Within a generation, Polk County is expected to be a million strong and have a thirst for new water, public education and transportation.

Since 2000, Polk County's population has grown by nearly one-third, from 480,000 souls to an estimated 638,000, and there is little indication that the next two decades will look markedly different than the past two.

Polk County Growth 2000-2016
Infogram

To get there without creating sprawling, isolated neighborhoods connected with over-capacity roads lined with strip malls is going to take foresight and money.

"It's going to be a struggle" to prepare for growth, County Commissioner Todd Dantzler said. "There's inexpensive land, a good business climate, and (Northeast Polk) has become a bedroom community for Orlando."

Growth in Northeast Polk County has put strain on the public school district, which is searching for cash to build schools for the influx of students. Within 20 years, Northeast Polk is expected to rival Greater Lakeland in size. But the transportation system on that side of the county is far less developed than the one in West Polk, which has its own future road issues.

Meanwhile, local officials accuse state legislators of undertaking a "war on home rule" for placing on the November ballot a measure that would expand homestead exemptions on property taxes. If it passes, it would cut a major local government income stream.

Voters have shown they are not eager to add to their tax burden. A 1 percent sales tax to fund roads and public transportation failed dramatically when put to voters in 2014, and local leaders are expecting the homestead-exemption expansion to pass.

"How do you meet that demand for growth?" Dantzler said. "Growth will pay for some of it — increased revenues will pay for some of it. I assume we will probably be behind the market a little bit if we don't figure out new funding sources for new roads and new utilities for (Northeast Polk County)."

But in the end, "political leaders are going to have to have the courage to fund those," Dantzler said.

Planning versus building

Polk County's Transportation Planning Organization, the TPO, is a countywide collaborative planning agency that produces, among other things, a 25-year forecast of growth and transportation needs updated every five years.

Currently, the situation is good in Polk County, TPO Transportation Planning Administrator Ryan Kordek said.

"By and large, a lot of our roads in Polk are operating within our level of service standards," Kordek said. "We're actually a lot better off compared to our counterparts to the east and west. … You don't have to go far to see places that are much worse than us."

Polk County was nicknamed "Imperial Polk County" prior to a massive 1916 public works project to pave 217 miles of road. The project helped the name stick.

"From a historical perspective, we're still living off the road network that was built 100 years ago," Kordek said, part of the "Polk County Good Roads movement, which paved all the major roads in Polk County at the time. There was nothing like it in the Southeast."

But the leg up won't last forever, especially as growth has shifted to areas that were recently rural.

For instance, Lake Wilson Road, a roughly 1-mile, two-lane road between Ronald Reagan Parkway and the Osceola County line, is over capacity and due for widening. Last year, it was given priority for funding, which Kordek said is an example of the planning agency's combination of long-term forecasting and short-term monitoring.

Though Florida has one of the highest gasoline taxes in the country, federal help has steadily declined since 1993 when the national fuel tax was last updated.

Meanwhile, cars have become more fuel efficient, meaning fewer gallons per mile to tax, and the price of building roads has increased with inflation. Wide adoption of electric cars would accelerate the decline of fuel-tax funding and create pressure to find another way to pay for transportation projects.

"I think we've got a good plan in place," Kordek said. "As a planner, I feel confident we're going to continue to demonstrate where we need to make transportation investment. But the real question is, how do we fund these improvements? … Funding is one of the biggest issues now and certainly into the future."

The intersection of roads and neighborhoods

Twenty and 30 years ago, the guiding philosophy was to plan cities with a strict separation of uses. Rows of single-family homes were built into limited-access walled enclaves. Commerce was cordoned into business and retail districts along major roads. Industry was built on the periphery.

Major neighborhoods and commercial districts would then spill out into major roadways, creating congestion and demand for more lanes.

North U.S. 98 in Lakeland is a good example of this, Lakeland Transportation Planner Chuck Barmby said, with its eight lanes and 55,000 to 60,000 automobiles a day using it near Interstate 4.

"It carries a ton of traffic, and that's probably a good example of an area that developed in the late '80s or 1990s," he said. The area was not part of Lakeland originally, and has been built under this suburban model; it has more of a connection to I-4 than it does to the rest of the community.

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So how do city and county leaders prevent the big ideas of today from becoming tomorrow's regrets?

"That's always the billion-dollar question," Barmby said.

Ideally, city and county governments will avoid creating another Brandon Boulevard, the extra-wide, clogged artery of State Road 60 in Hillsborough County.

"You go across the state and all of a sudden hit Valrico, and it can take you an hour to get from Valrico to downtown Tampa, and it's what, 12, 13 miles? And that corridor is six to 10 lanes," he said. "It's important to learn lessons from our neighbors around us, see what's working and what's not."

One way embraced by municipal leaders is to focus on a city's core areas, limiting the outward sprawl.

"South of Griffin Road and north of Edgewood Drive, you see that the forefathers that really started to build Lakeland in the '20s were onto something and building our neighborhoods in a livable, community street system," Barmby said. 

That is, the gridded road system.

"But I think the age of doing that in general, the golden age, is probably done," he added. Instead, the push is to do more with the underlying road system, improving pedestrian access, allowing more mixed uses and pushing population density.

"I think that's the biggest challenge is somehow get back to that philosophy that we don't want to pave the entire state from the Gulf to the Atlantic," Barmby said.

If you need six lanes, it might be best to have a four-lane road and a two-lane road, he said, providing alternate routes and dispersed traffic.

But the interconnected grid probably won't come back. Building roads is expensive. Maintaining roads is an expense forever, and developers and cities are reluctant to take on that kind of liability.

The recent approval of a new, major subdivision in South Lakeland named Riverstone, south of West Pipkin Road and west of Yates Road, provides an example of compromise. The new development is expected to have about 1,300 residential units, mostly single-family homes, by the time it is completed.

As part of the agreement, the builder is required to create walking paths and trails, and the city may purchase a part of the land to build a new park. The city and the developer are also sharing costs of beefing up key roads and intersections in South Lakeland as the new homeowners add traffic to the local system.

It remains to be seen whether this model will set a trend in Polk County.

Finding new water

The Floridan aquifer, the sea of fresh water underneath Florida, had been a mixed blessing, providing a wealth of water but also encouraging unsustainable habits that have damaged the state's ecological assets.

At the turn of the millennium, county leaders had a choice: fight a Southwest Florida Water Management District order to curb severe over-pumping on a well permit in Northeast Polk County, or do something different.

"We have a history of some abuse, and people acknowledged that and found we don't want to continue down that path," Polk Regional Water Cooperative Coordinator Gene Heath said.

The decision not to fight the order in 2000, "that led, basically, to where we are now. The mind-set changed at that point. Back in the early days, there would have been a great war." Instead, "there was a conscious decision we wouldn't go down that road, that there's a better way."

The water cooperative was created in 2016 as a regional planning council among 15 Polk County cities and the county government. Its goal is to make sure Polk County has the water sources it needs to continue to grow through 2035. The organization will act as a water wholesaler while developing new sources of water for the future and sharing costs, benefits and responsibility for the supply.

Plans approved last year are promising, Heath said.

Polk County needs to develop sources to add 46 million gallons a day to its water supply, adding to the 72 million gallons a day currently available.

Three projects are being analyzed.

• The cooperative hopes to gain access to 30 million gallons a day by developing a well field in Southeast Polk County tapping into the lower Floridan aquifer.

• Fifteen-million gallons a day could be gained from another field tapping into the lower aquifer from north of Lakeland.

• Conservation land, earthworks, drainage canals and regulation surrounding Peace Creek south of Winter Haven could help recharge the aquifer and free up another 5 million to 10 million gallons.

The projects won't come cheap. Analyzing the feasibility of building them is expected to cost $23 million. Building them is expected to cost approximately $617 million, which will be assisted by state funds.

Heath said he expects pitfalls along the way, but so far the path looks feasible.

"This cooperative is made up of 16 municipalities, and they came together in the last two years," he said. "To get 16 governments to decide they are going to do anything in concert is a major achievement. It gives you an idea of what their philosophy is. I feel pretty good. If there's a will to solve a problem and you can get the people working together, you'll solve the problem."

Christopher Guinn can be reached at Christopher.Guinn@theledger.com or 863-802-7592.