By REID TUCKER
DeFuniak Springs is going to be a happening place over the next month when it comes to public meetings and workshops.
The city will have hosted the first of a scheduled 10 Community Conversation information-gathering meetings by the time this edition of the Herald hits newsstands Wednesday morning, but the next one will be held Monday, Feb. 29, at the same place and time – the Community Center at 6 p.m. All 10 meetings will have been conducted and the data gleaned from those meetings will begin to be processed by the first of April. Participation from the general public is requested at the first two meetings, which are aimed at getting feedback from locals about what direction they’d like to see the city take with regard to its 10-year comprehensive plan, particularly as it relates to new jobs and economic opportunity.
The official line from city staff is that “if you work, shop or live in DeFuniak Springs” you’re invited to attend. This nuance is particularly important considering the information provided by the city’s pro-bono grant writing specialist Robert McKnight, who presented somewhat surprising figures to the Council at its Feb. 22 meeting. According to McKnight’s information, the city’s population nearly doubles, coming in at 11,000 individuals just by including Walton County residents just 2 ½ miles outside the city limits, while going out 5 miles beyond the city limits returns a population figure of 17,000.
With those numbers in mind, the city hopes to get as much involvement in this visioning meetings as possible. Subsequent meetings in the series will all be geared toward hearing from different subsets of the population senior citizens to high school students and several minority populations as well. The Community Conversations will be moderated by representatives from the Tallahassee firm Marlon Engineering so as to have an impartial officiator, thus preserving the data collected at the meetings in as unbiased a way as possible, said DeFuniak Springs Mayor Bob Campbell at the City Council’s Feb. 22 meeting.
The Community Conversation series is made possible thanks to the two-year Competitive Florida grant (valued at $40,000 per year), for which DeFuniak Springs was chosen as one of three municipal recipients statewide. Also included in the strategic planning process is the upcoming “asset mapping day,” set to last all day on Tuesday, March 8. A contingent of officials and experts from various state agencies will tour significant sites around DeFuniak Springs in the company of city reps in order to better help put together a branding and promotional strategy for the city.
The other big item on the agenda at the City Council meeting was a notification of two Florida Department of Transportation open-houses and a discussion about the roadway improvement proposal that are to be their primary feature. FDOT is required to come up with several alternate routes for a major improvement project of sufficient size, and the 25-mile stretch of U.S. Highway 331 to be four-laned from Coy Burgess Loop in DeFuniak north to the Alabama state line is definitely of sufficient size. Representatives from the state agency will make presentations and answer questions about the proposed alternative routes, some of which raised a few eyebrows in the City Hall chambers Monday night.
The first of the three proposals follows the course of the existing Highway 331 corridor, but it could include widening the already four-lane segments of the highway in DeFuniak north and south of Interstate 10 into six lanes or for such things as bicycle paths and improved pedestrian sidewalks. The second and third proposals are much more radical, with the second utilizing Bob Sykes Road to cut out much of the existing Highway 331 in favor of a new route that slices through the far east end of the land occupied by the city’s municipal airport. The third proposed corridor uses much of Walton Road and Wabash Avenue, but would move traffic off the usual route along U.S. Highway 90 west of the intersection with the southbound segment of Highway 331.
Members of the Council and city residents alike came down pretty hard against the second and third proposals. Councilman Mac Carpenter went so far as to say that, if one of those routes was eventually decided upon by FDOT, it would have the same kind of negative impact for business that the construction of I-10 did generations ago. Property owner Dianne Pickett said that, while none of the proposed alterations to the Highway 331 corridor would interfere with her property, the second and third alternatives would “take the guts out of this city” and “absolutely destroy” the local economy.
The first of the two FDOT meetings is scheduled for March 1 at the Paxton Agricultural Center and the second will be held Thursday, March 3, at the DeFuniak Springs Community Center. Both meetings will run from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., and the public is encouraged to attend and give feedback on the proposals.