Mayor D.C. Reeves unveiled the conceptual designs for the New Palafox project, which he called “the largest investment in our iconic downtown street in the history of the city.”
Behind the mayor, renderings by Jerry Pate Design showed the early concepts, but he added, “I do want to point out very specifically conceptual design means conceptual, which means there’s 0% design at this point.”
The mayor added, “We just met with our downtown business owners and got some feedback from them. Certainly, we will be taking feedback on the city’s website devoted to the project, thenewpalafox.com. There’s a submission form on there for anybody in the public with any thoughts. They can look at some of the ideas block by block.”
The estimated cost of the New Palafox is $5 million, with $3 million coming for FPL. The mayor said, “The funding of this project will be put together between a great community partnership with FPL and with your parking revenue.”
J.T. Young, the vice president and general manager of the FPL Northwest Region, pointed out that the FPL infrastructure work back in 2018. “It was about a 70-year-old infrastructure that needed upgrading. And so we began that project back then, which was pretty significant. And if some of you remember, we did a lot of that work at night, trying to avoid the busiest times. Nonetheless, we did spend a good bit of time upgrading that to improve the reliability and the resilience of our network downtown.”
The FPL budgeted $86 million for the infrastructure upgrades, and the $3 million allocated to the New Palafox partnership is part of that budget and would have been incurred se to restore the city streets to their original state.
“It just made sense to think about how could we partner with the city in getting this restoration and even make improvements from a paving perspective so that when we got this situation back to where it would be better than it was before,” Young said. “We are committed to making sure that the final product is what it should be.”
FPL will allocate the funds to the city, which will be the project manager. Young said, “We’re blessed with great vibrancy downtown, and we want to make sure that we do all we can to continue to enhance that. So again, we’re just pleased to be able to work with the city on this project, and I want to thank the mayor and the team from the city for working with us on this project. We’re grateful to be able to be a part of it.”
The New Palafox project focuses on the street from south of Garden Street to north of Main Street. Brad Alexander of Jerry Pate Design walked through the renderings and pointed out some concepts—reducing pedestrian exposure by relining and shortening crosswalks,
widening and raising crosswalks to calm traffic, reducing Palafox from 14 feet to 11 feet, and widening the sidewalks.
“The whole overriding concept is to prioritize pedestrians and pedestrian safety to reduce that conflict between pedestrian and downtown,” said Alexander.
Mayor Reeves said, “The net loss of parking is three spaces throughout the entire project. So there’s some decrease in parking in some blocks, and there’s some increase in parking in others.”
He said the project will have 12,000 more square feet of pervious surface and 51 more trees net.
The drawings will be available on thethenewpalafox.com soon.