- November 25, 2024
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On the surface St. Armands Key may appear to be an idyllic oasis of luxury seaside living surrounding a quaint but bustling retail village. Scratch that surface, though, and you’ll find an aging infrastructure and non-compliance with contemporary safety standards.
Residents, business owners and other interested parties learned about that and more at Wednesday’s “complete street” open house where Sarasota city staff presented them with three options on which to provide input — $45 million and 10 to 15 years for a complete infrastructure rebuild covering the length of the primary corridors, $15 million and two to three years for streetscape improvements covering the business district, or do nothing at all.
The option of doing nothing will still be something, explained Chief Transportation Planner Alvimarie Corales, as both options 1 and 2 include Americans With Disabilities Act compliance projects the city will have to undertake regardlesss.
“The city is going through an ADA transition plan and it will follow through the queue of what the ADA transition plan is,” she said. “It will be addressed as they've been prioritized. That has to happen.”
Those ADA compliance issues on St. Armands include sidewalk access ramps and undersized handicap parking spaces with no direct access to sidewalks at all.
The complete street concept is focused on creating safe multimodal and transit accommodations for vehicles and pedestrians. During construction, additional infrastructure improvements typically include fiber connectivity, drainage upgrades, enhanced pedestrian crossings, stormwater resiliency and more.
The city embarked on the St. Armands complete street process in the fall of 2022 and by December had selected a consultant to the project. By February of this year, however, the project was paused.
“Once we began negotiations, we realized that the amount of funding that we had allocated for the project was less than what the project cost was going to be,” Corales said. “So then we paused the project to get community feedback.”
The complete street concept on St. Armands would be disruptive, staff members warned, with the upwards of 15-year timeframe causing “construction fatigue.”
Every effort will be made to minimize impact on their operations, City Engineer Nik Patel told business owners at the open house, but with the complexities of the work some disruption is inevitable. Because St. Armands is an overlay district with a parking bond, though, parking capacity must remain intact.
“We did include as part of the scope of the project some kind of parking analysis that we can try to improve some of the parking aspects,” Corales said. “Other existing conditions you have are trip hazards and narrow sidewalks. There's one that we pointed out here that is four feet wide and now with the standards that are being updated at a minimum they will have to be 5 feet. We have different sidewalk materials. There are different colors and different textures.”
Both options will be publicly funded with no special assessments to residents and businesses on St. Armands Key.
“St. Armands has been highlighted as one of the top resiliency projects as part of the Sarasota-Manatee Metropolitan Planning Organization, so there are opportunities to get the project funded. It is also part of their multimodal emphasis corridor, and that is another pot of money that we could tap into. We just don't know when it would happen.”
Among the aspects for the complete street project are connecting the multiuse recreational trail to St. Armands Key and ultimately extending it to Longboat Key; underground fiber connectivity; evaluating pedestrian crossings; installing variable message boards; trolley and multimodal transit accommodations; enhanced landscaping, hardscaping and lighting; undergrounding some of the power infrastructure; enhanced pedestrian crossings; and reconfiguring parking to be more pedestrian friendly all while still allowing traffic flow to neighboring jurisdictions.
“And very importantly here is addressing some of the underground concerns we have related to utilities,” said Capital Projects Manager Camden Mills. “There is some outdated water and sewer infrastructure well as the drainage we are looking to upgrade. But with those improvements it’s very costly. The city is looking to fund the planning and design phases and we would reach out to FDOT and federal agencies for some funding support through grant programs.”
Open house attendees and other interested citizens are invited to provide additional input for the project. An online survey is available on the city of Sarasota website at SarasotaFL.gov through May 5. A video recording of the open house presentation can also be viewed on the city’s website.
