MediaUpdate

​By Cleveland Tinker

Several road construction projects are ongoing in Alachua County, while a couple are on hold, awaiting money.

The projects range from resurfacing Northwest County Road 236 from U.S. 441 to Interstate 75 in High Springs to major improvements to Southeast 43rd Street in Gainesville.

County Engineer Ramon Gavarrete said the projects are being done in the order set by county leaders.

“Resurfacing projects were prioritized by the Board of County Commissioners as new funding sources became available focusing on pavement conditions and traffic volumes,” Gavarrete said.

Below is a look at the road projects:

• The resurfacing of Northwest County Road 236 from U.S. 441 to I-75 also includes redressing grassed shoulders and filling in sidewalk gaps in High Springs. County officials opened bidding for the sidewalk construction March 29, and are evaluating bids.
  
  The $2 million project will be funded by the Alachua County Transportation Trust Fund. The project should be completed this summer.
• The resurfacing of Northwest 43rd Street from West Newberry Road to U.S. 441 that will include ensuring the road is compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act and the adding of a left-turn lane at Northwest 82nd Avenue.
  
  The $7 million project will be funded by the additional 5-cent local option gas tax. The project should be completed this winter.
• The Tower Road milling and resurfacing project includes rehabilitating the existing pavement; adding turn lanes at select intersections and bus turnouts at heavily used stops and adding a multi-use path on the east side of the roadway from Southwest 26th Place to Southwest Eighth Avenue.
  
  The $3.5 million project will be funded by the Transportation Trust Fund. This project is scheduled to be completed in the fall of 2018.
• The County Road 337 milling, realignment and resurfacing project is on hold pending funding.
  
  The project will include milling and resurfacing 8 miles of County Road 337 from the Levy County line to State Road 26 and constructing 4-inch paved shoulders.
  
  The budget for this project is estimated at $6 million.
• The project to expand the I-75 overpass on Southwest 20th Avenue from Southwest 61st Street to Southwest 62nd Boulevard is on hold pending funding.
  
  The budget for this project is estimated to cost $10 million.
• The pavement reclamation project of Southwest 62nd Avenue and Southwest 63rd Boulevard will include a full-depth reclamation of the road from State Road 121 to State Road 24, paved shoulders striped as bike lanes, construction of a center turn lane at State Road 121, drainage improvements and replacements, realigning a curve and constructing a storm water facility on the 2-mile project.
  
  The $4 million project will be funded by the additional 5-cent local option gas tax. The project is expected to be completed this fall.
• The Southwest Eighth Avenue and Southwest 61st Street project will include connecting the roads, as well as milling, resurfacing, new road construction and installing traffic signals.
  
  The highlights will be resurfacing Southwest Eighth Avenue to the new road segment; new road construction connecting Southwest Eighth Avenue to Southwest 61st Street; resurfacing Southwest 61st Street from Southwest 20th Avenue to new road segment; construction of new intersection at Southwest 20th Avenue and Southwest 61st Street, construction of a 6-foot wide sidewalk on the north side of Southwest 20th Avenue from CVS to the I-75 overpass and construction of an 8-foot sidewalk from Southwest 61st Street to the I-75 overpass.
  
  The budget for the project is $17.3 million, and most of the funding will come from campus development funds, impact fees, multi-modal mitigation fees and a state grant. The County Commission will seek $8 million from other funding sources to complete the project.
• The Southeast 43rd Street project includes adding a center turn lane from Hawthorne Road to East University Avenue.
  
  The project also features adding landscaped medians at locations without driveways; adding bike lines and right turn lanes into Eastside High and Lake Forest Elementary schools; upgrading crosswalk markings and signs and rehabilitating the pavement.
  
  The $2 million project will be funded by the Transportation Trust Fund, impact fees and multi-modal mitigation fees. The project will be completed this summer.

Finding the funding to address the county’s road repair backlog has been a concern for the County Commission, which has seen two transportation sales tax referendums voted down by voters in 2012 and 2014. In 2014, the backlog was estimated at $550 million, $380 million of which was for county roads alone.

“The board has made a decision to increase funding towards roadway improvements by 10 percent per year as the revenues increase ...” Gavarrete said. “In addition to gas tax funding, the board increased General Fund contributions to roads by over 27 percent from $2,577,760 (fiscal year 2016) to $3,285,536 (fiscal year 2017).”

View photos from this event.

​By Cindy Swirko

Some new walls are talking at the Historic Haile Homestead with Saturday’s dedication and opening of a visitor center and museum.

The museum features a timeline and genealogy of the Haile family, which began when Thomas Evans Haile and his wife, Serena Chestnut Haile, moved to the Kanapaha area of Alachua County in 1854 and established a cotton plantation with the labor of slaves.

Many of the descendants donated money for the visitor center and were back on their family’s ground at 8500 Archer Road Saturday.

“This is something I’ve been excited about for a very long time. It’s taken about 15 years to really get this up and usable,” said Beverly Haile Parrish. “We’re just thrilled to actually have it happen, and we’re grateful to everyone who has had a part in having it developed.”

Over the years the Haile family sold much of the original acreage for development — Haile Plantation is named after it. But the 40-acre homestead was preserved by Alachua Conservation Trust and the Haile Family Trust.

It includes the 6,200-square-foot home known for its “talking walls” — more than 12,500 words and artwork written by family members and dating to 1859.

Thomas and Serena had 15 children. Included on the walls are personal observations, names of visitors, growth charts of children and grandchildren, recipes for household solutions, inventories of linens, silverware, china, business records and prose, according to the Haile Homestead website.

The visitor center is named after family members Allen and Ethel Graham. The porch, breezeway, reception area and museum are dedicated to family members who donated to the project.

Included in the museum is a model of the homestead built to scale by Harvey Resnick, a woodworker from Old Town. Resnick said that even the rocking chairs on the front porch are scaled correctly, adding that 2,632 roof shingles were hand cut.

Also on display are photographs, biographies of the Haile family, maps of the area, tools found at the homestead and other artifacts.

No attempt is made in tours of the homestead or in the museum to gloss over the slavery. When the Hailes moved to the area from South Carolina, they brought dozens of slaves with them.

A display case in the museum includes an iron, 8-pound, 6-ounce ball that would be chained to slaves. Records and photos in the museum include those of slaves.

“At the homestead, you can’t not remember that there were 66 enslaved people here,” said Karen Kirkman, president and historian of Historic Haile Homestead. “We try to tell as complete a story as we can.”

Later generations of Hailes continued to make their way inside the house after it was boarded up.

Parrish said she used to ride her horse, Col. Genius, through the woods on the grounds as a child while Graham Haile said he would ride his bike from Gainesville to the homestead with his shotgun so he could hunt there.

“Even the daytime that place was spooky. You’d hear everything contracting and expanding, and your imagine would run wild, especially as a kid,” Graham Haile said. “You’d take a board off and crawl through the hole. It was always cool in there and hot in the summer.”

​Well, here we go again. SSDD.

Same Song Different Dance.

Lately we’ve seen a flurry of stories about Gainesville/Alachua County conflicts. The county threatens to sue the city over an unused building, county and city commissioners fall out over how to split gas tax dollars, the County Commission votes to spend thousands of dollars to determine its “legal rights” in regard to a possible city purchase of the Gainesville Renewable Energy Center biomass plant.

No surprise on that last one. GREC’s plant is a tax-paying entity and if it becomes city property, the county stands to lose a couple million bucks a year.

Still, it’s ironic that we’ve finally come full-circle on this particular issue. Once upon a time, back in the 1970s, there would have been no question about the county’s legal rights. Decisions were then made by the Regional Utilities Board, made up of both city and county commissioners.

So what happened? RUB-Out happened. That’s what they called the agreement whereby the two ever-squabbling commissions settled on a less-than-amicable divorce.

And now the county wants to know about its legal rights?

Same song, different dance.

Listen, I hate to sound like a broken record. But I’ve been writing about this community for more than 40 years. A lot has changed, but one thing never does.

The city-county wars continue more or less unabated.

Oh, the issues change, but the song remains the same.

Sometimes they fight over who pays for street lights and fire hydrants. Sometimes it’s over fire and EMS services. Or transit. Or annexation. Or emergency dispatch. Or law enforcement. Or fill in the blanks.

Whatever. It’s got a beat and you can dance to it.

Now its a spirited disagreement about the city-county allocation of local gas tax dollars.

“City officials have asked for a more even split for the soon-to-be expired funds” The Sun reported recently. “County officials recently responded saying they were willing to walk away from negotiations altogether and pursue alternative funding sources.”

Good luck on that. The only viable “alternative funding source” is a local option sales tax, and voters around here keep rejecting that one. A couple of elections back, friction between city and county commissioners over how to split those theoretical sales tax dollars contributed to the initiative’s defeat.

Sound familiar?

Since that Sun account was published, a Facebook posting by County Commission Chair Ken Cornell seeking public input about the “gas tax status quo” has drawn more than 300 responses. Some of them denounce “greedy politicians” on both sides of the invisible city-county line.

County Commissioner Robert Hutchinson followed up with his own Facebook posting.

“The City sets the ratio of the city/county funding split, then the County decides whether to impose the tax,” he wrote. “So County Commissioners get the pleasure of public notices and hearings about a tax increase without being able to determine how much gets used on County roads, and City Commissioners get to stay home drinking pina coladas during the hearings and don’t get opponents who call them out as tax-and-spenders.”

Pina coladas? Is that a great job or what?

Not to be too hard on Hutchinson. In the same post he made a fairly constructive suggestion.

“Perhaps every two years, city and county commissioners and managers should be required to switch seats. Empathy, teamwork, and communitarian principles shouldn’t be this hard to achieve.”

Now there’s something we haven’t tried before.

What’s especially irritating about these latest skirmishes is that both commissions appear to be controlled by like-minded progressives who ought to be in accord on issues like promoting urban infill and discouraging suburban sprawl (aka more money for transit, less for roads). Yet shared values and objectives never seem to stand up against the same old city vs. county imperative.

SSDD.

And that’s too bad, because there are important things happening in metro Gainesville right now — UF’s historic strategic plan outreach, to name just one. And the last thing we need at this critical juncture in our community’s history is another outbreak of the same old city-county wars.

— Ron Cunningham is former editorial page editor of The Sun.

​Managing stormwater for protecting the environment should be important for everyone. Alachua County has been working on a county stormwater manual, focusing on new construction, that proposes advanced stormwater treatment requirements for protecting water quality.

The Alachua County Environmental Protection Advisory Committee, the League of Women Voters and the Alachua County Emerging Leaders are hosting the next informational meeting about the manual. The forum will be held on today at 6 p.m. at the Alachua County Senior Recreation Center, 5701 NW 34th Blvd. in Gainesville.

A panel of experts, moderated by Marihelen Wheeler, will discuss the issues and the latest draft of the manual, addressing questions from the hosts and the audience. I hope all interested citizens will attend (email questions you would like addressed to Gus Olmos at gus@alachuacounty.us).

George Hochmuth

Gainesville

​By Cleveland Tinker

Tiny houses could become a reality here if the Alachua County Planning Commission decides Wednesday to recommend new rules on tiny house developments.

The Planning Commission will decide whether to recommend that the Alachua County Commission adopt amendments to the county’s comprehensive plan that will govern how and where such developments could be built.

The Planning Commission will make its decision at a meeting 6 p.m. Wednesday in the County Administration Building at 12 SE First St.

“The amendments to the comprehensive plan will allow development of cottage neighborhoods (tiny house developments) on lots within the low-density and medium-density residential land use designations to develop at up to two times the maximum density per acre,” said Missy Daniels, principal planner with Alachua County Growth Management.

Some have suggested that tiny house developments could become part of a solution for the county’s homeless population.

Daniels said current rules allow four units per acre in low-density and eight units per acre in medium-density residential areas.

Under the proposed change, eight units per acre would be allowed in low-density residential areas. Medium-density areas could have no more than 15 units per acre.

Daniels said the planning commission will likely recommend that the County Commission send the changes to state planning officials for review. Commissioners will likely decide on the issue in late May, Daniels said, and state officials would review it within 30 days.

After that, county commissioners would consider adopting the amendment.

Cottage neighborhoods are groups of tiny homes built around a common green space, and Daniels said though they are becoming more popular in Oregon and Washington, she doesn’t expect them to become nearly as popular in Alachua County — in the foreseeable future, anyway.

According to a report by county officials, the neighborhoods offer opportunities for creative and high quality infill development within urban clusters. “Urban clusters” are areas under the county’s jurisdiction that surround the city of Gainesville, have water and sewer available and allow residential, commercial or other non-residential development at a higher density and intensity than in rural areas.

The neighborhoods maximize pedestrian-oriented outdoor spaces, while minimizing the impact of automobile traffic and parking.

Daniels said there are no cottage neighborhoods in Alachua County. However, with the average household size declining in Alachua County, some people may begin to see tiny houses as a viable option, she said.

Some features of cottage neighborhoods:

*Tiny homes, with no more than 1,000 square feet of air-conditioned area.

*A minimum of four homes and a maximum of 15 homes are allowed per development.

*Must have direct access to a paved, publicly maintained street.

*One community building allowed per neighborhood.

*Common green space must include 400 square feet per unit, excluding wetlands, streams or areas with slopes greater than 10 percent.

*The common green space must be centrally located.

*Parking must be provided in a common lot or garage, and meet minimum standards that include 1.5 spaces per unit, lots and garages are restricted to no more than 15 contiguous spaces separated by a minimum of 5 feet and be set back a minimum of 20 feet from a public street or property boundary.

* All homes must include at least one open air-covered porch.

*Paved walkways must be provided to connect all homes, parking areas, open spaces and sidewalks along public streets bordering the neighborhoods.

“These neighborhoods will offer a different, likely less expensive housing option, but I don’t expect there will be a great number of them developed because they can only contain up to 15 total units and will be on smaller infill lots,” Daniels said.

​By Andrew Caplan

To assist those most in need, Alachua County and the city of Gainesville officials have partnered to begin allocating funds toward a rental assistance program.

Recently, the Florida Legislature changed how State Housing Initiative Partnership (SHIP) funds can be allocated, allowing for money to be put toward rent subsidies for poverty-stricken households and to get homeless people into housing.

The county and city each receive a little over $800,000 in SHIP funding annually and plan to give $120,000 from their respective cuts toward the initiative — the maximum amount permitted.

“I think the key thing we are looking for is the long-term self-sufficiency,” said Ralston Reodica, the county’s housing division director.

At least $100,000 from both the city and county will go directly toward rental assistance. Each side will also add another $20,000 for case managers, to bring the joint investment to $240,000.

The program, based on Department of Housing and Urban Development guidelines, will assist with deposits and monthly rent and will complement similar initiatives in the county.

Generally, Reodica said, SHIP funds generally go toward homeowner programs and building housing. The change, he said, allows to the county and city officials to address two of their most pressing issues: Living in poverty and homelessness.

City and county officials have already expressed interest in ending homelessness throughout the county, and those at Grace Marketplace have been gearing toward getting its residents into homes.

Sarai Cabrera, the county’s division director of social services, said applications will not be based on a first-come, first-served basis, but rather on who is most in need.

She hopes the program assists at least 20 to 25 people in its first year and that those people become self-sufficient within a year.

Recently, close to 100 community leaders, homeless people and advocates rallied in Tallahassee to speak out against Gov. Rick Scott’s call to cut the $293 million budget for affordable housing trust funds by 77 percent.

Due to the cuts in housing funds, Reodica said he knows the combined $1.6 million for Alachua County and Gainesville isn’t enough to solve the county’s housing issues.

“It could be more,” he said. “We could be getting almost double that.”

There are approximately 33,500 people throughout the state who are homeless or in temporary shelters, according to a 2016 U.S. HUD study. About 2,900 are veterans and more than 6,000 are disabled, the study found.

Reodica said he hopes to get local businesses and the University of Florida involved with the program in the coming years.

“It really requires a community effort to end homelessness,” Reodica said.

View this story.​

The ongoing budget disputes in Alachua county entered a new phase today.

A court heard a legal challenge brought by county comissioners arguing that Sheriff Darnell was spending allocated funds innapropriately.

"The sheriff believes she can move money between departments between functions at the object code level of her budget, the comissioners disagree," said Mark Sexton, the county spokesperson.

The judge postponed the hearing on the sherriff's motion to dismiss due to a county request to file revised paperwork

A date for the new hearing has not yet been scheduled.

Reporter:
Michael Sorge