Richard Clark, executive director of Monroe County Transit, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s been going on with travel in the county.
Affordable housing and transit really are complementary.
Clark explained, “The affordable housing advisory committee asked me to talk to them a little bit today about what role mass transit can have on affordable housing, and the ability of those in affordable housing, to easily access transit, so that they can get to and from work or to and from a grocery store or wherever they need to go. But those two things tie together nicely. So much so that there are two avenues of significant funding from USDOT, one of which is called transit oriented development. It’s a planning grant where they spend seven figures per grant and a million plus dollars. They look at your corridor and they say, okay, here’s where your nodes are, let’s look at where your transit hubs should be and if you’re within a two mile radius of that hub, they will fund and it’s whatever prime is. Years ago, it was one and a half percent. Now it’s more like three and a half. But three and a half is 50% of what a regular, probably even a third of what commercial paper is. The real beauty of that federal funding for affordable housing is that that funding is long term, meaning most commercial paper you have to refinance every 10 years. This you get 30, 40, 50 year note. You don’t have that turn, which makes it an incredibly stable environment for affordable. If you’re a commercial developer, every number pencils, things don’t pencil out these days because of interest rates. So we have to find other ways to allow people, incentivize them to do such a thing and you incentivize them by allowing them to make a profit.”
There will be more discussions coming up about the Monroe County transit master plan.
Clark said, “The Keys did something really, really smart. David Rice, our county commissioner was mayor at the time, he pulled together elected officials from each municipality, had our strategic planner at the time, Kimberly Matthews, head the effort and really took a look up and down the Keys at where we were from a transit perspective. We needed a master plan, we needed to talk about how we grow and what’s first on the list and what can wait. So those conversations in an urban environment are done by an MPO, or metropolitan planning organization, or a TPO, a transit planning organization. They intuitively knew we have this hole and so let’s go out into the public – it’s a very public process – and let’s talk about what’s needed here in the Keys. They’ve done some wonderful things. FDOT has been an incredible partner. They had a list, of everyone on the list, at least three or four of the five or six said that should be on the priority list that got moved to the top. So FDOT has gone through that list, some intersection improvements, some stoplight moves, things like that. Most of it revolves around safety. But I’ll tell you FDOT is just an amazing partner with Monroe County, just Long Key Bridge and Seven Mile Bridge, both of which are on the horizon line from FDOT and budgeted for the future. I mean, that’s a billion and a half dollars in and of itself. Those are tremendous projects. They’re going to be new bridges, they’re not rehabbing old. They are going to put brand new bridges up. They’re going to start in June, on a stretch of the 18 mile stretch. They’re going to go in, they’re going to resurface, but they’re going to shore up some barriers, they’re going look at some infrastructure. It’s a little more significant than you would readily expect. That’s going to take about a year, so June to June, if not longer, you never you know how construction goes. On top of all the regular push, every time we talk, I always tell people slow down, we live in paradise for a reason. Slow down and take it easy. All of the county needs these efforts and it gets more expensive, because now we have an entire resilience effort on top of this and sustainable effort where injection wells that push that water down back into the aquifer easier and raising roads and infrastructure so that it doesn’t flood it, king tides, those things are important and expensive.”
How long could the Seven Mile Bridge project take?
Clark said, “They’re going to start PD&E and that is going to determine, that’ll kind of map out okay, this is where it’s going go, this is how it works. That takes a solid year or two. It’s real work. It’s Seven Mile Bridge, it’s long. So it takes real work. And obviously, from an environmental perspective, any bridge, especially in our waters is going to take that much more effort. Snake Creek, it’s the last drawbridge, but if you wanted to remove the drawbridge, the span, you would have to on either side of that bridge, it’s a pretty long run to get it to the height you need in order to eliminate the drawbridge. Then that also, this is why you do PD&E because if you stretch that out, just that one thing, you start looking at the waystation and how is that impacted and how does that change? So there’s always layers upon layers on any of these efforts.”
The Long Key Bridge is also slated for replacement.
Clark said, “That is the first one. So I would say, as the planning efforts happen, as construction happens, the first one you’re going to see is Long Key. It’s the one that’s needed the most. As FDOT has informed us, they’re their plan is to build a brand new bridge, there won’t be a rehab project, it will be a brand new bridge. It’s just age. It’s the lifecycle. Obviously it’s a much shorter lifecycle to resurface a road, but over the last 14, 16 years, you just put it on a rotation, obviously, bridges and that level of infrastructure or more like 50 year life cycles, but you have to stay ahead of it before they get to that point. It’s just part of the process. Thank goodness, we have such a good partner, because FDOT understands that they need to keep US 1 moving. It’s our lifeline for the Keys. Here’s the good news. Because they are going from one side to the other, it certainly is going to impact traffic, there’s no doubt about it. But as opposed to a one lane or 11 foot wide lanes, like they have in other places, we’ll still be able to use existing bridges the whole time.”