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Unfinished road between New Tampa and Wesley Chapel causing traffic headaches, safety concerns

Officials looking to complete unfinished road
Posted at 7:38 PM, Apr 07, 2017
and last updated 2017-04-07 19:38:09-04

"It is an inconvenience,” said HOA President K Bar Ranch Craig Margelowsky.

An inconvenience that tacks on about 40 minutes to every trip his family takes when they go out to eat.

"If we were able to go north, we could just go right to Wiregrass and everything is right there,” he said.

But drivers can't go north on Kinnan Street out of K Bar Ranch in New Tampa because the street dead ends before stretching north into Pasco County.

"You've essentially got a small strip that separates Kinnan and Mansfield, that separates the City of Tampa from Pasco County,” said Tampa City Council member Luis Viera.

About 15 hundred people live in k bar ranch and another new development being built could add as many as 5 thousand more people to the same area.

Folks who don't want to take a round-about jaunt from Kinnan to Cross Creek, then a busy Bruce B Downs Boulevard just to go north to County Line Road.

"It's also a business issue because you have a lot of businesses in the City of Tampa that would like to get folks from Meadow Pointe and what could be a five minute journey becomes a 20 or 25 minute journey,” explained Viera.

Viera says there is opposition from Pasco County because of the traffic it would add to Kinnan.

But he and Margelowsky hope a public meeting with Pasco county's Metropolitan Planning Organization on April 18 at PHSC Wiregrass Campus from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. will open up a compromise.

"As long as we can get residents out there and voice their concerns and opinions at the April 18 meeting, it'd be fantastic,” said Margelowsky.