$1 billion highway plan in doubt. Hearing reveals it would save Kendall drivers just 6 minutes

Three minutes one way and three minutes back on a typical two-hour round-trip commute from West Kendall to downtown. That’s how much a proposed $1 billion highway extension through wetlands meant to help preserve the Everglades could save on travel times for West Kendall residents.

The revelation that traffic congestion relief would be limited at best emerged during a legal challenge that wrapped up last week over Miami-Dade County’s controversial plan to extend the Dolphin Expressway with a new 13-mile-long toll road called the Kendall Parkway.

A ruling in the lawsuit — brought by an unusual partnership of environmental and community activists, and a major developer — could come later this year. But it’s only the latest potential roadblock for a massive transportation project that appears increasingly in doubt.

Since the suit was filed in October, the parkway plan has run up against powerful political forces as well. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill to abolish MDX, the county tolling agency that proposed the roadway, and ordered the creation of a new board with a mission to freeze toll prices. Under the new law, Mayor Carlos Gimenez, MDX’s appointed chairman and the parkway’s most influential supporter, can’t serve on the board of the new entity, to be called the Greater Miami Expressway Agency.

Though MDX has sued to block the state law, Gimenez himself had warned that the measure to replace the powerful agency could also cripple the Kendall Parkway plan.

Despite the project’s declining prospects, its opponents still mounted a lengthy case during the two-week hearing, arguing that the county’s own data didn’t support the project and that pushing forward would violate the county’s growth management plan.

Attorney Richard Grosso, representing Tropical Audubon Society and West Kendall resident Michelle Garcia in the legal action, argued that the new highway would do more harm than good, posing a threat to the Everglades and the county’s water supply. He also pressed on county projections for improving traffic flow, grilling former Miami-Dade planning chief Mark Woerner, who was testifying as an expert witness for the county.

For a West Kendall resident with a two-hour commute to downtown Miami, Woerner said the data showed a likely 5 percent reduction in travel time, citing a November 2018 traffic engineering report done for the project. That would equal about six minutes.

“Everything we talked about in this case in the last two weeks, all the potential impacts are for the purpose of saving the driver who would get the most benefit from this highway six minutes a day,’’ Grosso told an administrative judge hearing the case last week.

After the Miami Herald published the story on Tuesday, the mayor’s office pushed back in a press release, dismissing the testimony as “a hypothetical.” In a follow-up phone conference, MDX consultant Albert Sosa and Miami-Dade attorney Dennis Kerbel said other traffic flow data showed much greater congestion relief for West Kendall, with commuters potentially seeing travel times to State Road 836 alone cut in half. Some commuters, the press release said, could save up to three and three-quarters of an hour each week in traffic during rush-hours commutes.

Congestion issues are at the heart of plans by the Miami-Dade Expressway Authority, or MDX, to build the six-lane toll in the growing western suburb under a proposal backed by the Gimenez administration and approved by the County Commission last year. County planners have touted the Kendall Parkway as a better, faster connection for the western Kendall suburbs to other corridors in the city.

But environmentalists and some government agencies have warned that allowing the road to get so close to the Everglades would encourage more suburban sprawl and endanger protected wetlands used to recharge the aquifer that provides drinking water to the city.

During the hearing, county attorney Kerbel and witnesses supporting the plan insisted the parkway proposal remained the best option to make the lives of West Kendall residents easier. They argued that the new road was necessary to ease existing and future traffic, as more people are expected to move to Southwest Dade while new jobs will be created mostly in the county’s downtown and central areas. They also said the parkway would improve hurricane evacuation by adding a new route going north.

Opponents said that the proposal would violate Miami-Dade’s own growth plan by allowing a major highway outside the existing urban development boundary.

The plan, known as the Comprehensive Development Master Plan, lays out policies to guide development and protect resources, including Everglades restoration projects and agricultural lands. But last September, county commissioners voted to change the plan to make way for MDX’s blueprint to extend the Dolphin.

Critics believe the highway would encourage more traffic that would soon create the same old congestion, said Garcia, the West Kendall resident suing the county. It’s what urban planners call “induced demand”: By expanding the mega highway, more traffic will come because added capacity leads to more travel. One study, titled “The fundamental law of road congestion,” shows that the number of vehicle-miles traveled increases in direct proportion to the available lane-miles of roadways.

The mayor has dismissed that induced demand argument as “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard,” and defended that the Kendall Parkway has the best transportation bang for the buck.

But Garcia, a fixture at the administrative hearings earlier this month, called the proposal short-sighted, saying better mass transit is the only real long-term solution.

“This is 1970s planning and 1980s implementation, it’s simply backwards,’’ Garcia said on Friday. “My tax dollars are worth a whole lot more than something that is not going to fix anything.”

Beyond traffic issues, opponents say they had concerns about the county’s most precious resource: water. The highway would be built over a basin that’s key to guaranteeing drinking water for Miami and the Keys. The area, known as Bird Drive Basin, was once part of the Shark River Slough, the main artery for water flow in the Everglades and used to recharge the region’s shallow Biscayne aquifer. It’s also home to native animals, wading birds and rare plants.

State agencies, the South Florida Water Management District and Florida Department of Environmental Protection, also have raised questions over the lack of details about the environmental impacts on water supply, flood control and natural resources. The basin is part of the plan to restore water flow south through the Everglades, and much of the land is already owned by the district and the U.S. Department of the Interior and earmarked for restoration. The Miccosukee Tribe also owns land acquired to restore the tribe’s historic homelands.

While new highways typically encourage development, one company, Limonar Development, backed the highway’s critics. The company has plans to build a mixed-use project called Green City, and the proposed roadway would go through the middle of the planned 860-acre mix of homes, offices and shops.

While the land for Green City is outside the urban development boundary, it sits within territory the county has labeled an “urban expansion” area. That means that once Miami-Dade determines it has run out of building space within the development boundary, it plans to extend the line west to include that new expansion area. Limonar has been buying land for the development for years under the assumption that Miami-Dade would eventually extend the boundary into the expansion area as planned.

Plans to extend the highway date back at least 10 years but lost traction as economic growth faltered after the recession. From the start, the latest effort has been controversial.

County planners and architects couldn’t figure out a precise path, and kept changing plans, moving the proposed line to the east and west, with at least 10 options under consideration at one point. The path that was approved by the board of county commissioners was different than the one published 10 days earlier on the notice informing the public of the upcoming vote.

Some residents in Kendall were offered $75 to attend the public meeting to support the plan, though MDX and the county denied having anything to do with the offer that was published by an FIU student on Instagram.

Miami’s Transit Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for better public transit, created a funny anti-parkway campaign website featuring animated videos of all-red gridlocked traffic maps magically turning green. The tagline says: “Solutions aren’t sexy — but highways are.’’

A finding from the administrative lawsuit will take at least four months, with attorneys submitting final arguments to administrative law Judge Suzanne Van Wyk. She will then make a recommendation to the state government.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is still in the process of reviewing an application from MDX to build over protected wetlands. The Corps has extended the public comment period through Aug. 23. Comments can be emailed to Megan.L.Clouser@usace.army.mil or mailed to 9900 SW 107th Ave., Suite 203, Miami, Florida 33176. Comments may also be phoned in at 305-526-7182.

This story was originally published July 30, 2019 at 12:14 PM.