Already Behind!
Yesterday was the Comprehensive Plan Open House. I arrived around 6pm and left around 7:30pm. That wasn't because there was that much information given. I actually talked to several people mostly about things not related to the comp plan.
The open house was the opposite. There were 5 boards of information and 1 board for community input/comment. I am told that you can still email comments to them at the website I linked above.
Here are the boards.
They are highlights from the documents created.
I am told this is a preliminary draft. They will take the comments and feedback from this even and fine tune it a bit more before moving to the next phase. However, I am concerned with the lack of presentation.
At some point, I would love a public workshop type thing. Stream it live on the county's Youtube page... but make it a question and answer session of some sort. Let citizens come ask their questions publicly and get some feedback from those who wrote it. Answer the questions members of the community have and use that to help shape the plan.
The more public input and participation the better. People I spoke with said this was not really helpful, but I suppose if there is some feedback given, then that is better than no feedback given.
In any case, I wanted to point out a few things that I noticed in the Comp Plan update.
First... recreation and leisure. This section covers things like parks, boat ramps, libraries, etc. I tend to be a data person, so I wanted to see the data that was used to create the Comp Plan.
I found this interesting.
The top chart is the park level of service. Basically, it tells us how much park acreage we will need as we move forward to 2050. The takeaway here... we do not currently have enough acreage.
If we demand 5 acres per 1000 people in population, we are currently short 227.93 acres. That is today's number and that shortage only grows to over 570 acre deficit by 2050.
That is a lot.
Which brings me to Betz Farm. If we are currently short 227.93 acres of park space in this county, why in the world would we sell Betz Farm and the 350 acres or so there? Turn it into a park and we instantly get very close to what is needed by 2035.
We can solve 10 whole years of park deficit with a single thing... cancel the contract using the contract zoning state laws and turn the land to a park. We are not set through 2035 or close to it.
So tell me again why the commissioners are so adamant about selling that land? And do not get me started on the idea of selling Betz and buying other property. That plan makes zero sense. Keep what we have, turn it into a park, and we are good to go for a decade.
Here is a map that shows all the parks and their coverage in the county. The pink mark is Betz. Add a park there and that will go a long way to closing that gap of missing park coverage. It will actually fill that void.
The 2nd chart will shock no one... it is the amount of boat launch lanes we have in Citrus and the deficit we have there.
Today, we are short 19.11 lanes based on 1 lane per 5000 people. And people wonder why traffic is so bad during scallop season. There simply is not enough boat ramp capacity. Where have the talks been about expanding the lanes significantly. I know we are talking about Fort Island ramp half way down, but that only adds a lane... not solving out problem.... and not sure how we get there. The county owns limited land with launch access. Not sure where they come up with all those missing lanes.
But perhaps more shocking... Libraries.
According to this, we are currently 35k sqft short in library space today. In 10 years, that will be 54,737 sqft. Considering we currently have 72k sqft of total library space in the county, that is 2/3s of the current space we have that we are short.. or close to 2 libraries.
Ouch.
Maybe it is time for a library in Citrus Springs and/or Hernando.
I will have more in the coming days/weeks/months as this moves forward. I believe the final vote will be sometime in the spring. So plenty of time to dive into this.
Have a great Tuesday!