Government Testimony: Check Reality Before You Panic
By: Bill Myers
Tags: Life Lessons, Traffic, Retirement, Testimony, Government

Restaurant & Clubhouse demolished, to be Replaced by Apartments. Photo, author. 2020

The Villages Retirement Community, Apartments

Government Testimony: Check Reality Before You Panic

Will traffic flow really double & increase golf-cart vs. auto accidents in the retirement community?

Synopsis

The developer has proposed building apartments inside a gated retirement community of single-family housing. They tore down a clubhouse and pool in anticipation of receiving unopposed county approval.

One, if built properly to blend in, may not cause much damage - maybe- but the residents feel it is the first of many. There are several reasons to take care. This article covers the impact of changing traffic patterns caused by many people living in such a small space.

Proposal: Slam apartments inside gated community

The developer of The Villages, a gated retirement community covering 70 square miles with a population of 125,000 and 56 golf courses, is attempting to change its fundamental structure. They tore down a clubhouse and restaurant featured for years in their advertisements and plan to replace it with apartments - in the midst of hundreds of single-family homes.

The Sumter County Commissioners board had to approve the proposal for the project to proceed. The commissioners held two required public meetings where any interested party could testify under oath. They could present reasons to accept or decline the proposal as long as the testimony was based on facts or studies, not just opinions.

Testimony lasted about 10 hours

Many people testified on these categories, which included:

Broken sales promises, i.e. bait-n-switch

Removal of facilities used for health reasons, such as the pool and indoor facilities

Reduced property values, projected 50% near the apartments and declining further out, but still there, across the 65,000+ homes in The Villages

Huge increase of traffic flow on Morris street, a street with 2 inside lanes for cars and an outside lane on each side for golf carts, thus creating congestion and increased danger to the golf carts

Higher incidence of golf cart-auto accidents.

My testimony concentrated on how the developer misrepresented reality or lied with assumptions and statistics concerning golf carts and traffic volume.

The traffic engineer used general traffic tables for cities to represent traffic flow in the first board meeting. That was nonsense. City traffic and retirement community traffic patterns are wildly different. I asked for a traffic flow study at the first meeting before the board approved the proposal.

At the second meeting, the engineer presented a graph showing county statistics for that part of Morris. It had daily totals, not peak times, and the graph didn’t mean anything to anybody. It still seemed that the additional traffic would be overwhelming.

In my second testimony, I said that

“I counted the number of houses accessing Morris from the golf course area. Assuming that the house and apartment residents generate the same traffic, the apartments will generate at least 70% more traffic than just those houses.



The real question was how much of the Morris traffic is generated by people living close by and how much is just passers-through?”

Finally, “How much of the total traffic flow is that 70%?”

Did those overwhelming feelings represent reality?

I found the underlying data for that graph on the County’s website, talked to an expert traffic engineer about traffic patterns in retirement communities, and built a model to support the county’s data. I confirmed the model by counting cars and carts at three locations on November 4th and 5th.

At the day’s peak, the 159 apartments will add 3 cars and 1 cart in any 5-minute period, less than 50 out of 2,000+ vehicles in an hour. That‘s at 2 round trips per day per apartment. Even doubled, that would have little impact on the 150+ vehicles per 5-minute period at the peak.

Of course, all apartment residents could form a parade and leave at the same time, but that probably won’t happen often.

Surprise! Things were not as they appeared

The proposed Hacienda apartments will have no real impact on traffic flow. Always check the numbers if they are available.

Identifying the right numbers is the hardest task.

After talking to others, our real concern is not about the apartments themselves. They just serve as a focal point and these may blend into the environment if done right.

Our real concern is that the developer:

May change the unique characteristics of The Villages

To something quite ordinary

The best advice for The Villages developer comes from Steve Jobs which is the same piece of advice that he gave to the CEO of Nike — “focus on doing one thing right first.”

In my opinion, The Villages company values are getting fuzzy and becoming unfocused by adding apartments. I suggest they rent all existing ones outside the gated portion of The Villages to confirm demand before building anything inside.