Trinity Town Center

Trinity Town Center: To Be or Not To Be?

For several years now, the Trinity Town Center has been a concern for many Trinity area residents.

This development has turned into a bit of a complex controversy and even a source of pain for many people who lost their dreams and/or life’s savings on the project.

The 60 million dollar plan broke ground in March of 2007; however the construction is still visibly unfinished with no end in sight. What was once anticipated to be a great asset to the Trinity community has evolved into an unsightly mess.

The Trinity town center was meant to be a bit of a fresh start for developer Bill Planes, who has a bit of a colorful past. It wasn’t long, however, before the mortgage lender for the town center along with many subcontractors started to sue Planes for lack of payment.

Legal and financial difficulties are not new territory for Planes, who in the later 1980’s served a sentence in federal prison for embezzling more than 140,000 dollars from a struggling mortgage company he was hired to help revive in Hollywood, FL.

He also recently found himself in court regarding a number of insufficiently funded checks along with employee paychecks he allegedly stopped payment on. Based on the history of Bill Planes as a developer, it should come as no surprise that the development of the Trinity Town Center is facing serious financial and legal complications.

Planes is not only in debt to Pasco County, but the IRS also filed $193,000 in liens on his home for unpaid taxes from years 2007-2009.

According to the St. Petersburg Times, as a result of the unfortunate predicament with the Trinity Town Center, many business owners are finding themselves in expensive legal battles to find a way out of their leases in order to start their companies elsewhere.

In late 2010, county commissioners made an agreement with Planes that the condition of the unfinished buildings was to be improved by given deadlines or his development would face demolition soon thereafter.

The established deadlines were indeed met so that the building would not be torn down; now it still stands on the corner of Little Rd. and Trinity Boulevard as an empty, barren reminder of these lengthy proceedings. Although not much progress has been made in the development of the facility in quite some time, according to the court filings, the lawsuit is still very much open.

At one point during construction, there were 22 tenants listed in the Trinity Town Center but many have since sued to get out of their leases and cut their losses. Most of the tenants were small businesses eager to begin making profits rather than large corporate chains that could afford to wait around 3 years for site development.

The Tampa Bay Times interviewed a married couple named Adam and Karen Kantrovitz, who were just a pair of many small business owners who lost a great deal of time and money on this project.

The Kantrovitzes had moved to the Trinity area to pursue their dreams of opening their own tea shop. The couple moved here from Boston and saw the Trinity Town Center as a perfect opportunity for turning their dreams into reality. Unfortunately, the controversial happenings of the development project turned the Katrovitz’s dreams into more of a nightmare.

Like many new, small business owners, 3 years is a long time to wait to get a business plan in motion due to multifaceted delays in venue development.

Trinity Town Center officials are encouraging all parties involved, and even those of us who are simply concerned residents, to remain patient as they sort through these issues and urgently seek out solutions.

For now, questions regarding the current status and future plans for the site go unanswered. It appears as though changes and progress in development are at a standstill until legal and financial dilemmas are resolved.