Guardrails’ slow installation in Glades has Florida officials fuming
Feb 14, 2011
The following article was published in the Palm Beach Post on February 14, 2011:
Guardrails’ slow installation in Glades has officials fuming
By Jason Schultz
The wheels of state bureaucracy can grind only so fast, even when people are dying, and that has local officials very angry.
After a mother and her two children drowned in the canal south of State Road 80 Saturday night, those angry officials are trying to get the state to speed up the planned installation of guardrails that locals say have been needed for years.
“This is an emergency. People are dying. Do it now. Do it today,” County Commissioner Jess Santamaria said after 3-year-old Claudiz Joseph Francois, her 10-year-old sister Midjina and their 32-year-old mother, Dieula, died Saturday night when their 2004 Jeep ran off westbound State Road 80 eight miles east of Belle Glade.
Santamaria said he would write letters this week to State Secretary of Transportation Stephanie Kopelousos and Gov. Rick Scott asking them to speed up the guardrail installations along State Road 80.
“We waste money on helping special interests for special interests’ benefit,” Santamaria said. “Here you have something that is putting people lives at risk and what are we doing, waiting for funding next year.”
Last summer, after The Palm Beach Post detailed the deaths of four people in the canal in a little more than a year, the state Department of Transportation announced it would spend $4.3 million to install about 18 miles of guardrails on the south side of the four-lane state highway from State Road 880 near 20-mile Bend to State Road 715 near Belle Glade. But DOT officials said the bids by contractors to build the guardrail could not be awarded until July.
Pahokee Mayor J.P. Sasser said that was too slow because people are still driving into the canal and dying.
“They should be able to go out to bid within two or three weeks,” Sasser said. “I don’t know why they are waiting until July.”
DOT spokeswoman Barbara Kelleher said it is not that simple. The project is still being designed and has to be presented to the public for comment and advertised before the state can award a construction bid.
July is the absolute earliest a bid could be awarded because the agency does not have any money budgeted to build the guardrails this year. The $4.3 million will not be available until next year’s budget, which starts July 1.
That explanation incensed Santamaria, whose response was to call it “baloney.”
“That’s why you have contingency funds,” Santamaria said. “If you have a catastrophe, are you going to wait for funding next year? That’s the problem with government, the bureaucracy.”
In Saturday’s crash, the vehicle crossed the median and the eastbound lanes flipped over after hitting a berm and eventually sank into the canal south of the road. The deaths bring the toll of fatalities from people who have driven into that stretch of the canal to 12 since 2004.
Kelleher said DOT officials planned to give a public presentation on the guardrail project at the next meeting of the Glades Technical Advisory Committee, a collection of local officials that advise the county on Glades issues. That meeting is scheduled for Feb. 24 at 9:30 a.m. at Belle Glade City Hall.
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