Goodwill Industries-Suncoast is eyeing the edge of Brooksville for a roughly 100,000-square-foot distribution center and retail complex, and the timing could not be touchier. The nonprofit’s planned hub site sits by the intersection of Buck Hope and Barnett roads, hard up against an oak-shaded neighborhood where residents and some city officials are already bristling over tree loss and traffic.
The project was first detailed by the Tampa Bay Business Journal, which reported that Goodwill closed on the property in December 2025 and is planning a combined warehouse-and-retail setup totaling about 100,000 square feet.
A commercial listing for the parcel at 19487 Barnett Road shows roughly 13.5 acres at Barnett and Buck Hope marketed for highway-commercial and distribution uses, according to Land Advisors. The listing pitches the site as a fit for warehousing with related retail, a description that lines up neatly with Goodwill’s warehouse-plus-store plan.
City leaders have already been dragged into the project’s thorniest issue: trees. In June, the Brooksville City Council hit pause on a request tied to the removal of 19 specimen trees for the development, telling staff and the project team to go back and look for ways to spare more of the mature oaks, as reported by the Hernando Sun.
Goodwill Industries-Suncoast, the St. Petersburg–based affiliate that covers Hernando County, runs thrift stores and workforce programs across the region and says it helped place more than 1,200 people into jobs last year. That regional footprint and jobs mission are outlined on Goodwill Industries-Suncoast.
For local economic boosters, a big Goodwill facility is another brick in a long-term logistics play. County leaders have spent years pitching Hernando as a freight-friendly hub, highlighting highway access, airport cargo ambitions and a 1.6-million-square-foot Walmart distribution campus as proof the area can handle large distribution users, according to the Hernando County Office of Economic Development.
What’s next
Before any of that promise or pushback becomes reality, the project still has to survive the city’s review gauntlet. The development will need site-plan approvals and tree-mitigation permits, and council members have already signaled they want revised drawings that cut down on canopy loss. That request for revisions, paired with the lack of any publicly announced construction schedule, means residents should bank on more hearings and plan tweaks in the coming months, as reported by the Hernando Sun.
For Brooksville, the Goodwill proposal sums up the tradeoff at the heart of its logistics strategy: new jobs and discount retail on one side, fewer trees and potentially busier roads on the other. City officials say they will try to balance those competing pressures when the developer returns with updated plans at future planning and council meetings.
