Let me extend a big Jubilee column New Year’s greeting to all our ESho Lagniappe aficionados. May the upcoming 12 months bring you peace and prosperity. And may the baggage of the old year not weigh too heavily on our local leaders as they go forth in pursuit of the common good.
“Baggage? What baggage?” you might be asking. Not suitcases and duffels, but all the half-baked (both in concept and in execution) projects that have sprung up around us in 2007. If I were given to drama, I would be telling you that our politicians have let (or even encouraged) developers to rape our land, despoil our streams, rivers and bay and endanger our very quality of life.
But since I’m not, I’ll just list a few things that shouldn’t have been allowed to happen in 2007. Things that we all should resolve to get fixed or at least not be repeated in 2008.
North in Upper ESho, we have the Spanish Fort Town Center going up – finally. After denuding the site, work stopped for – let’s say for simplicity – a year. A year of looking at acres of dirt along the interstate at the entrance to all our Eastern Shore communities. A year of watching silt run off into the surrounding small streams and eventually the bay. Finally they do have one building up, but the urge to clear before being anywhere ready to build should be curbed by the city governments. Not just here but throughout the area.
This “Clear and Wait” approach is really obvious a bit to the east along AL 181. Here in Middle ESho we have Daphne’s equivalent of Saudi-Arabia’s ‘Empty Quarter.” Miles of woods, farm land and orchards, graded clean as the desert – and about as verdant, at least until the weeds and trash trees move in.
And for years that’s about all that will spring up in these dozens of approved-and-platted new developments. Sure, there are some with one or two model homes, but many have nothing but a gate and miles of meandering streets with fanciful names.
It appears the city fathers of Daphne will approve anything if they can annex it with the hope of bringing in more tax money (and beating out neighboring Spanish Fort and Fairhope). Right now it looks like the population of the city could double and still not fill these fallow sub-divisions, so we’ll all be driving through this wasteland for years to come.
But there is something good in this – we actually will be able to drive through. Since nothing has happened to improve the roads around these someday-to-be-inhabited developments, the absence of residents is a benefit for the rest of us. AL 181 is supposed to be widened and County Road 13 extended to accommodate all the new folks who are going to live in these new sub-divisions, as well as to relieve congestion on US 98. But nothing has happened and with luck home building will start later and move even slower than the road building.
Next, let’s look at Fairhope-Point Clear (Lower ESho if you will). Here we see the only real Eastern Shore downtown being endangered not only by the aforementioned shopping centers to the north and those like Craft Farms and The Wharf to the south, but by Fairhope’s own leaders. The “Village Center” concept will not work in a community the size of Fairhope.
In case you’re not a regular reader (see what you’ve been missing) the concept envisions small neighborhood commercial centers scattered around the community. Neat idea, but the city and the surrounding area don’t provide enough consumers to support multiples of the same type shops within a mile or so of one another. So to create viable village centers, developers want to build new downtown shopping areas with big box stores and a broad range of shopping opportunities to draw people in from all over the county. The first attempt to do this was recently turned back in Planning and Zoning, but the whole “Village Center” concept needs to be revisited as it is both unpopular and, at this stage in the development of the Eastern Shore, economically unsupportable.
My final thoughts on the baggage that Fairhopians have to deal with in this new year and far into the future is what to do about land use in the unincorporated areas around the city. The coming of Wal-Mart and the Point Clear high-rise condos, both just outside the city limits, are examples of unwanted projects that couldn’t be stopped.
Annexing the surrounding areas should be a priority for the city, but the baggage of years past weighs heavily against this. A few years back residents of the area south of the city asked to be annexed. They were rebuffed, purportedly because as residents of a “disadvantaged community,” they could get federal funds for things like sewerage and sidewalks. If annexed, these improvements would have to be funded by the city.
Subsequently, when asked to give land use planning control to the city, these same residents rejected the request. For now we have a standoff in the most vulnerable area for undesired or runaway development.
So have a happy 2008 – and maybe take a look at all this baggage that’s piled up and clear some of it before 2009 comes in.
Contact Pete Gleszer at jubilee@lagniappemobile.com.
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