Already years in the making, a Collier County proposal to extend Wilson Boulevard in Golden Gate Estates is still years away.
The county hosted a public information meeting Monday night to share potential locations of a new road that will extend Wilson Boulevard south and then west to connect it to City Gate Boulevard and ultimately Collier Boulevard. The county’s long-range transportation plan determined the connection as a need to improve connectivity. While Wilson Boulevard South dead ends at a canal more than a mile south of Golden Gate Boulevard, the proposal to extend it south into southern Golden Gate Estates would pass APAC Florida’s quarry before veering west to connect with City Gate Boulevard near the Paradise Coast Sports Complex.
“This is the first public meeting that we’re having to kind of re-announce the project. Some people are familiar with some of the older studies that have been done probably 10 or 15 years ago. So, we’re now showing three different alignments to get public involvement and get opinions,” said Lorraine M. Lantz, a principal planner for the county.
The alignment options on the table propose circuitous routes that would add 8.63 to 9.61 miles of additional roadway through that rural area of Collier County. In two of the three proposed options, the extended route would cut through part of the 967-acre property, known as HHH Ranch, immediately north of Alligator Alley that the county bought two years ago for $10 million from Dr. Francis and Mary Pat Hussey.
In a separate project already greenlighted, Wilson Boulevard will be widened from two to four lanes from Immokalee Road to Golden Gate Boulevard but the proposed route for the Golden Gate Boulevard South extension will be two lanes on a four-lane footprint. All three options would connect the boulevard to Tobias Street, a north-south route on the other side of the canal, and ultimately end at City Gate Boulevard, but each alignment wildly differs in between.
The north alignment shows Tobias connecting to Keane Avenue and then Garland Road to City Gate. The central alignment has Tobias extended south to connect with Markley Avenue and then City Gate. The south alignment extends Tobias south to a new corridor through the former Hussey property and connecting to White Lake Boulevard and then eventually to City Gate.
“I don’t have a favorite,” said Collier County Commission Chair Bill McDaniel, whose District 1 includes the new route. “What I have is a need to provide infrastructure for the people that are already here let alone those that are coming. We know for a fact we’re less than 50% of our buildout population. We know for a fact we’re direly deficient in infrastructure, especially in the eastern portion of the community for my residents that are already here let alone the other 400,000 or 500,000 that are coming in the next 50 years.”
Although Monday’s public information meeting is considered the first stage in the county’s process for the Wilson Boulevard extension, it’s actually the reboot of a process that started before 2005. Before he became a county commissioner, McDaniel said he vetted the initial project as chairman of a committee for the Collier East of (County Road) 951 Services & Infrastructure Horizon Study more than 15 years ago.
“It’s going to be an alternative access point for people to get to town off of Pine Ridge Road or Immokalee Road. It will serve as an additional route for evacuation from hurricanes or fires.” McDaniel said. “And there is, as we well know, a dire shortage of housing. Supply-demand dictates the prices of our housing as exorbitant as it is. This is going to access a large land mass area that houses can be built on and increase supply and ultimately come up with some housing affordability initiatives.”
Both the start and targeted completion of the project have not been determined yet but it is expected to be farther than five years away, said Trinity Scott, the county’s Growth Management deputy department head. “That is something we are going to be determining throughout this process,” Scott said.
That process includes focusing on the preferred alignment, road design and implementation this summer and fall with a second public meeting to be announced. A third public meeting this fall or winter will review the final recommendations and conclusions.
“It still has some pretty intensive environmental permitting to go through. Even once we get through this and start a design it will still take some time to get the environmental permitting,” Scott said. The particular rural fringe corridors were chosen to try to reduce the impact on natural resource protection areas, she said because plans would need to be approved by the Army Corps of Engineers as well as the Florida Department of Environmental Protection for any wetland impacts.
The options are presented as wide swaths that would have to be refined. The study is funded but the project itself is not funded yet. The county will have to work with some larger land owners, a few with developer agreements, during the public-private partnership, Scott said.
“Right now, they are all viable options,” she said.
