A Road to Nowhere

The Ibis Street Thoroughfare Comprehensive Plan Amendment No. 2017-F comes before the County on Wednesday, April 25 -- it will be found under item 7 on the Board agenda.

Comment by R.N. Collins:

The Sarasota Board of County Commissioners will take the first step towards building a road to nowhere if it approves the Ibis Street Thoroughfare Comprehensive Plan Amendment during an April 25 public hearing.

The county transportation planning department believes that the traffic congestion south of Twin Lakes Park will be so severe in the year 2040 that we need a new thoroughfare to connect Clark Road to a full interchange at State Road 681 and I-75 via another north–south roadway.

But neither the full interchange nor the north-south roadway exist today, and neither is considered financially feasible by the Sarasota-Manatee Metropolitan Planning Organization.

If the interchange is built, FDOT will design and fund it, but FDOT hasn’t even looked into the need for the interchange yet.

And while the north-south roadway is part of a plan to provide an alternate route from Venice to Manatee County, the project is unfunded.  The project recently suffered a setback when the commission rescinded an important funding request for the segment connecting Lorraine Road to Bee Ridge Road Extension.  That segment is a sorely needed connection needed to support development already under construction at the 5000-unit Waterside Village, the 600-unit Artistry community and the 3,500-unit LT Ranch Village.

So it is highly unlikely the proposed thoroughfare will have anything to connect to for many years or decades to come.  Instead of providing connectivity, it will be a road to nowhere.

Actually, that’s not an entirely accurate statement.

The new thoroughfare will go somewhere.  It will dead end at Manatee County-based developer Pat Neal’s 533-acre sod farm where he wants to build 1,100-home subdivision on land zoned for only 258 homes.

Unfortunately for Neal, county regulations prohibit him from building a large development unless the property has direct access to a major road—one that is part of the county thoroughfare plan.

Normally thoroughfare plan additions are considered after the county prepares an in-depth analysis and after the public has multiple opportunities to weigh-in on the proposal.  In fact, the transportation planning department had wanted to consider several changes to our thoroughfare plan during the 2016 comprehensive plan update.  But those changes could not be processed because the county had not held the required public input sessions.

With the county’s holistic thoroughfare evaluation on hold due to a lack of department resources, Neal convinced the county to let him “adopt” Ibis Street and pursue a privately-initiated amendment.

The private process enables Neal to fast track the proposal to designate his access road as a major road.  It bypasses almost all the public engagement that must occur when the county initiates such a change.  And this case, avoiding a lengthy series of feedback sessions and workshops allows the developer to quickly overcome the prohibition on rezoning his property.

I wouldn’t object if putting a line on a map and saying a dead-end country road is a major road was the only effect of Neal’s proposal,

But it does much more.

It allows Neal to divert impact fees away from curing today’s traffic jams and use them instead to improve a dead-end country road that will be used only by his subdivision for years to come.

We believe road improvement priorities should be determined with more, not less, public input.  And we believe impact fees should be spent on real traffic problems we face today, not on ones that are imagined to occur more than 20 years in the future.

Call or email the Sarasota County Commission today and ask them to vote against the Ibis Street Thoroughfare Comprehensive Plan Amendment on April 25.

-- R. N. Collins

Documents relating to the Ibis Street Amendment are here.

FPL: Three current options for power lines

(Eds. note: Details about the comparative quantities of residential housing on each of the three main roadways for the power line options have been clarified and updated.)

This is quick summary of the March 26th meeting of FPL reps with the Bee Ridge neighborhoods at Laurel Oak regarding possible routes for new powerlines. For more on the plan, click here.

Each of the three possible routes would connect the Howard substation at Proctor by I-75 with the Bobwhite station at Lorraine Rd. on East Fruitville Rd. The project is deemed necessary to provide for present capacity in the area. Future construction, such as LT Ranch and Hi Hat Ranch, ultimately will add over 20,000 homes south of Clark Rd. and east of the Bee Ridge Extension, and will require further power installations at some point in the future, FPL spokesmen said.

Uwe Hinrichs chair of the Bee Ridge Neighborhoods Committee, opened the discussion by noting that representatives of more than a dozen communities had worked with Sarasota County for 15 years on the improvements to east Bee Ridge Rd. - widening, roundabouts, and low-impact landscaping were among the results that transformed East Bee Ridge into a quality thoroughfare. Hinrichs and others noted that this would be an unfortunate time to site tall power lines along Bee Ridge Rd.

Although FPL didn't ask for a show of hands or voice vote on which of three routes (shown below) is preferred, one man asked those who oppose siting the power line along Bee Ridge Rd. to raise their hands.

Pretty much every hand in the room went up.

The image below shows the three routes, but the Bee Ridge route shows two options at the right - east from Bee Ridge Extension. The FPL reps said the first choice had been for the route east of the extension to go north past Artistry, but after meeting with an unidentified advisory council made up of businesses, nonprofits, and residents (they declined to provide names of their council advisers), FPL decided to prefer the south option, going south of Rothenbach park, north of Misty Creek.

Lines will be 80-130 feet high

A woman from Aberdeen Pines noted that her research on Google Earth showed that the longest "footprint" for the power lines would be along the communities of Bee Ridge -- approximately 13,000 feet. On Clark, they would run by neighborhoods for 7,000 feet, and on Fruitville for 1,500 feet (or a little more if you count Sun 'n Fun).

To a question about the impact of tall power lines on property values, an FPL rep said that FPL studies show that the impact on the market for home sales and the values of homes was often "insignificant," eliciting a strong skeptical guffaw from the crowd.

Power lines typically might disrupt AM radio, but do not affect cellular service or FM transmissions, according to Daniel Hronec, an FPL engineer.

The ultimate decision on where the route goes is up to FPL and is not subject to higher approval. The company will decide by mid-year, said Rae Dowling, FPL manager for this area. More background here.