregrass?
“I don’t think our family thought that was possible,” he says of Wesley Chapel’s first mall.
Pasco Hernando State College? The Wiregrass Ranch Sports Campus? Raymond James Financial (which chose Wiregrass Ranch out of 78 different sites, according to Porter)? And, most recently, Orlando Hospital (see story on pg. 4)?
Unicorns.
Those unicorns, which have provided jobs and people to the area, now surround what will be the centerpiece of the 5,100-acre Wiregrass Ranch Development of Regional Impact (DRI) — the longawaited Wiregrass Ranch Town Center.
Porter says the Wiregrass DRI, which is being developed by his family’s Locust Branch, LLC, and extends from S.R. 56 north to S.R. 54, and west to east from Bruce B. Downs (BBD) Blvd. to Meadow Pointe Blvd., will soon have its biggest missing piece.
While it doesn’t have any publicly announced tenants just yet, Porter and Scott Sheridan, the chief operating officer of Locust Branch, LLC, are making the kind of careful choices that will cement the roughly 100-acre Town Center as what they expect to be the downtown area of not only Wesley Chapel, but north Tampa as well.
The map above shows the approximate location of the planned Wiregrass Ranch Town Center.
There are plenty of options, and Porter and Sheridan are in no rush to make any of them.
“No town center, no downtown has had this much space set aside ahead of time,” Porter says. “In today’s environment, there’s nobody that would sit on property that valuable in order to let it grow We’ve already started planning by how we’ve oversized it in order to see what it actually could be, versus what can we throw in here just because we sold everything around it. That, to me, makes it much more attractive as a canvas. Nothing is forced.”
One major component of the Town Center, which Porter hasn’t mentioned before, will be a potential four-year college, keeping with the education corridor concept hatched years ago along Mansfield Blvd. (home to an elementary and high school and Pasco Hernando State College, a two-year institution).
“I think (a 4-year college) would be a great fit,” he says. “It would benefit everyone in the county.” Porter also says that he’d like to see an ethnic grocery store, maybe a local butcher, baker and seafood guy, among a large assortment of small family-run businesses. “I want it to be somewhere you go if you want something authentic,“ he says. “Where people don’t mind paying a little extra for something real.” Porter wants plenty of civic uses. He says he’d like to see someone relocate their Master’s degree, MBA or nursing programs to the Town Center. According to Porter, Pasco County already has asked to reserve 75,000 sq. ft. of office space at the site in order to build a county center. Also exciting are the possibilities – and there’s already been talks — of midrise buildings with structure parking. “That changes the skyscape,” Porter says. “It changes what we’re going to look like. It’ll be done better than anyone else in the county….and in North Tampa, by far.”
Restaurants, Too
When it comes to restaurants, highend establishments like Cooper’s Hawk, which will open next year, will be chosen over many of the national chains you see on the west side of I-75. In fact, Porter says he can see another 5-6 restaurants coming to Wiregrass Ranch in the same category as Cooper’s Hawk.
Although he can’t say which ones until later this year and early next year, he says to get a good idea, take a look at some of the more upscale restaurants along Boy Scout Rd. in the Westshore area of Tampa, where you’ll see at least two or three restaurants that will be coming to Wiregrass Ranch in the future.
Sheridan says some smaller restaurants that will bring a more local hometown feel also fit into the plans. Both Porter and Sheridan say finding the right balance between big and small, and local and national, is the key to building a successful Town Center.
And, for those who worry that brick and mortar is going to one day envelop the remaining country charm of Wiregrass Ranch, Porter says he is not just giving lip service to making sure plenty of the land he grew up on (photo on next page) survives.
“There’s going to be programmed green space throughout the Town Center,” he says. “We will create something everyone talks about, but never delivers. We’ve probably spent as much time planning that out as what the streetscape will look like. It’s ever-changing. We’ve got the ability to do some really creative stuff. It will shine in a way that nothing else has, I think that’s fair to say.”
With careful direction — “It’s critical that it comes off as well-designed,” Sheridan says — Wiregrass Ranch’s Town Center is set up to succeed.
With housing developments like Esplanade 55+ (860 homes), Estancia (1,184), Persimmon Park (450) and an entirely new, yet-to-be-named 2,000-home subdivision to be built east of Wiregrass Ranch Blvd. behind the proposed Town Center, there will be plenty of customers for whatever Porter brings to town.
“The most important aspect of getting this stuff is making sure that you’re not only successful on a Thursday and
Friday night, but that you’re staying busy as hell all the time,” he says. “When your doors are open, you’re all packed up. That’s the thing we’re addressing way more than anybody else in the county.”
To feed those future retail and commercial tenants, the Town Center will receive the benefit of foot traffic from Orlando Hospital and Raymond James Financial employees, which will number more than 5,000, a sports campus that already attracts thousands of athletes and their parents every month, not to mention the schools and a mall that will be walking and biking distance away.
And, that doesn’t even include the rest of the Wesley Chapel, Zephyrhills and New Tampa residents that are within a short drive. In fact, from K-Bar Ranch in New Tampa to the proposed Town Center will be less than a 10-minute drive.
Patience, Porter says, will soon pay off for everyone in Wesley Chapel.
“As soon as you see Orlando Hospital start doing stuff, you’re going to start seeing the infrastructure in the Town Center come at the same time,” Porter says. “Then, it becomes a reality vs. we have cow pens there now. It becomes easier to sell it. Now that we have an announcement, now that we have permitting, we’re actually set up to start telling a significant story.”
