Hillsborough County's bus maintenance facility has needed upgrades and repairs for years. But funding has been elusive for the agency at the local, state and federal levels.
Now, after a long wait, a federal $23.4 million grant will help provide some much-needed improvements.
Dale Smith, the Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority's director of facilities, has been waiting a while for funding to make upgrades to the facility, which was originally built for trucks in the 1980s.
"We've turned something that was a truck stop into a bus facility, and we've operated it,” Smith said. “We've done a fantastic job. But now that we have this money coming our way, and with the new design, we're going to design it the proper way, the way it should be."
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The grant will help launch Phase 1 for the facility construction.
The most notable fix: Building a new fuel service lane. Dan Rodriguez, HART's project manager, says the current one causes major issues.
"We make a 90-degree turn into the bus wash in the middle of the night, so it gets kind of treacherous to do it, and we kind of have some little fender benders on the walls and on the rails with the buses,” Rodriguez said. “So what we're going to try to do is be more efficient, be better with our space."
Smith says not having to navigate the service lane so awkwardly will lead to better service for customers overall.
"We'll have the spare time that we save, the five minutes we save per bus,” Smith said. “We're going to have more time to detail and clean the buses. So I think you're going to see cleaner busses, more inviting buses, and obviously the repairs will be done quicker. So there's going to be a lot of positive effects to our patrons."
There are also plans to create a few offices on top of the service lane, to serve as an emergency operations center in case of situations like storms and freezes.
Rodriguez said while those minutes may not seem like a lot, they add up and provide a big efficiency bonus.
“Some buses come in at 10 p.m., some of them come at 2 in the morning,” Rodriguez said. “By 4 or 5 a.m., that bus has to be back out on the street. That bus doesn't have a lot of time to be on the lot. So you gotta make all the efficiencies you can so that you can get the bus in and out. That's where the ripple effect goes down to the customer.”
The facility will also improve its stormwater drainage, which is an issue during heavy rains. Both Smith and Rodriguez said those issues were exacerbated during hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024.
“We had some serious flooding here,” Rodriguez said. “We had some tree damage. We still have, the same problems, but it was just made 10 times bigger when these storms came through this summer.”
Some of the money received will also enhance the security around the facility. Right now, the guard station is inside of the fencing, meaning people are inside the facility before they even get cleared to be there.
The grant was provided through the U.S. Department of Transportation's Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE) program.
Overall, Smith and Rodriguez say they’re ecstatic that they received the funding after years of rejection.
“I was like, ‘Heck, yeah!’ ” Rodriguez said. “I might not use heck, but I was like ‘Hell, yeah!’ I wanted to get that done. We've been kind of idling for a few years. I've been here 20 years, and probably the last 10 years I've been promising these folks that we're going to try to get this building replaced. And it's kind of tough to walk through here every day after day, and you see the same faces, and you're like, ‘I wish I could do things better for you.’ We just weren't funded to do so.”
HART is looking to replace the entire facility with one intended for buses when it manages more funding. That’ll happen over multiple phases, with five planned to create the ideal version of the facility.
Future phases would create an new building, including putting the administration building next to the heavy maintenance building, and adding a parking garage. A new facility could also accommodate all of the buses that are in the fleet, since the current bays aren’t able to fit the newer buses that use compressed natural gas.
Rodriguez said HART will still be on the lookout for more funding wherever they can get it, whether that’s at the local, state or federal level again. But being able to show some level of work is helpful toward that cause.
“We have to show some progress, right?” Rodriguez said. “You gave us some money. We're going to make that happen as soon as possible. And then we're going to say, ‘Hey, we did great work with your the money you gave us.' We want to continue that vision. Let's move on to the next phase.”
