Pasture land south of State Road 50 and west of I-75 is one rezoning vote away from holding a hospital, microbreweries and a pickleball complex on the same parcel. Two development projects from Jack Melton Family Inc. took a major step forward at the Hernando County Board of County Commissioners’ Oct. 6 land-use meeting, with both properties approved to rezone from agricultural to planned development.
The larger of the two, Black Jack Ridge, covers 203.89 acres north of Old Trilby Road, bounded by SR 50, I-75 and Lockhart Road. The development agreement on file is less a single plan than a wish list of what’s allowed on the site: single-family or multifamily homes, a hospital and/or urgent care and standalone emergency rooms, educational facilities, light wholesale and storage, microbreweries, public and private recreation including virtual golf and pickleball, plus residential ancillary uses.
That breadth is itself the honest caveat. A zoning approval that permits a hospital, a brewery and a golf simulator on the same acreage isn’t a committed site plan — it’s maximum flexibility for whatever actually pencils out once financing and tenants are real. Both properties still need a second reading, with parameter changes the board requested worked in, before any of it is final.
For a corridor that’s mostly been grazing land up to now, it’s the clearest sign yet of which direction Hernando’s SR 50-I-75 growth is heading — even if nobody can say yet which pieces of the wish list actually get built.
Photo: pasture land in Hernando County, Florida, by DanTD, licensed CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.