HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla. — Larry Rosario loves living in Mango, a quiet corner of Hillsborough County that lies north of Brandon.
“It’s a beautiful location,” he said. "It’s a beautiful place. It’s quiet.”
But it’s so quiet that he feels like it’s being forgotten in one very important aspect.
“The roads are pretty bad,” Rosario said. “They look like they need some maintenance done to them.”
Just like the rest of Tampa Bay, this area is seeing more traffic from more growth. Rosario says it’s led to an ugly problem on several streets: Broadway Avenue, Hewitt Street, and even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
Rosario contacted Tampa Bay Tonight asking us to come out and see what he’s talking about, so we paid him a visit and saw several patches of road where the asphalt is literally crumbling into gravel.
“When you look at them, it looks like they’re kind of like peeling apart,” he said.
His worry is that the rough, gravel-covered roads could cause accidents if cars can’t get traction.
“When you start taking off, the traction — it kind of like gets the car going. Next thing you know, a car comes out of nowhere, and then, you have to stop, and sometimes, you just don’t have time to react,” Rosario said.
His hope is that the county can either repave or patch up the roads.
“I think it needs to be looked at,” he said.
ABC Action News reached out to Hillsborough County to see what it can do in response. A spokesperson sent an alert to the county’s public works department. He says a crew will eventually assess the roads in the area and start addressing them if there is a safety issue.
