Comp Plan Visioning Input
The items below were submitted in response to a city request for ideas to be incorporated into the Comprehensive Plan.
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ESTABLISH TREE CANOPY COVERAGE AT CITY LEVEL
The city should be commended for establishing a tree ordinance requiring that tree canopy coverage be at least 10 % for new subdivisions. Still, one thing that is lacking is that we don't have any mechanism to encourage tree preservation on other kinds of property. One way to accomplish that would be to set a goal for overall tree canopy coverage at the city level, not just at the subdivision level. Many Florida cities have done this. I suggest establishing an overall tree canopy goal in the comp plan and the tree ordinance.
STOP EFFORT ON DOHERTY/HOB EXT AND DELETE FROM COMP PLAN
The city should cancel the Doherty Dr/HOB Extension project.
This project would funnel cut-through traffic (often impatient, frustrated drivers) through school-crossing intersections. It would increase the congestion on Henry which already blocks access to several side streets. And it would not improve traffic circulation significantly, because the city will not be able to extend Doherty Drive to Fell Road as originally planned.
The road project could also raise the risk of flooding because it will pave over a large swath of green space that now absorbs stormwater. Despite almost four years of effort, the city has been unable to come up with a stormwater design that meets the minimum state requirement. Any design they come up with will increase the flood risk for major storms, which are sure to occur in the future.
This project has been in the Comp Plan since the 1980s. Over the years, the city made one decision that drastically limited the usefulness of the road, and another series of errors and decisions that made it difficult to create an effective stormwater design for it. It seems we don't value the road enough to do it properly, but can't bring ourselves to cancel it altogether. Instead, we “kick the can down the road” by putting it in the Comp Plan, leaving the decision to others to deal with later. We should only use the Comp Plan for things that provide value, and that we can do properly. This is not one of those things!
It is time to proactively cancel this project and remove it from the Comp Plan.
PRIORITIZE ENVIRONMENT IN ROAD PLANNING
Recently there was a governmental survey of public sentiments throughout Brevard County, and they found that in setting transportation priorities, "…the public wanted more emphasis on the environment." In a nutshell, what the people want is this: Don't decide where to build new roads, and later tweak the designs to pacify environmentalists; instead, consider the environmental impact before you decide to build a road.
In response to this, the Space Coast Transportation Planning Organization is changing its decision process. In the new scheme of things, environmental impact is to be considered when prioritizing projects, so that projects with harmful environmental impact will receive a lower priority, and be less likely to be funded.
The city should follow the county’s example. The concept needs to be integrated into the city’s Comp Plan and Sustainability Plan. More importantly, it also needs to be defined in specific procedures for transportation planning and budget prioritization and spelled out in detail in a city ordinance.
TRAFFIC LIGHT AT HENRY/DOHERTY
The city should budget for a traffic light at Henry/Doherty intersection. Florida is currently the worst state in the nation for pedestrian fatalities, and Brevard is one of the worst areas in Florida. These are the conclusions of a study that has been discussed at WM City Council meetings and Space Coast TPO meetings. The study details a set of proven methods for reducing fatalities. One of the methods is to install traffic lights where pedestrians actually cross streets. An obvious example would be the intersection between Henry and Doherty, which will be a traffic bottleneck if the Doherty Dr/Heritage Oaks Ext is built, and is a school crossing. The need for the traffic light was recognized as early as 2011, by the Neel Schaffer engineers who did the preliminary design. Indeed, during six separate council meetings, Mayor Rose has asked for a traffic light to be included in the plans, but the city staff resisted. It is hard to understand the resistance, unless we assume the objective is to hide the overall cost of the road project. (Based on the cost of a recently-installed traffic signal, and adjusting for inflation, a new traffic signal would cost approximately $838,000.) Eventually the staff relented and placed a nonbinding note in the budget document indicating a traffic study should be done after the new road goes in, to see if a light is warranted. No additional funding was set aside for it, there is no firm schedule, no budget estimate, and no design. At a recent meeting of the SCTPO, Mr. Pete Petyk stated that the only way to get a traffic light put in is to wait and let a few people die, to prove that the light is needed. Let us not prove his grim assessment is right.
DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS
The city should appoint a director of communications to act as the prime spokesman for all government functions. This is a point that was brought up by Mayor Rose in a recent meeting, in which he asked who the city spokesman is, and there was considerable confusion as the staff tried to answer the question. The need to improve city communications was also mentioned by Councilmember Diana Adams in her interview for her assignment to the council. The advantages of having a single person responsible for external communication are obvious. Without a spokesman, there are conflicting messages put out by various city officials; sometimes there is no message at all when clearly there should be one. A particularly good example of the need for a communications director is the incident that occurred last year when many homes throughout the city were experiencing a problem with their water. There were hundreds of people complaining that the water smelled bad. But they all called different people with their complaints, and most of them just complained on social media. The city staff ignored all the complaints on social media. And many of the people who called the city were put on hold for a very long time and essentially received no satisfactory answer. The scope of the problem apparently was not perceived by city staff until various council members began comparing notes at a council meeting. It appeared at that time that the City Manager and the Director of Public Utilities were only marginally aware of the problem. One council member, unaware of the breakdown in communications, blamed the people, saying they should not call council members or complain on social media. Had there been a spokesman responsible for interacting with the public and media, most of those complaints would have been funneled through that spokesman and could have been addressed promptly. (This description of the smelly water incident is based on listening to the council meeting and reading posts on social media; other interpretations are possible.) For a city of this size, a director of communications is essential to ensure that we have unity in our messaging and are paying the appropriate amount of attention to how the city's efforts are perceived by the public.
IMPROVED PROCESS FOR TRAFFIC ANALYSES
The city's process for traffic analyses in support of development projects needs to be improved. Some traffic analyses have been of such low credibility that recently our mayor stated that that he never saw a traffic study that did not support the desires of the person who paid for it. There are many areas for possible improvement. For example, the city requirement document currently does not even call for our traffic analyses to comply with the Florida Traffic Analysis standards. It should. Also, no traffic study should be done by a person without the proper credentials. An important traffic study impacting one of our current projects was done by a person with no background at all in traffic analysis. Also, it should be part of the process to extend traffic studies some number of years into the future, perhaps 10 or 20 years, at least. Otherwise, the studies are obsolete before the project is built, which is what happened in a recent case. A traffic study should make use of the high-credibility data which is available, for free, from the Space Coast TPO. Their professional analyses are done in accordance with the highest standards and deserve to be given a high level of credence. Traffic analyses should also always look at the history of traffic issues in the area being studied. For example, if there is a history of cut-through traffic on nearby streets which have a similar configuration to the streets being analyzed, that information should be made available to the analyst. Traffic studies should not read like marketing spin, advocating for a road project because it would allow the residents to take a leisurely stroll in the evening to some nearby attraction. There should be some kind of review of any analysis before it is released, to insure against bias. Finally, individuals should never be selected to perform a traffic analysis if they have an obvious conflict of interest, such as living in the immediate area of the roads whose traffic is being analyzed.
Also, when vehicles are counted or speeds are measured for a traffic analysis, care must be taken to avoid the appearance of a police speed trap. This is because the sight of a speed trap will lead drivers to slow down or avoid that road altogether, which will bias the results. That happened in 2018, when police used a Radar Speed Board to measure vehicle speeds to evaluate the need for speed humps on Trend Road. Mayor Rose pointed out that the drivers could clearly see their speeds being monitored, which biased the results. The results should have been discarded altogether. In that specific case, an incorrect decision about speed humps might have been made – there is no way to know. But more generally, the credibility of the city suffers when biased measurements are used to confirm preordained government positions on issues. (It is well known that city governments are normally reluctant to use speed humps.)
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The city's Traffic Impact Study Guidelines, dated 2008, need to be updated to address all of the comments above, and also to ensure that they address current traffic realities and modern analysis technologies. Also, the document should be made available online, because it is the basis for making city decisions that significantly impact the citizens, and the citizens have a right to full transparency into how these decisions are made.
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