Lakewood Ranch residents complain of delayed gate access to their communities

Inter-District Authority officials are looking into residents' complaints regarding gate access.

Steve Zielinski, the executive director and chief financial officer of the Inter-District Authority, said the organization oversees three gate houses: for Edgewater, for Country Club at Balmoral Woods Boulevard and for Country Club on Legacy Boulevard. Although the gates are staffed with guards for part of the day, they also use remote guard services to assist guest visitors or vendors.

Zielinski said the IDA takes the complaints seriously and is looking into the concerns, which involve the ability to enter the villages in an efficient manner.

He said it isn't certain why some guests or vendors aren't being granted access in a timely manner. He said some cases of unresponsiveness could involve human error, problems caused by lightning strikes or internet connectivity issues.

“You have myriad issues that you need to (overcome) to have this running close to 100% as successful as you possibly can make it,” he said.

Officials emphasized the gates are typically functioning as expected.

“I'm not saying there's not failures, but I think the failures are the exception, not the norm,” said Tom Merrell, operations manager of the IDA.

Merrell was speaking at a meeting of the board of directors for Community Development District 2.

“There are far more going through than are not going through," he said. "We’d have a real problem if that was not true.”

Zielinski said he has been performing an incident study on response times from off-site gate attendants. Visitors to communities must connect with these guards through touch screens at the gate kiosks.

He said after six weeks of documentation, 90% answered that they were reached by an attendant within 90 seconds. He said 3%-5% of instances were reported to be between 90 and 180 seconds, and 5%-7% of incidents were 180 seconds or longer.

However, though rare, some response times were greater than three minutes. He said he is working with the contractor, Allied Universal, to understand the cause.

Some problems led to off-site guards leaving the gate arms in an up position for as long as 14 minutes due to vehicle backups.

“I want to see what they're working on behind the scenes,” Zielinski told the board.

The IDA might have the kiosks tested to ensure they are operating correctly.

Zielinski and Merrell speculated some issues might be caused by an overuse of the touch pads on the screen.

Zielinski noted lightning strikes have recently impacted gates in the area, with three different gates having been affected by lightning, once each, in the past month. However, he said an initiative of the IDA to install surge protectors around the area is decreasing the number of incidents.

He said during a surge, the gates should operate in a way that they default to an up position, though at the board meeting, he related one power failure incident he observed that resulted in a closed gate.

He also said that human error is an inevitable part of systems like these. In the case that a remote or on-site guard steps away, the procedure is for gates to be placed in an upward position.

“You have people not showing up for work, people showing up late for work, people taking breaks or excessive breaks, people not being attentive to the gates," Zielinski said. "Somebody should be mindful of all that. We're doing our best trying to stay on top of these people.”

He said technology is obviously the way of the future, but said, “with technology comes issues as well.”