City and County Need to be Hyperfocused on Flyover Guarantees for DeSoto Bridge Replacement

On Friday, the Manatee County Commission and Bradenton City Council held a joint meeting. These are usually relatively useless dog and pony shows in which much is said only for precious little to actually come of it. It was refreshing, however, to see the new Manatee County Commission take a much more serious approach to engaging city officials more meaningfully, something current chair George Kruse had long advocated for and finally has an opportunity to influence.

The meeting began with a meaningful discussion on affordable housing in which Kruse and Commissioner Jason Bearden offered different perspectives on ways that the county, which owns more downtown space, might work with the city to improve the inventory of workforce housing in the downtown area. Bearden has recently been ringing that bell after hearing from lower-level county employees who do not make enough money to qualify for what is considered "workforce housing" by the county’s current formula.

Kruse pointed out that he would like to see more discussion toward a grand vision for downtown Bradenton and would be more eager to look at a mix of development strategies that are more likely to lead to a thriving downtown. Both made valid points regarding the need for workforce housing downtown and elsewhere in the county, and it was the kind of healthy, productive exchange I would be eager to see more of.

The long-sought but never-realized push for a downtown grocery store was also taken up. There has always been something of a food desert in the central corridor, and, as Kruse pointed out, more units will likely need to be built before a major chain finds it viable. Right now, the closest options are the Publix on Manatee Ave W and 39th Street W, and the Key Foods Supermarket (formerly Bravo) on the Tamiami Trail, between 19th Ave W and 21st Ave W. Kruse noted that there is but one downtown Publix in Sarasota, one in Tampa, and one in St. Pete, all cities whose downtowns are more built out than Bradenton's.

More important to me was the DeSoto Bridge replacement discussion, an issue regular readers know I have been very vocal about for more than a decade. As I’ve mentioned in many columns, if we do not get graded separations so that through traffic can bypass the most congested portion of the central corridor, we will never solve downtown gridlock—full stop. The last time he was on The Bradenton Times podcast, I asked Commissioner Kruse if he agreed, and he said that if we did not get flyover lanes, it would be a “game over” for solving the problem.

At a public hearing held by FDOT last April, flyover lanes were not discussed. The agency instead presented another four-lane bridge as the likely outcome while focusing on improving multimodal transportation by adding two 12-foot shared-use paths for bikes and pedestrians. While I’m all for multimodal transit, making it easier for people to walk or ride their bikes over the bridge will not impact congestion one bit.  While I’m sure they will be used for recreational purposes, outside of perhaps a short period of winter cold snaps, no one is braving Florida heat or our unpredictable rain to walk to work between Bradenton and Palmetto.

Below is a rendering of each option, one from last year’s public hearing and one from a previous update when flyover lanes seemed to be getting serious consideration.

As Bradenton Mayor Gene Brown pointed out Friday, the wider bridge on the single-deck option includes large medians that could allow for an extra lane on each side. However, as with discussions of widening the Cortez Bridge, the inability to add lanes on either side of the bridge just means traffic can move more quickly toward the same bottleneck. It does nothing to solve the problem.

Brown said that the single deck option includes the infrastructure to add the flyover lanes later and that we will likely have to do one first, with the graded separation added later when more funding becomes available. However, when I spoke to an FDOT official back then, I was given the impression that they hadn't been getting a concerted push for graded separation. Manatee County Commissioner Amanda Ballard, whose district includes much of the central corridor, said she had spoken with FDOT officials recently and mentioned her support for that option.

The bridge replacement has now entered its critical Project Development and Environment (PD&E) Study phase. As Manatee County Public Works Director Chad Butzow noted, it is crucial that all entities—Manatee County, the City of Bradenton, and the City of Palmetto—remain loud and unified if they want the best chance of pushing the agency toward a desired result. And I will add that I definitely got the impression that FDOT is eager to work with a unified community to meet what it feels its needs are.

In the past, the cities of Palmetto and Bradenton consistently impeded the county's push for graded separation, expressing an antiquated fear that overpasses lead to urban blight. Today, one has to look no further than the extremely impressive traffic management plan that Hillsborough County has engaged in over the past decade and a half as a local example of how efficiently moving traffic through a community benefits both economic development and residents' quality of life.

Both city councils, mayors' offices, and the county commission are comprised of entirely different faces since those decisions were made. But while they do not own previous failures, they have been gifted the opportunity to solve the number one quality-of-life issue expressed by their constituencies. All stakeholders need to get on the same page and push for graded separation right from the start, as the project will still need to go through years of design, right-of-way acquisition, and construction phases before it is complete.

The single-deck option, which will not increase capacity, would be even more overwhelmed than our current bridge on day one. Remember that earlier talk about adding a whole bunch of downtown housing inventory? Why put the community through all of the burdens of major central corridor construction only to need to add graded separation as quickly as possible? Click here to let FDOT know what you think the outcome should be.

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of our weekly podcast. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County government since 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Click here for his bio. Mitch is also the author of three novels and a short story collection available here.