Convincing landowners to prep for commercial development is paying off for Pasco County
By Ashley Gurbal Kritzer
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Mar 11, 2022

Amazon.com's purchase of the Pasco County land where it plans to build a highly sophisticated robotic sortation facility was years in the making for Bill Cronin.

Cronin, president and CEO of the Pasco Economic Development Council, has been pitching the county's biggest landowners on the benefits of prepping their property for commercial development for years. It's not an easy sell: The generational owners who own huge swaths of raw land have hordes of residential developers beating down their doors. Instead of just selling the land to the highest bidder, Cronin asks them to work with the EDC and county administrators to position and market their land to commercial developers — often for less money than they might get from a residential developer.

The program under which Cronin and his team work with landowners to prep and entitle their properties is known as Ready Sites, which Pasco County Commissioners approved in April 2016. The first land that would become a Ready Site was identified in mid-2016. The property was ready to take to market in October 2017.

Amazon's acquisition is the first land sale under the Ready Sites program, which the Penny funds for Pasco sales tax. Pasco now boasts six shovel-ready sites for industrial development, ranging from 100 to more than 1,000 acres.

Cronin says he's had the most luck with landowners who see that commercial development will only boost the value of the property they want to sell to residential developers, as job creation drives demand for new housing.

"There's also a community feel to this, and the people who have been involved on Ready Sites have a much longer vision for Pasco County," Cronin said.

In a serendipitous twist, Cronin said it was through a different Amazon deal — one that never came to fruition — that showed the EDC the urgency of construction-ready sites. Around 2014, when Amazon was scouting for locations for its first wave of million-square-foot fulfillment centers, Pasco was passed over because none of its sites were ready to go for an industrial developer.

"It was an education for our team," he said. "We had what we thought were ready sites, but they weren't really well planned."

That education ultimately translated into a more-informed sales pitch to landowners.

"That gave us enough ammunition," Cronin said. "It was what we needed to start getting the landowners to think about how to prepare their land."