Earlier this week, I received this email:
Inweekly Friends,
How many cars are going to crash through the fences around St. Michael’s Cemetery before the City and/or DOT do something to prevent this from happening? There have been TWO in the past two weeks alone! The tombs and headstones damaged in these accidents are not cheap to repair – if they’re even able to be repaired.
I think a little daylight on this reoccurring issue would be very helpful to finding a solution to the problem.
Thanks,
Ramie
At his press conference yesterday, I asked Mayor Reeves about the crashes. He pointed it is a state road but he plans to “explore all sorts of options.”
“That’s a difficult road too. I mean, personally, I owned a business that was really close to that, and I tell people all the time that it’s not a very walkable place, right? It’s a state road, obviously Garden Street turning into Alcaniz. I think we would be open to explore all sorts of options there. Whether that needs to be T-ed off somehow, I don’t know. I’m not the traffic engineer and what the solution is, but I’m definitely open-minded to hear because the reality is, even outside of the current incidents, no one would walk that street and say this from Bay Center to downtown…I mean, you’re more worried about traffic than you are about feeling safe there.”
Regarding the blog post about the Haas Center study that estimated the economic impact of developing just 46 acres of OLF-8 as light industrial at $1.3 billion, Michael asked, “What would happen in 200 acres that were set aside for light industrial?”
I asked Rick Byars of FloridaWest the question on “Real News with Rick Outzen” yesterday.
Byars said FloridaWest had only asked the University of West Florida Haas Center to look at the 46 acres, but the economic development authority had three light industrial prospects considering a 46-acre site at OLF-8 and wanted to see their economic value. FloridaWest has asked the Haas Center to expand its analysis to include all 271 acres that the master plan has earmarked for light industrial.
“We actually asked the Haas Center not to do this study, but to talk about the three companies that we had originally that we brought before the board of commissioners back on September 24th, just to show the economic impact they would have if the county would move forward with those three companies. And our point then was simply to say, ‘Hey, Let’s take the emotion out of the conversation. Let’s talk about the real data, what this really means to the county,'” Byars said
“And so I presented that. Now, at that point, we haven’t had not done the comparison with the commercial and residential pieces of it. The Haas Center went back and added (the comparison with a retail and mixed-use option) after the board made the decision, ‘Hey, we might want to sell the entire parcel to a private developer to do the whole thing’ – which was a little bit different than what was envisioned and what was agreed to by all parties in a compromise several years ago.”
He added, “Now we’re going to move forward with the next step, which is to do the whole study on the 270 acres remaining light industrial.”