What's cost and time schedule of street project?

The Coconut Grove street scape project will start in late summer. The total cost including county and city streets is $3.2 million. Phase One, the city streets, will cost from $1.5 to $2 million. Most of the streets in the Center Grove are city streets. The county streets (which will be phase two of the project) are Grand Avenue, Main Highway and McFarlane Road.

Florida Avenue has 36 trees now; 11 will be replaced due to problems with them (root rot, bad placement, unhealthy, etc.), so the street will still end up with 36 trees in the end. This will be the first street to be worked on in late summer according to plans. Planners are giving the project three to four months for the work to be completed on Florida Avenue.

Commodore Plaza has 33 trees now; 18 will be removed, 20 will go in new and the total will be 35 trees at the end of the project. Sidewalks will be widened at one end to allow for better pedestrian traffic and more room for restaurant tables. Commodore will lose five parking spaces due to the project. There are 30 usable spaces now, in the end there will be 25. This part of the project will begin July or August 2012 and take five months, according to plans.

Fuller Street is a mess according to the experts. There are major root problems with the trees, they are intertwined and a mess and none of the trees can be salvaged it seems. There are 20 trees now and there will end up being 16 after the removal and replacement. As for parking spaces, Fuller Street will go from 16 parking spaces now to 13 after the project. The sidewalks will be widened to make them ADA compliant. The projected time for Fuller Street's work is three months, staring in May or June of 2012.

The three county streets (Grand, Main and McFarlane) are projected to have a start date of next summer and they are supposed to take a year or less for completion. The whole project should take 2.5 years.

Businesses are concerned about the mess, the closed streets and the long drawn out project which may affect business. They were assured by the project managers, Scott Silver of the BID and Albert Sosa, the assistant director of Capital Improvements with the City, that the work will go fast and they will work in sections, so as not to close large areas down at once. Businesses will be consulted to see what times and days would be best for the least disruption to them. In some cases work may be done just at night, or just on weekdays or weekends. Incentives may be added into the project to get the contractors to move fast and finish ahead of time.

It may be a big long mess, but in the end it should be a major improvement to the street scape. The variety of trees and the color schemes with the new bricks and widened sidewalks in some places will make Coconut Grove much more pedestrian friendly.