Pinellas commissioner Seel wins national award for U.S. 19, trail efforts

Karen Seel will retire next month after a quarter-century as an elected official, but before she goes, she’s got one last feather in her cap.

On Thursday, the longtime Pinellas County commissioner was named the winner of a national award from the Association of Metropolitan Planning Organizations, an umbrella group for transportation-focused agencies across the country.

The Outstanding Elected Official Leadership award is something of a lifetime-achievement recognition for Seel, who will leave a legacy largely centered on her public infrastructure efforts. Most notable among those: She led the transformation of U.S. 19 in Pinellas. She also championed expansions to the Pinellas Trail and had a hand in combining the county’s planning council and its metropolitan planning organization, long divided, into one body, Forward Pinellas.

This marks the second time Seel’s U.S. 19 efforts have been highlighted on some national scale, she noted. The other came in 2005, when NBC’s “Dateline” declared that the U.S. 19 “may be the most dangerous road in America for pedestrians” — there had been 100 pedestrians killed in the previous five years — but praised the steps taken by a Seel-led task force to make it safer.

“It’s really very cool, as I go out of office, to have had Forward Pinellas submit my name to the AMPO,” she said. “I really consider it to be a very prestigious honor.”

Seel began her political career as a Clearwater city commissioner in 1996, was appointed to the county commission in 1999 and won reelection several times. The U.S. 19 overhaul was one of her earliest projects and one of her longest-running. When she took it on at the turn of the century, improving the dangerous and congested road was seen as a nearly impossible task, likely only to embarrass any politician who tried.

Now, the transformation is seen as one of the state’s defining transportation projects, said Forward Pinellas Executive Director Whit Blanton.

“There’s nobody in the state, I don’t think, who’s as knowledgeable as she is on the process, funding, what to do to get things done,” he said. “Really, since the mid-90s, she’s been actively engaged, and I think her legacy really speaks for itself.”