Like A Marble Staircase In A Quaint Beach Cottage...

Pine Avenue parking is once again on the agenda tonight at City Hall and anyone interested in what direction this thing will take should show up and ask some questions. While the concept of “meandering sidewalks” appears to be where the City Commission is headed, how that ultimately works, legally and logistically, is far from decided.

The “meandering” part of the proposed plans refers to essentially serpentining the sidewalks from the right-of-way abutting the street, where the City Code currently requires them to be, to the space between nose-in parked vehicles and buildings on certain commercial parcels creating an easement separate and apart from the street that the City thereafter maintains. You can go ahead and consider “certain commercial parcels” as those developed or to be developed by PAR.

The rub comes from those three thorny words “right” and “of” and “way.” That’s land under the city’s control, land and infrastructure maintained by your tax dollars. Without the right-of-way a meandering sidewalk, whether they call it a “public” or a “private” parking plan, cannot work. There is simply not enough room. Proponents would have you believe the City can simply swap out the respective pieces of the sidewalk like a jigsaw puzzle up and down Pine Avenue wherever developers seek to wedge in as much parking as legally allowable and everything will be copacetic. But...

Like we’ve said before, if only.

In a vacuum the concept of meandering sidewalks is a nice aesthetic idea. And in planned communities, where planning and design are done on the frontend before things like roads and sidewalks, commercial structures and homes, parks and green space, landscaping and storm drainage are in place, they make sense. Think Disney’s Celebration or even vast parts of Lakewood Ranch.

But this is not that. This is retrofitting, the old square peg in a round whole conundrum, like stuffing a spiraling gleaming marble staircase into quaint historic heart-of-pine beach cottage. The mechanics of such a swap, if it’s legally viable at all, would be a logistical nightmare for everything from liability issues to survey and platting concerns, not to mention the precedent it sets of which future aggressive developers may, and most certainly will, seek to take advantage. Easements serve a specific legal purpose in the interplay between public and private land use. They are not, however, intended to function as a convenient tool to evade land use regulations.

That being said, some sort of resolution is imminent. Or maybe not. The votes for such a plan appear to be in the bag in spite of (1) pending litigation against the City on four fronts which may directly affect past and future site plan analysis; (2) continuing concerns over Comp Plan and LDR compliance (i.e. Land Use Element 1.3.8 and City Ordinance Sec. 90-2 so strongly and persistently argued by Commissioner Woodland and others) and (3) the startling disregard for the hundreds of voter signatures on last summer’s Citizen Initiative Petition, signatures that illustrate an undeniable undercurrent of disapproval of right-of-way use in the community.

But Mayor Selby has made it clear publically and in direct discussions with developers that he will veto any ordinance that cedes or “swaps” the right-of-way. To his significant credit and in keeping with his pre-election promises, he seems to have been working hard for a solution, getting as much face time as he can with stakeholders and decision makers on both sides of the issue.

We'll see. Stay tuned.


Bill Yanger