Village D, Neighborhood Meeting, 01/10/17

Tuesday, January 10, 2017. Main Street Ranch Land Partners hosted a neighborhood meeting to present the preliminary Village Pattern Plan for the new Village D retail, commercial, residential future development. Comments from the public were received after the presentation and will be "considered" as possible revisions to the plan which is next scheduled to be presented to the North Port City Planning Board sometime in March 2017. Retail/commercial development will be done along the south side of US 41 with single family and multi-family residential development in the southern portion of this 620 acre subdivision area. Multifamily structures could run to 4 stories with a proposed maximum height limit of 120 feet. Some of the multi-family units adjacent to the retail commercial area may be built as mixed use structures with the retail/commercial space on the ground floor and residential units on the upper floors.

There were a number of constructive comments and concerns voiced by the public during this meeting. Most noteworthy were:

• Would these residential subdivisions be hard gated or soft gated? No direct answer was given.
• Residents from Gran Pardiso asked that the planners consider a pedestrian/golf cart friendly overpass or tunnel that would provide access from the north side of US 41 to the south side where the new retail/commercial development is proposed. The planners were again non-committal in there responses.
• Would the new entrances to this subdivision be regulated by new traffic lights or round-abouts? Planners stated that since the IslandWalk/Gran Paradiso intersection had just been approved for a traffic light, it was their understanding that all other intersections would also get traffic lights.
• When questioned about the timing of traffic light installation the planners said FLDOT was the decider of that question and stated that typically the FDOT wants to see traffic count data to justify a light. Many in the audience thought that installation of traffic lights should be done as part of the initial development.
• I asked about what consideration had been made for irrigation water to support this new subdivision since we are already experiencing difficulty in getting enough water now for just the two existing subdivisions (IslandWalk and Gran Paradiso). Planners response was that they were well aware of these irrigation water issues and that adequate planning was being done.