PLEASE HELP!!!
As concerned residents, we encourage you to contact Alachua County
Commissioners directly OR write your own letters to the editor
of The Gainesville Sun.
The Alachua County Commission is found at:
P.O. Box 2877
Gainesville, FL 32602-2877
PHONE: 352 264 6900
Paula Delaney, Chair pdelaney@alachuacounty.us
Mike Byerly byerly@alachuacounty.us
Cynthia Moore Chestnut cmchestnut@alachuacounty.us
Rodney J. Long rjlong@alachuacounty.us
Lee Pinkoson lpinkoson@alachuacounty.us
All commissioners bocc@alachua.fl.us
The Gainesville Sun Letters Address is:
Voice of the People
The Gainesville Sun
2700 SW 13th Street
Gainesville, FL 32608-2015
IMPORTANT POINTS TO INCLUDE IN YOUR
LETTERS, PHONE CALLS, AND EMAILS
COMPREHENSIVE PLAN IS OUR ASSURANCE OF RESPONSIBLE GROWTH
The Alachua County Commission can only vote “no” on the expanded SpringHills development if it follows the guiding vision and provisions of its own Comprehensive Plan, which states that the commission will “slow sprawl in the county’s rural areas and western Gainesville while encouraging higher density infill.”
The commission’s vision statement further advocates:
SPRINGHILLS IS INAPPROPRIATE FOR ALACHUA COUNTY
SpringHills is the largest single development in the history of Alachua County. The project of a Philadelphia, PA developer, SpringHills is 600 acres of big-box stores, warehouses, hotels and tightly packed housing. It would fill the area between I-75 and NW 39th Avenue and San Felasco State Preserve and have far reaching negative effects on our county.
A smaller proposal from the developer was approved by the commission in 1999. It had 1,971 dwellings, 495,000 square feet of offices, 801,342 square feet of stores, 459,471 square feet of warehouses and industries and 748 hotel rooms.
With little notice to residents, the developer presents a new and amazingly expanded proposal that clearly violates the comprehensive plan -- our best assurance that growth will be managed. The developer now wants to double its stores and pack in more dwellings. Its new total comes to 1.5 million square feet of mostly big box stores, 125,000 square feet of offices, 460,000 square feet of warehouses and distribution warehouses, hotels with 625 rooms, and 2,238 dwellings.
To visualize the breathtaking size of SpringHills, imagine a development much larger than all of sprawling Butler Plaza and bloated much larger by tightly packed houses, warehouses, apartments and hotels. Estimates are that population will increase by 15,000 and tens of thousands of people daily will visit or work there.
POSITIONS ABOUT THE EXPANDED SPRINGHILLS DEVELOPMENT
SpringHills will cause 60,000 to 95,000 new car trips daily. Yet to realize its ambitions, the developer wants 39th Avenue to be six-laned like nearby I-75, a cut through road from NW 39th Avenue to Millhopper Scenic Road, and a bridge across the Interstate to the entrance of Meadowbrook.
The developer’s plans were reviewed with alarm by the North Central Florida Regional Planning Council, which stated that traffic congestion will have “significant adverse impacts on the regional transportation network.”
SpringHills will cause intersections on 39th Avenue, already a failing road, to become too overcrowded, and congestion would spread at least as far as Jonesville to the west and US 441, or NW 13th Street, to the east. Worse, traffic will congeal down Fort Clarke Boulevard, where it collides with the proposed Newberry Village, which itself would flood 11,000 more cars each day onto already gridlocked Newberry Road.
Roads costing $120 million are needed to serve SpringHills. The developer is estimated to pay $50 million and county residents must, through increased taxes, pay $70 million.
By consuming a huge amount of county roadways funds, SpringHills will block commissioners from building needed transportation projects elsewhere in the county for years to come.
Also, the City of Gainesville would have to widen the intersections at 43rd Street and 34 the Street along NW 39th Avenue to accommodate the developer, which would compromise the city’s ability to build needed roads elsewhere.
There is only a finite number of customers in Alachua County and the region. SpringHills’ concentration of big box stores will take away customers from many of the county’s small businesses and damage the local economy. Numerous studies confirm that local businesses, unlike their big box counterparts, spend more to pay local workers, recycle more of their profits into the community, and support local cultural and volunteer organizations.
Studies show that local businesses spend three to five times more of their revenue in the community than do the big boxes, whose profits go out of town and often out of state. SpringHills’ big boxes would also draw customers from large regional centers like the Oaks Mall and Butler Plaza, causing economic decline.
SpringHills will pull good economic development from downtown and east Gainesville. Residents of east Gainesville and Alachua County at or below the poverty line will not benefit from SpringHills, which is up to 20 miles away. Many residents lack transportation to remote SpringHills, and those that can get there are likely to be paid wages at or below the poverty line, which continues the cycle of poverty and further strains social services.
The developer’s claims that SpringHills will provide more revenue to the county are highly unlikely to come true. Such claims have not been borne out by developments elsewhere in Florida. This is because developments like SpringHills do not create new jobs – they take away jobs from residents who have them elsewhere in the county. Worse, the financial burdens assumed because of SpringHills would make it impossible for the county to approve more profitable developments in the future.
Also, the county will have to spend more of its scarce funds to teach thousands of new students, provide new fire and rescue service to residents, and provide other services such as law enforcement.
There is a geological fracture and sinkhole under SpringHills that could funnel pollution directly into the Floridan aquifer, the source of our drinking water. The developer has acknowledged this threat but has not addressed it.
Nor has the developer provided an analysis of storm water runoff. The homeowner’s association of Meadowbrook, a subdivision downhill from SpringHills which was swamped in 2004, asked for but did not receive answers from the developer to its questions about flooding.
The water management district wants the developer to implement water conservation, groundwater, and surface water monitoring and management plans. The developer has not complied.
SpringHills will bring 2,000 more students into our overburdened schools. Schools now serving the area of SpringHills are crowded. To serve the new students, the county would have to bus them away, possibly to east Gainesville or Alachua, rezone families from their neighborhood schools, pack students into already crowded classrooms in violation of Florida’s class size law, or build 50 new classrooms at a cost of at least $22 million, which the county cannot afford.
In 1980, the County Commission passed a law to provide for and preserve scenic roads. The county stated that it wanted to preserve for us and future generations the few remaining examples of natural Florida.
The developer wants an outlet road from SpringHills to Millhopper Road, one of five county scenic roads. SpringHills, with thousands of residents and tens of thousands of customers and employees, would spew huge amounts of traffic onto Millhopper Road, ruining it forever and casting into doubt the future of other county scenic roads.
Time and again the developer, when asked or required, has not provided information to support SpringHills in respect to traffic congestion, loss of county funds, detriments to small businesses, poverty reduction in east Gainesville and across the county, and threats to the environment and our drinking water.
To a large extent the developer wants the county to trust its promises for a grossly expanded SpringHills. |