Not a good idea- Expanding the Sawgrass Expressway to Palm Beach County

Twenty years ago an expressway was built in Broward County. It's name- The Sawgrass. Starting in Deerfield Beach and running first west and then south, the highway ran over twenty miles before ending in western Broward County.

The Sawgrass was and still is a toll road. When the highway first opened, Broward County was counting on something like 20 million dollars in tolls collected a year. How much did they really collect? 6 million. There were a couple of reasons for this.

1- The Sawgrass passed through a mostly deserted stretch of Broward County.

2- Unattended toll collection areas. No one there to stop someone from going through without paying, and not even a gate/barrier to stop them either.

3- No connection to I-95 in the north. The residents of Century village in Deerfield Beach objected to a expressway connector in their back yard.

4- No connection in the south to Alligator Alley/I-75/I-595. The road ended in a detour at Broward boulvervard.

No connections in the North and South, no one living anywhere near most of the highway, and unenforced toll booths. Sounds like typical government planning doesn't it? My parents lived in Southern Boca Raton back when the Sawgrass was open and I had more than some f amiliarity with the highway.

Almost twenty years later problems 3 and 4 don't exist anymore, and Broward County has built up signifigantly around the Sawgrass as developers built around what many used to call the highway to no where.

Back in the 80's when the Sawgrass was being built, it was proposed to link it to Palm Beach County. One of the many reasons why it wasn't is the expressway would have to run very close to Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. If you don't know much about South Florida, most of the area is butting up against either the Everglades, A wildlife park like the one mentioned or some type of wetlands. The preservation of the Everglades and Lake Okeechobee are vital, because of the later being the water supply for most of South Florida.

Now as is being reported in today's Sun-Sentinel, the issue of Palm Beach connector to the Sawgrass is being raised again.

On Thursday, Palm Beach County transportation officials plan to consider a request from Broward County to support studying a new Sawgrass extension instead of stretching University Drive north.The Sawgrass extension could keep traffic farther away from residents on both sides of the Broward-Palm Beach County line who object to using University Drive as a commuter connection.

However, building a Sawgrass extension in western Palm Beach County also puts a major highway closer to the Everglades."Nothing is cast in concrete," said Ossama Al Aschkar, transportation engineer for the Broward County Metropolitan Planning Organization.

"We need to have some connection between Broward and Palm Beach counties west of State Road 7."With development already moving onto land once reserved for the extension, a new route would likely have to head farther west and cut through into Palm Beach County's agricultural reserve area, said Randy Whitfield, director of the Palm Beach Metropolitan Planning Organization.

"There is a fear that that type of connection would open that area up to development," Whitfield said.

Which is exactly what happened with Broward County after the Sawgrass was opened up. A connector will lead to more development, which I along with the Palm Beach Post think would be unwise.

Broward, though, has been the problem all along. There is no direct way to get from crowded northwest Broward to southern Palm Beach County because the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee Wildlife Refuge is in the way. Extending the Sawgrass would mean building a road along the eastern edge of the refuge. That didn't make environmental sense in 1988, when the lawsuit over Everglades pollution was filed, and it makes no sense now, 11 years after the Legislature approved the state's plan to clean the Everglades and five years after Congress agreed to help pay for the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.

Yet University Parkway remains alive, sustained by political timidity and taxpayer-financed studies. A task force that County Commissioner Burt Aaronson -- who represents the southwest district -- tried to kill will report soon on options for easing traffic in the area. Because of Palm Beach County's own failure to control western growth, there aren't many helpful options. The worst option, though, is University Parkway. Seventeen years hasn't made it look any better.

Hey Hey I agree with the Post for a change. I'll just add that the Universal Parkway connector would do little now to relieve traffic in Palm Beach County because few people live out that way. It would change however once the road was built as development poured into the area.

Just a plain bad idea all around. Hopefully the University Parkway idea will die and go away but our politicians are too often in pockets of local developers. We the citizens of South Florida have to keep up the pressure on our politicians to do what is in t he public interest.