RaymondArce · “R-Sea”

Fresh food downtown, in a building worth saving

Downtown has no grocery store, and a neighborhood that cannot buy fresh food where it lives drives away to spend its money. Rehabilitate one of our empty historic structures and market it to a grocer. A landmark saved and back on the tax roll, and a reason to walk our commercial blocks on an ordinary Tuesday.

Air support the east end can actually afford

On the east end I keep hearing the same two things: gunfire at night, and street racing. More officers on shift is the honest answer, and it is the answer the budget keeps refusing.

There is a second answer at a fraction of the cost. I have been meeting with law enforcement agencies about an interlocal partnership and grant funding. What I have learned is a plan like that, for a secondary drone base near the Port and UTMB, would provide rapid response and criminal deterrence: a unit overhead in seconds, following the car that just tore through the neighborhood, marking where the shots came from, holding position with live video until officers arrive.

Response, not surveillance. Nothing loitering over your house, a written retention policy, and reporting anyone can read. We live on an island. There are only so many ways off it. That is a strategic advantage and we should be using it.

Safer streets and corners you can see around

Traffic here is not only congestion, it is risk. A large share of it is people driving a grid they have never seen before, hunting a parking space or recovering from a turn they already missed. Every visitor we move onto the loop is one less unfamiliar driver making a decision at forty feet.

The other half is visibility. Canopy and plantings that hide a stop sign, signals that wash out in the afternoon sun, faded crosswalks, and corners where you cannot see a kid on a bike until you are already in the intersection.

A corner by corner visibility review with Public Works, starting with the intersections that actually generate the crash reports, then trimming, signage and striping to match. This is cheap work with a body count attached to getting it wrong.

Lights on and patrols back

Whole stretches of this district go dark at night. Street lighting and park lighting are the cheapest public safety we can buy, and they decide whether people walk to dinner or drive, whether a park is used after six, and whether the same corner keeps generating calls.

A lighting audit block by block starting with the blocks that ask, park lighting on a schedule that matches how people actually use them, and patrol coverage on the east end that reflects what residents are reporting: gunfire at night and street racing.

Clean streets, sidewalks and alleys

Walk our alleys and you will understand the whole problem in about four minutes. Standing trash, illegal dumping, broken and blocked sidewalks, and blocks that go unswept for weeks at a time.

A published sweeping and alley cleanup schedule anyone can hold us to, sidewalk repair prioritized where people actually walk, and enforcement against dumping. This is the least glamorous item on this page and the one residents mention first.

The other half of clean is accountability. Most people here take care of their property and their neighbors. A small number do not, and everyone else absorbs it: the junk piles, the noise at two in the morning, the derelict structures, the rental that treats a residential street like a venue. Code enforcement that is consistent and predictable, applied the same on every block, with the fines that already exist actually collected. Not a campaign against landlords or visitors. A campaign against being ignored when you call.

Public transportation for the people who live here

People are tired of waiting for a bus they are not sure is coming.

The problem is not the route, it is the reliability. A schedule you cannot count on is a gamble, and somebody who has to clock in at seven cannot gamble on the ride.

Get us off a paper schedule and onto a screen. Live tracking on your phone that shows where the bus is right now and how many minutes until it reaches your stop, the same way you watch a ride come to you on a map. No more standing on a corner guessing.

Then hold it to the clock. Runs timed to shift changes, school bell times and clinic hours, and on time performance published every month so nobody has to take our word for it.

Getting to a job downtown, to school, to a doctor’s appointment. A car should be a choice on this island, not the price of holding a job or finishing school.

Micro transportation, one continuous loop

Visitors do not need a parking space, they need a ride. Small vehicles running one continuous loop: downtown, the port, Old Red, Stewart Beach, the hotels and the convention center, and back around again. Frequent enough that nobody checks a schedule, with live tracking so you know when the next one comes.

Run it with the Park Board and the operators already on this island rather than standing up a new city fleet, and fund the visitor-serving portion through the hotel occupancy tax, which is what state law allows that money to do.

Every rider is a car that stops circling the block, and every stop drops people on foot in front of our businesses. A parked car spends money in one place. A person walking passes twenty doors.

Parking we already own

Downtown has about 650 spaces serving residents, workers and visitors at the same time, and we are not out of room, we are out of organization. Two ideas, both on land the city already controls.

First, convert the right blocks from parallel to angled parking. Pilot it on two blocks, count what it adds, then expand where it works. Second, put our underused surface lots to work. There are lots downtown sitting half empty most days that could be carrying worker parking, evening parking and event overflow with an agreement and a sign.

And make it free for our workforce and our neighbors over 65. If you work downtown or you are 65 and up, you should be able to park for your shift, stop into a shop, or carry groceries upstairs without feeding a meter. A pass tied to your plate, renewed semi annually with a pay stub or an ID, honored everywhere the city controls the curb.

Our natural resources are infrastructure

The beach, the dunes, the lagoon and the bay are what protect this island in a storm and what brings people here the rest of the year. District No. 3 holds Stewart Beach and the East End Lagoon Nature Park and Preserve, which means these are not somebody else’s department, they are our front yard.

Enforce the dune protection and beach access plan consistently rather than after the fact. Go after our share of state and federal nourishment money every cycle instead of once the sand is already gone. Finish the lagoon out as a preserve people can actually reach and use, with the habitat left intact for the wildlife that was here before any of us.

Clean water, clean beaches and working drainage are one project, not three, and every one of them is cheaper to protect than to replace.

The cost of living here

Every dollar this city spends comes out of somebody on this island, and plenty of them are already choosing between the tax bill and the insurance bill.

Lower the tax burden, and mean it. Start from the no new revenue rate and make the city justify every step above it, in public, line by line.

Measured spending. Infrastructure, health and safety get protected first. Enhancement and economic development get scrutinized before anyone reaches for the reserves or for your rate.

Stop paying to be told what we already know. Consultants have a place, and it is not a standing line item that substitutes for a decision. A study that gets commissioned twice is a budget problem, not a research problem.

And use the capacity we already have. Incentives for our non profits to ramp up community engagement mean more of the work in this city gets done without adding to the tax roll.

Then follow-through, which is where the money actually goes missing. A project that stalls for three years costs more than the same project finished on time, every time. Finishing things is a fiscal policy.

Growth that pays its own way

I am not going to stand here and call myself pro development. On this island that phrase has come to mean a variance for anyone who asks for one.

What I am for is a deal that got negotiated. Our land development regulations exist because this island learned things the hard way. A project that fits them should move quickly and with less red tape than it does today. A project that only works with a radical variance is telling us it does not fit, and the answer to that is to change the project, not to bend the rules for it.

Growth also brings load with it: police and fire calls, water and sewer, traffic, and pressure on the beach and the drainage that protects all of us. Those costs get paid by the development that creates them, through the agreements and fees negotiated before the first permit, not by the neighbor who has been paying taxes here for thirty years.

Build here, and build well. Just do not hand the bill, or the variance, to everybody else.