Florida's top turnpike official, feeling the heat, says he will see whether a promise was broken.
By BILL COATS
Published August 6, 2004
LUTZ - After nearly 10 years of discussions, state officials and residents of the Cheval subdivision still can't agree on whether Cheval is being sufficiently shielded from the Suncoast Parkway, which bisects it.
But this week, 31/2 years after the parkway opened, the state's top turnpike official faced a room full of Cheval residents. Executive director Jim Ely promised a fresh study of the issues. And he pledged to fill in 2,000 feet of gaps in the parkway's current noise walls if shown in writing that his agency promised that.
A county commissioner, a state representative and a state senator were present at Tuesday's meeting to add their clout to Cheval's. The senator, Victor Crist of Temple Terrace, threatened to have the turnpike agency audited. The commissioner, Jim Norman of Carrollwood, warned that residents might sue.
"I see a community rising together that's going to be a big problem," Norman warned Ely. "You know where it's going next."
Cheval's complaints in recent years have persuaded Florida's Turnpike Enterprise, a division of the state transportation department, to add $500,000 in landscaping along Cheval's section of the parkway.
But residents have been stewing since 2000, when the construction of the parkway evolved sufficiently to reveal noise walls only where Cheval's residential streets curled close to the expressway. Gaps were left along golf course fairways, and along an open field near Cheval's Ramblewood Road entrance.
"Sound gets amplified toward the golf course," said Kevin Ambler, a state representative and a Cheval resident, complaining that each gap conveys noise bouncing across the highway lanes from the wall on the opposite side.
Many residents planned houses along the highway with the belief that turnpike officials had promised continuous walls.
Ambler gave Ely a sheaf of papers that were given to residents in 1999 by home builders but were purportedly published by the state. Ambler said those showed continuous walls.
Ely said his staff would study the papers and decide next week whether they constituted a promise from the state.
Turnpike officials have resisted more walls in Cheval, partly because the walls must withstand vehicle crashes and cost about $2-million a mile.
The state's noise experts also contend the walls provide less noise protection than people think, and the gaps cause less noise exposure. Walls only benefit people living within a few lots of the Suncoast, they said. As sound travels farther than that, it becomes so dispersed that walls make little difference, they said.
"That's what they say," responded T.J. Rives, chairman of the neighborhood's Suncoast Impact Committee.
Ultimately, argued the turnpike officials, they are banned by law from building noise walls except where they can show that a resident has a noise problem and a wall will reduce it by 5 decibels.
Earl Burley, the retired Army colonel who has led Cheval's negotiations for many of the 10 years, said the discussion shouldn't be about decibels.
"It is simply about the state's promise to us," Burley said. "We believed what they said, and for that reason, we did not vigorously oppose the parkway ... We did not lay down in front of the bulldozers, and we could have."
