Hernando County approves funding plan for County Line Road widening

Hernando County commissioners unanimously approved a funding plan for the long-delayed widening of County Line Road, moving a major east-west connector one step closer to construction in the county’s busiest growth corridor.

The plan covers the stretch from Mariner Boulevard to the Suncoast Parkway, where planners have warned traffic will keep getting tighter as Spring Hill and the surrounding area grow. County officials said the project is being built through coordination with Pasco County and the Florida Department of Transportation, turning what was once a local road issue into a regional transportation priority.

Under the financing structure, the widening is estimated to cost about $20 million for land acquisition and about $65 million for construction. Hernando and Pasco counties would each pay $5 million toward land acquisition, while FDOT would provide a $10 million legislative match. For construction, each county would again contribute $5 million, FDOT would add another $10 million, and the remaining cost would be pursued through a State Infrastructure Bank loan. The counties would also be responsible for future maintenance and half of the loan repayment.

Public Works Director Scott Herring said money is already being set aside in the county’s five-year capital improvement program for the first land acquisition purchases, a sign the project is shifting from planning into implementation. FDOT will handle design and development, so the earliest visible progress will likely come after the right-of-way work and engineering steps advance under that state-county agreement.

The timing matters because County Line Road has already been flagged as increasingly strained. Hernando/Citrus Metropolitan Planning Organization records from May 2025 list County Line Road, CR 578, from east of Mariner Boulevard to west of the Suncoast Parkway as an “add 2 lanes” project in the adopted FY 2026-FY 2030 priority list. The corridor has also been split into subsegments for funding purposes, underscoring how closely planners are tracking each piece of the route.

A May 2024 traffic segment study for the MPO examined County Line Road, US 41 and SR 200, and a county agenda packet from that same month said the Mariner-to-Suncoast segment was projected to become deficient in the morning peak hour by 2028. In other words, the widening is not ahead of growth so much as trying to catch up with it before congestion gets worse.

County meeting records show the project has been moving through quarterly coordination among Hernando County, Pasco County and FDOT. The Hernando County Technical Advisory Committee unanimously recommended approval of the FY 2026-FY 2030 Transportation Improvement Program on May 22, 2025, and an October 2025 agenda packet showed FDOT was still presenting the tentative FY 2027-FY 2031 work program. The road has been in the official planning pipeline for years; this vote puts the funding structure behind a corridor that commuters, businesses and residents along County Line Road already rely on every day.