In the report, the nine-member High Speed Rail Authority tells the governor and his Cabinet the first Orlando-to-Tampa leg of the line will have to be built either along Interstate 4 or on a railway company's rights of way to meet the mandated November 2003 construction start deadline.
The legislature and the governor need to sign off on the authority's recommendations before construction can begin. Bush was a Miami developer before entering politics.
Commercial real estate developers have been monitoring the bullet train project, hoping to spot new development niches either at the train stations or along its route. Voters in fall 2000 approved a constitutional amendment instructing state lawmakers to get the project moving by fall 2003. C.C. "Doc" Dockery, a wealthy Lakeland real estate investor and industrialist, used personal funds to spearhead the bullet train movement two years ago.
The report estimates the cost of the Orlando-Tampa first leg at $1.2 billion to $6 billion. Private money could be used to operate the bullet train but some public funds will be needed to build the train itself, the report notes.
The High-Speed Rail Authority concludes the first leg will be profitable and would be a model for the construction of later links to the network.
The second leg should run from St. Petersburg, FL to Tampa and should break ground in 2005, the report recommends. Another Central Florida leg would run from Orlando to Port Canaveral. Future legs would run to South Florida cities such as Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton.
The authority's Central Florida members are Lee Chira, president, Lee Chira & Associates, an Orlando real estate development/investment firm; Skip Fowler, the longtime Orlando law partner of House Speaker Tom Feeney; John Browning, Palatka, FL, chairman, Florida Transportation Commission; and Leila Nodarse, president, Nodarse & Associates Inc., a Winter Park, FL environmental engineering firm that has participated in multi-million-dollar commercial real estate ventures.
Other panel members are Dockery of Lakeland; William Dunn, Miami civil engineer; Norman Mansour, Manatee County, FL, member, Florida Transportation Commission; Frederick Dudley, Tallahassee, FL lawyer; and Heidi J. Eddins, St. Augustine, FL, an executive with Florida East Coast Industries whose wholly owned subsidiary, Flagler Development Co., is one of the largest developers in the state.
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