Letter to Charlie Crist, Governor State of Florida

To: Charlie.Crist@MyFlorida.com
Sent: Fri, Jun 4, 2010 10:20 pm

Office of Governor Charlie Crist
State of Florida
The Capitol
400 S. Monroe St.
Tallahassee, FL 32399-0001

RE:  US Highway 92 – Gandy Blvd – Tampa, FL

Governor Crist,

Being from St. Petersburg you are familiar, quite familiar probably, with Gandy Blvd. which runs through South Tampa. It is one of Tampa’s gateways from Pinellas County, with the Gandy Bridge being one of the three bridges that cross Tampa Bay and connect Pinellas with Hillsborough.

As you may know the Florida Department of Transportation has recently completed a safety and beautification project on Gandy which has not only made it much more attractive but has also significantly improved the flow of traffic, especially during rush hour times. Being a local resident who lives five streets north of Gandy I could not be more pleased with the results of this project, a project which was long and at times very trying. I have heard nothing but praise for the new Gandy, and the twenty-three million dollars spent to make it happen seems to be no longer discussed. Until you start talking about the possibility of it being unearthed and marred by a currently proposed project, which is why I am writing to you today.

The Tampa Hillsborough Expressway Authority (THEA), a local transportation authority with several board members who have been appointed by you, has proposed an elevated bypass road to be constructed down the middle of Gandy Blvd. which will connect the Selmon Expressway to the Gandy Bridge. This concept has caused quite a stir with a solid majority of the local residents, many of whom live within only hundreds of feet of this proposed structure. I am one of the members of the majority, and the thought of a massive concrete structure running down the middle of my neighborhood’s main street is simply unacceptable.

The defacing of our neighborhood is definitely not necessary at this point in time, and it may never be. The scary traffic counts that have been predicted are nothing but guesses, and we feel speculation alone is not even close to being a good enough reason to ruin the character of our thoroughfare. Gandy is a commercial/retail corridor with neighborhoods one block away on both the north and south sides. This is certainly not the proper place to erect an elevated roadway. It is totally wrong, and this is the main reason why an estimated 75% of the locals soundly reject the idea. If the majority of us, the people who using Gandy the most, are willing to deal with thick rush hour traffic for a few hours five days a week, why force a very unwanted project on us when nobody needs it and everything will still be quite functional without it? In short, the minor benefit to be realized falls way short of the negative impact we will feel, and there is no way we will agree to a project that will deface our neighborhood unless it can be proven to absolutely necessary for reasons of life safety. The sales pitch that it will serve as a better hurricane evacuation route is fooling nobody. The overhead will be just as clogged and backed up as any other route has been in the past and will be in the future.

We have made our case in front of the Tampa City Council and the Hillsborough County Commission, and both boards, after seeing that we have over 1,500 names on a grass roots petition that we circulated and also many letters written by businesses on Gandy, have sent a letter to THEA saying that the local residents and businesses do not support the project. They did this because THEA has said since the beginning that they would not do anything the community does not support. Well, we will soon see how sincere they have been with that statement.

Attached are the aforementioned letters from the Tampa City Council and the Hillsborough Board of County Commissioners, as well as a letter from Senator Charlie Justice to FDOT Secretary Stephanie Kopelousos. We have reached out to our local leaders in an effort to have our voices heard. A small group of us even went to see Michelle Todd in St. Petersburg, and we were rather disappointed to hear her say that she had not heard of any opposition to the project. Senator Justice said the same to me, and he even added that he had heard it had “all been worked out”. Well, it hasn’t. We are so upset with the prospect of our neighborhood being ruined by an out of place concrete monster that we will not stop opposing until a final decision is made.

We are reaching out to you in hope that you will sympathize with our position and see the connection we feel with our neighborhood. Perhaps your authoratative voice can influence the individuals who are sitting in THEA board seats because of you. We sincerely ask you for your help in preserving the character of our main street and keeping our neighborhood feeling like a neighborhood and not a transit corridor.

Respectfully,

Bill W