FDOT to seek more San Carlos Boulevard input
The Florida Department of Transportation is still seeking public input on its San Carlos Boulevard traffic improvement study, but the date of a public meeting is now to-be-announced.
The local community was supposed to get its chance to discuss FDOT’s proposed traffic mitigation solutions at a tentative Feb. 23 workshop. However, at the Jan. 20 Lee County Metropolitan Organization meeting, FDOT was told it needed to re-evaluate, and it canceled the workshop.
Now, some local residents are concerned that yet another pushed-back public meeting could delay the project for months.
Beach Area Civic Association (BACA) leader Charlie Whitehead said he and the members of BACA are troubled at the continued delay of the study moving forward.
“BACA sees no reason to delay the start of the public workshop portion of the study. This study is already a year behind schedule,” Whitehead said. “Statistics gathered in the early portion of the study clearly indicate San Carlos Boulevard is an extremely crowded, extremely dangerous stretch of road.”
Whitehead said he was concerned at the lack of an official date set for a public workshop – if FDOT waits too long, it will have to delay the meeting until the winter to make sure a majority of the seasonal residents have the chance to comment.
“FDOT is unwilling to hold the workshop over the summer because they get beat up for doing it when the snowbirds are gone,” he said.
Instead, BACA wants the study to move forward – because the next step in the study was actually to take in public comment on proposed traffic solutions.
“The process typically includes presenting all the options to the public,” he said. “Those options that are unworkable are discarded. We will be asking the MPO to allow this process to go forward.”
The study, which was launched in May 2015, is now more than a year past its projected date for public input.
Lee County Commissioner Larry Kiker and Fort Myers Beach Town Council Member Tracey Gore pushed for the halt. Both said the ideas FDOT was considering had already been tried, and had failed.
The study was examining ways to alleviate some of the heavy traffic congestion on San Carlos Boulevard, which is a state road.
“I’m a little concerned with going public without going to the elected officials that have been there and done that,” Kiker said at the January meeting.
FDOT was proposing multiple ideas, such as removing the alternating light at Buttonwood Road and re-striping the Matanzas Pass Bridge to allow two lanes of traffic to the beach, and, in long-term ideas, widening the bridge to have another sidewalk, putting a traffic signal at Main Street, and considering roundabouts at appropriate intersections as potential problem-solvers.
Both Gore and Kiker said many of the ideas had been “done before.”
“The County and Town of Fort Myers Beach wanted a little more discussion on some of the solutions that the Department was proposing as well as some items that they would like us to look at,” said Zach Burch, FDOT spokesman.
So, FDOT canceled the Feb. 23 workshop, but the topic arose again at the MPO’s Feb. 17 regular meeting.
“Last MPO requested us to hold off. We made decision to comply. Our plan is to work with stakeholders,” said FDOT Secretary L.K. Nandam. “We have the study, we want to get information from stakeholders.”
Nandam also said FDOT would not let the focus hone in too heavily on San Carlos Island and instead examine other reasons that traffic backs up on Fort Myers Beach. The extended public input would allow some of those ideas to be brought forward, but Nandam warned the MPO that increased public input wouldn’t necessarily lead to a program that solved everything.
“We might all accept that this congestion is a reality, and decide how to manage it, not to solve it,” he said.
After a heated debate at the Feb. 6 Town Council meeting, Council Member Tracey Gore also delivered a message to the MPO, at which she represents the town: that her vote to pause the San Carlos study was not backed by all at her Town Council and she had given her MPO vote without an official consensus from her council.