Mike Carballa, County Administrator, Pasco County

July 2026 — Mike Carballa, county administrator of Pasco County, spoke with Invest: about the county’s resilience efforts, rapid growth, infrastructure planning, and role in the broader Tampa Bay economy. “We can train people with the skills needed to draw manufacturers here and create a place where people can live, work, and play,” Carballa said.

What changes over the past year have had the greatest impact on Pasco County?

One of the biggest things we have been working on, both internally and externally, is resiliency. Pasco County, along with Tampa Bay in general, was hit by a couple of hurricanes in 2024. After that period, we received $585 million from the federal government through the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery program.

That is a significant amount of money. When your budget is normally about $2.4 billion, receiving another half a billion dollars is not a small thing. We have spent the better part of this year making sure we are prepared to spend that money appropriately and put it in the right places based on our priorities.

Affordable housing is certainly part of that. We also want to give money back to residents who sustained damage, help them rebuild, and not only rebuild, but build back better.

We are also looking at where to invest infrastructure dollars. A lot of those dollars will go into flood mitigation projects, especially in areas where we have known flooding issues or where flooding was exacerbated by the storms. It is really about helping the county recover in a better way.

That has been a major focus, along with our strategic plan. We adopted the plan about 18 months ago, and the hurricanes slowed down implementation, but we are focused on three main pillars: creating a thriving community, enhancing the quality of life of our citizens, and driving economic growth and prosperity.

How would you describe Pasco County’s current evolution and momentum?

We are still a growth county. Florida is growing, the Tampa Bay area is growing, and Pasco County, because of its proximity to Tampa and St. Petersburg, has had a heavy residential focus.

We are making plans to bring our own economic identity to the table, much of that through healthcare and industrial uses. Rapid residential growth is a challenge, but it is also bringing growth in our industrial and jobs base, as well as our commercial base, which drives the economic engine of Pasco County.

To help manage that, we are focused on updating our comprehensive plan. We are calling it Pasco 2050. Our last comprehensive plan update was about 20 years ago, and now we are again in a period where we need that blueprint for the future.

Pasco 2050 is intended to help us balance growth. One of the challenges in a suburban county is the temptation to sprawl. Sprawl can hurt you if you are not careful.

We are identifying where we want urban areas and urban core centers to be. Density cannot be everywhere, so we have to determine where it makes sense and how to incentivize it without punishing rural areas.

Private property rights are very important to us, so we want to make sure we are not hurting owners. We want to create opportunities for landowners to develop in ways that align with our goals. There is a lot of opportunity in how we are trying to manage growth, place density where it is needed, and give people quality of life in the areas where they want it.

How important are partnerships with developers, educational institutions, and economic development partners in shaping Pasco County’s future?

Partnerships are important. We have always prided ourselves on our collaboration with developer partners, government partners, and quasi-governmental partners, including private utilities and different industries. You have to bring everyone together.

One of the biggest things we can all agree on is the need to build infrastructure. Without infrastructure, growth and development are not going to come.

As part of our budgeting process, we put forward a five-year capital program that lays out investments in water and wastewater infrastructure, road infrastructure, stormwater infrastructure, and other needs. For the first time this year, we are integrating what the development community is doing into those plans.

That is important because Pasco County government may identify a road as important, but the development community, the market, and industry may be telling us that growth is really happening somewhere else. If that is the case, our money may be better invested where the need actually is.

We need to be agile and work with the market to make sure we are investing capital dollars in the right places. Developer partners can also sometimes get things done better, faster, and cheaper because government has processes it must follow.

It is about making sure infrastructure is built in the right place at the right time, rather than building something that may sit unused for years until the development pattern reaches it. We are focused on bringing developers into the tent because we are in it together.

How would you describe Pasco County’s role within the broader Tampa Bay regional economy?

About 60% of our population that lives in Pasco County probably works outside of the county. We do provide residential support within the Tampa Bay community, but we are also on the cusp of being a healthcare engine in the region.

Moffitt has planted a flag in Pasco County. They purchased over 700 acres off Ridge Road and the Suncoast Parkway, where they are currently constructing a campus that will be transformative for cancer research and treatment. We are very proud of that, and it gives the healthcare industry a foothold to grow here.

I also see movement in manufacturing and advanced manufacturing. We have groups working to train a capable workforce in Pasco County, including AmSkills, CareerSource Pasco Hernando, and technical colleges. Not everyone is going to go to college, and that is OK. We can train people with the skills needed to draw manufacturers here and create a place where people can live, work, and play.

Regionally, over the past two years, we have also gotten our commissions together. The Pasco County commissioners, Pinellas County commissioners, and Hillsborough County commissioners meet every three to six months with administrators to discuss issues of regional importance.

We recognize that it is not all about where our county lines begin and end, and that we are part of a broader region. There is a lot of cooperation involved in solving regional issues.

Looking ahead to the next two to three years, what are your key goals and priorities for Pasco County?

Our first goal is to complete the comprehensive plan, which should be done in September. After that, we need to rewrite our land development code. The code is antiquated and has not served us well. We make a lot of exceptions to our rules because they just do not apply, but we cannot fix the land development code until the comprehensive plan is done.

That will help drive the pattern and quality of development. Our board is very interested in ensuring that development in Pasco County is quality development that supports quality of life for residents and creates environments where both big and small businesses can thrive. We want Pasco County to be a place where people want to do business.

As growth continues, we will focus on infrastructure expansion and making sure we have the infrastructure to support residential demand as well as the demands from business and industry. We have to continue providing services through public safety, roads, parks, and the other things our citizens have told us they want and need.

If we do that right, it will drive economic growth. Moffitt alone has 16.5 million square feet of entitlements coming, and the opportunities are limitless.

With the CDBG-DR funding and other efforts, you will also see a renewed focus on making sure this community stays resilient for future storms. We already have a number of projects in the pipeline. Our coastline is important, but one thing we learned from the storms is that we also have internal riverine systems in the eastern part of the county that flooded.

We need to mitigate those risks and make our community resilient from storms, resilient from natural disasters, and resilient economically, because all of those things are tied together. We are excited about what that means for the future.