Public Meeting To Discuss Bruce B. Downs Boulevard Widening

Here's the press release for the public meeting I mentioned last week. It's on Thursday, April 1st at 6:30PM

Public Meeting To Discuss Bruce B. Downs Boulevard Widening

Hillsborough County and the Hillsborough Metropolitan Planning Organization will hold a public meeting to provide information and discuss Segment A of the Bruce B. Downs Boulevard widening project from Bearss Avenue to Palm Springs Boulevard in the New Tampa area. The purpose of the meeting is to receive input from citizens as to whether this segment should be reconstructed as a six-lane roadway, per the recently adopted Long Range Transportation Plan, in order to preserve right-of-way for future rapid transit, or as an eight-lane roadway as currently designed. Construction is estimated to start on the designed eight lanes in the summer of 2011 and should be completed by spring of 2014. The projected cost of the project is approximately $55 million. County and MPO staff, local agencies and consultants will be at the meeting to discuss the details of the project and future transit plans and to answer any questions residents may have. Please attend; we welcome your input. Date: Thursday, April 1 Time: 6:30 p.m. Place: Tampa Palms Elementary School , 6100 Tampa Palms Blvd. All meeting facilities are ADA compliant. For additional assistance, or for more information, please call Steve Valdez, Public Works Department at 272-5275 (TTY: 301-7173) or visit the MPO website at: www.hillsboroughmpo.org Para información, llamar al 272-5275.

I attended the public meeting held jointly by the County government and HART last night at Gaither High School. For those of you thinking of attending one of these meetings next week: the first hour is a chance to look over maps and other materials they've provided. Then they have a brief video about transporation issues, that explains why they are asking for a 1% sales tax increase, and how that money will be spent (75% bus and rail; 25% road and trail improvements). After the video they broke us into two groups to learn more about either transit or non-transit issues. I confess I did not stay until the very end! But I did hear about 30 minutes of the discussion group about transit.

Some of the comments from the public were of the predictable "Don't tax me!" variety. And there were the usual attendees who simply want to gripe about a bad intersection near their home, as well as one fellow who announced he was running for county commissioner and then held the floor with a mini-lecture for a very long time.

But one interesting concern, esp. of interest to planners, did come up in the transit discussion. Many of those in attendance live in the new developments off Dale Mabry highway in the north part of Hillsborough County, close to the border with Pasco. The HART planners explained that they made recommendations for transit improvements based on the Hillsborough county Future Land Use Map (FLUM). But much of the volume on the major roads in that area comes from the many new subdivisions built in across the county line in Pasco County-- and yet the Hillsborough County planning doesn't process doesn't fully consider how much new development Pasco County anticipates in the coming years. This strikes me as a structural problem in much of the planning process: although there is some cooperation between municipalities and counties, much of planning still fails to work at a regional level.