Overtown ramp plan provokes a dispute
BY LARRY LEBOWITZ
The Battle for Overtown continues to rage well into its fifth decade.
The latest front: The Florida Department of Transportation is trying to
build a new on-ramp to southbound Interstate 95 from Northwest 14th
Street, and a new off-ramp from I-95 northbound to NW 14th Street.
This is a relatively tiny project in the grander scheme of things. If
it passes muster with the Federal Highway Administration, FDOT has set
aside $8.6 million to build the ramps in 2008.
But no road building project is taken lightly in the historically black
community that was decimated by the construction of Interstates 95 and
395 in the 1960s. An estimated 20,000 people left the area as it
declined.
FDOT is trying to improve access to the interstates based on the
findings of a 1998 study conducted for the Metropolitan Planning
Organization by Florida International University.
According to the FIU study, Overtown residents and business owners said
they were cut off when the interstates were built over and through
their community and that they wanted improved access to spur economic
development and progress.
There are plenty of people in Overtown today who believe the findings of that FIU study are a smokescreen.
These opponents say that many Overtown residents get around on foot,
bikes and mass transit. Better access to I-95 won't help people who
don't own cars, said Bernadette Armand, an activist at the Power U
Center for Social Change.
''There's plenty of access just a few blocks away. This isn't for our people,'' Armand said.
Armand and Power U director Denise Perry are stirring the pot, with the
help of the Booker T. Washington High School alumni group.
They believe the ramps are really intended to improve access for the
patrons of the nearby Performing Arts Center and the high-rise condos
that are rising along the Biscayne corridor.
Late last week, they orchestrated a protest on the Northwest 14th
Street side of the school. Current and former students voiced concerns
about pedestrian and bicycle safety with all of the traffic that the
ramps might bring.
FDOT project manager Vilma Croft insists that the project include
wider, safer sidewalks and bike lanes on both sides of NW 14th Street
along with a 10-foot-wide, landscaped median strip in the center of the
road.
The opponents insist that kids won't use the sidewalks, especially on
the north side of 14th Street, because the high school, the Overtown
Youth Center, Frederick Douglass Elementary and Gibson Park are all
located on the south side of the road less than a half-mile from the
proposed ramps.
FDOT officials and their beleaguered consultants thought they had
garnered widespread community support for the ramp projects, and said
so in applications they submitted to the Federal Highway Administration
late last year.
But there's no such thing as true consensus -- or a done road deal -- in a community as politically fractured as Overtown.
What appeared to be a February 2005 endorsement of the plan by the
city's Overtown Advisory Board has recently deteriorated into
widespread confusion. Depending on whom you ask, the board may have
voted to withdraw its stated support for the project after a heated
community meeting last month.
''There was a lot of confusion, I'll give you that,'' advisory board
chairman Del Bryan said last week. ``I'm still trying to go through all
the minutes to figure it out.''
Some unidentified elements in the opposition are resorting to disinformation and unnecessary fear-mongering tactics.
There is a perception that FDOT will be displacing more homes and
businesses to build the ramps. Fact: No properties will be taken. The
ramps could be built in the existing right of way.
Whether FDOT eventually prevails and the ramps are built, the fireworks are just beginning.
In the next nine months, FDOT will be back in the very same community
trying to garner consensus for a much larger, and controversial
project: The reconstruction of I-395.
