Email to City Council Sep 2022

Councilmember Dittmore has requested comments on this project. The email below was sent to him and other council members.

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John, I understand you have solicited comments about the Heritage Oaks Blvd/Doherty Drive Extension Project. For what it’s worth, my opinion is that the project should be canceled immediately, because it would do much harm to the community, without significant benefit.

For example, it would have some bad effects on traffic. It would:
 

• Create hazardous situations by funneling cut-through traffic (often impatient, frustrated drivers) through school-crossing intersections. 

• Exacerbate the dangerous congestion on Henry that already blocks access to several side streets. 

• Fail to accomplish its original objective of improving traffic circulation, because the city cannot extend Doherty Drive to Fell Road as originally planned.

 
As the Trend Road problems showed, important real-world effects, such as cut-through traffic, are not captured in simplistic models used in the city traffic study. However, I’m sure your experience with traffic makes you well-qualified to recognize these effects. So I would encourage you to draw on your personal background, to help the council appreciate these concerns.

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. The city has been attempting for almost four years to come up with a stormwater management design. Two designs have been rejected, and the third design is currently being evaluated by SJRWMD, which has found a large number of serious flaws in the application. The design task is quite difficult because of limited space, and because the existing detention ponds for the subdivisions were undersized, due to an error in the original design calculations. Even if the flaws are eventually corrected, the road’s drainage system will be sized, at best, to deal with a nominal rainfall event, but there are going to be hurricanes and tropical storms that will dump much more rain than the nominal event, so homes will probably be flooded that would not be flooded without the road in place.  

For these and other reasons, my take is that this is not the right way to spend our tax dollars. Whatever problems the road project might fix, the remedy is worse than the malady!