Developers need to pay for traffic

By Steve Estes

For the counties in Florida that take growth management seriously, which are primarily the smaller, rural counties with environmentally sensitive areas—yes like Monroe—the state is trying to force them to play catch up.

A bill currently making its way through the state Legislature would prohibit local governments from requiring concurrency updates from developers seeking to build, build and build some more.

The prohibition comes down hardest on transportation concurrency, a term for making sure that vehicles can traverse the existing road system in a reasonable period before more, and more, and more building can take place.

Traffic concurrency plays a big part in growth management in the Keys. We have just the one road into and out of the island chain. If that road doesn’t flow, particularly during Christmas week and Fantasy Fest, our economic lifeblood, tourists, can’t get to the destinations and we all go broke.

Maintaining a reasonable level of service for US 1 is of utmost importance to everyone in the Keys.

What we do now is conduct traffic studies for major developments to see if those projects, whether new or rebuilt, will add to the daily use of the road that serves them and if that added usage will cause unacceptable delays for all motorists.

If the project causes the level of service to fall below state mandated minimums, the developer can be required to address the traffic flow issues, either through construction of access roads, turn lanes or merge lanes, or pay a fee to allow the local government to upgrade the servicing road to permit reasonable traffic flow after the development is in place.

And that all makes sense.

What the Legislature is proposing is that we can’t use the possibility of a debilitating traffic jam to stop us from issuing a development permit.

And that makes no sense.

During the doomed-to-fail housing boom of a few years back, our mainland neighbors couldn’t find a major residential or commercial project they didn’t like. In one instance, a 1,700-home subdivision was permitted that was served by a two-lane access road with a single highway exit to get to that road.

Due to the housing crash, that subdivision never materialized in its entirety but Miami-Dade County is still trying feverishly to build enough new roads to handle the possibility that the development gets resurrected in some fashion.

We are all familiar with the potable water battles occurring across the nation. Access to potable water may well become the defining end of human development in some areas.

Yet we can’t ask developers to pay for access to potable water, or even wait to develop their project until such questions are answered. And we can’t ask developers to pay for the construction of roads that move their prospective customers to and from their developments.

And that makes no sense.

This proposal is simply another in a long line of bad ideas from our current crop of Legislators in Tallahassee.

Local officials are working through lobbyists and small-county coalitions to get the Keys an exemption from the concurrency prohibition due to our status as an Area of Critical State Concern and our fragile ecosystem.

As they should.

Our elected leadership has been good in the last few years about not allowing unfettered development in the Keys. But that may not last forever.

If we do indeed wind up under the new state proposal, it will mean probable higher taxes for all of us as we are forced to make the necessary adjustments to cure traffic ills caused by developments.

Our local leaders need to fight this proposal or we all lose in the long run.