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OVERTOWN
I-95 ramps likely dropped
Road-building projects in the historic black village that was decimated by the advent of Interstates 95 and 395 continue to evoke anger and heartache four decades later.

BY LARRY LEBOWITZ

A Miami-Dade transportation planning group is preparing to kill a $10 million state plan to build new Interstate 95 on- and off-ramps in the heart of Overtown, the historic black village that was decimated by the interstate's construction in the early 1960s.

County Commissioner Audrey Edmonson, who represents the area, urged her colleagues on the Metropolitan Planning Organization to wipe the unpopular ramp plan off the books.

A vote is scheduled for May 25, but Edmonson believes she has enough support to prevail.

''I think it's a very good day for the residents of Overtown,'' Edmonson said Thursday. ``I think they have historically felt like they've been lied to and that no one hears them. Today, they were heard.''

Edmonson was raised in Liberty City, but spent a large chunk of her childhood in Overtown where her family were active members of the Ebenezer United Methodist Church.

She remembers what the community was like before I-95 and I-395 were run right through Overtown. Thousands of homes and businesses were bulldozed. More than 20,000 people left or were forced out.

Edmonson said she remembers generations of unkept promises that were supposed to help the community heal and rebuild.

Florida Department of Transportation officials barely defended the project Thursday in front of the MPO, the 22-member board dominated by county commissioners and representatives of cities with populations exceeding 50,000. The panel oversees all transportation policy decisions in Miami-Dade County.

Gary Donn, director of planning for the Miami-area FDOT district, said the original plan to build the ramps was hatched in the late 1990s in response to an MPO study that indicated that many Overtown residents felt cut off from the interstates that were built over and through their community and wanted better access.

FDOT officials and their consultants thought they had garnered widespread community support for the ramp projects, and said so in applications they submitted late last year to the Federal Highway Administration.

This stirred a swift backlash from longtime residents, Booker T. Washington High School alums, students and anti-poverty community organizers at Power U, who said FDOT was grossly misrepresenting community sentiment.

They staged public protests and persuaded the Overtown Advisory Board, the Miami Community Redevelopment Agency and then Edmonson to officially oppose the plan.

Mistrust of FDOT and federal road-builders was already extremely high in Overtown, a reflection of four decades of anger, frustration and heartache caused by the agencies responsible for running Interstates 95 and 395 through the center of their community.

''You know, they say lightning doesn't strike the same place twice. But we must be a lightning rod in our area that keeps drawing FDOT,'' said James Hunt of the Booker T. alumni association. ``In '65, they took our homes, our businesses and our land. Overtown, as they say, was collateral damage.''

Safety was a common rallying cry Thursday.

Opponents fear that the I-95 ramps would bring additional traffic into an area where a much larger proportion of residents walk or ride bikes than the typical South Florida community.

Kenia Castellon, student body president at Booker T., said the ramps would be located too close to the high school and nearby Gibson Park and Frederick Douglass Elementary School.

FDOT project managers have previously said that wider sidewalks and tree-lined medians would improve pedestrian and bike safety throughout the corridor.

Other opponents claim the ramps are being built to benefit the wealthy patrons of the Miami Performing Arts Center, which is rising nine blocks due east of the interstate, and the high-rise condos going up along the Biscayne corridor.

FDOT officials have repeatedly denied any linkage between the 14th street ramp plan and the arts center construction.

Anthony Jennings, a social studies teacher at Booker T., asked a more practical question: ``Why do we need another southbound ramp onto I-95 in downtown Miami when we already have two of them and the road ends two miles away?''

Even if the 14th Street ramps are killed, FDOT will be back in the community later this year trying to garner consensus for a much larger, and controversial project: The reconstruction of I-395.

Edmonson's proposal would shift the money out of the I-95 ramp project and let FDOT use it to conduct the extensive studies that would be necessary to either raise I-395 between I-95 and the MacArthur Causeway or find a way to push it underground.