Fort Lauderdale beach is reaching its development maximum. Under rules meant to prevent traffic gridlock, a beachfront hotel coming up for a vote in May could be one of the last major developments on the barrier island.
The proposed Beach Boys Plaza hotel would fill in a vacant space on State Road A1A a few hundred feet south of Las Olas Boulevard, at 401 S. Fort Lauderdale Beach Blvd.
It will attract more cars to the crowded beach roadways, pushing traffic volumes toward their legal maximum. Under a little-known development rule from the 1980s, new projects cannot be approved on the barrier island if the number of cars on the roadways during the busiest afternoon hour would exceed 3,220 cars, city officials and documents say.
After Beach Boys hotel and a few other pending projects are approved, the afternoon beach traffic will be just 59 cars short of that cap, city development officials said.
Beach redevelopment is expected to slow to a halt soon.
City elected officials were warned last summer that the development milestone — a no-more-traffic moratorium — was coming.
“When the trips run out, the development opportunities run out,” then-City Manager Lee Feldman warned commissioners in June. New City Manager Chris Lagerbloom said he agrees with his predecessor’s assessment.
If commissioners wanted to change the rules to allow more development and traffic, they’d need permission from the county — an approval that is by no means guaranteed. The process for approval can take several years, Feldman warned last summer.
Mayor Dean Trantalis said this week that it’s a debate he anticipates, because there is still “quite a bit of redevelopment that needs to happen on the beach.”
Trantalis and two of his colleagues on the City Commission, Ben Sorensen and Steve Glassman, ran for election last year on slow-growth platforms. In addition, city residents say bad traffic is one of the city’s worst problems. Trantalis said he’d need to see “clear and convincing evidence” that the traffic limit would be lifted but is open to discussing it.
“We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to complete the beach projects and eliminate the balance of the slum and blight in exchange for additional traffic in order to accomplish it?” Trantalis said.
A store, a hotel, a bar, a restaurant — all would attract traffic.
Redevelopment will be limited to projects that wouldn’t make traffic worse. For example, a hotel could be torn down and replaced with another, but only if the new hotel didn’t bring more afternoon peak hour traffic than the original one did, city officials have said. Or a developer could buy up businesses, tear them down, and use the traffic allowances associated with them to build on another site.
That might be good news for drivers, knowing that there is a limit to how bad traffic can get on the barrier island. But it likely will set off a scramble among developers.
“There’s no way every single project we’ve heard about can come to fruition under the present trip cap,” Commissioner Glassman said.
Traffic rules
Under the 1989 agreement with Broward County, the city is required to keep tabs on beach traffic, to make sure beach traffic congestion doesn’t get any worse than a “D” level on an A to F scale. Projects that will further congest the roadways would be required to come up with action plans to improve traffic flow, the 1989 agreement says.
Despite that, State Road A1A in the central beach has descended to the worst traffic congestion on the scale — an F — in just the last few years, according to Florida Department of Transportation assessments.
The 1989 agreement also restricts the number of residences on the beach to 5,500. A city memo from June said there were 391 remaining for future development projects.
Commissioner Glassman, who represents the beach area, said residents are not interested in allowing more development and traffic.
“Every meeting I go to on the barrier island, folks are really looking forward to the trips expiring,” he said.
The development limit applies to the central beach, from Sunrise Boulevard south to just south of the Bahia Mar property.
Rights to the few remaining car “trips” will be given out on a first come, first served basis, a city memo says.
Beach Boys
Over the past 20 years, the beachfront has slowly transformed, as older, smaller businesses were torn down and replaced with giant high-rise hotels and condos.
The Beach Boys Plaza hotel follows that trend, filling in a parking lot with a 16-story building. If approved next month, it will rise next to the city’s Las Olas parking lot, which is currently being remade into a public park.
An existing retail strip on the Beach Boys property will be renovated, lawyer-lobbyist Courtney Callahan Crush said. More retail and restaurants will be added with the new hotel. A garage will include an extra 162 spaces for the general public to park, the building plans say.
The hotel will be designed like other beachfront architecture, with the tower portion of the building set back away from the shore in order to minimize shadows on beach sunbathers.
Traffic forecasts say the new hotel will add 1,991 cars to the beach roads each day. But only the afternoon peak hour cars from the hotel — 155, according to traffic forecasters — count towards the traffic cap.
More cars coming
Several other big developments are in the works, and are factored in to the latest traffic tally, city Sustainable Development Director Anthony Fajardo said.
The projects: Bayshore Hotel at 3016 Bayshore Drive, with 115 residential units, 168 hotel rooms and some retail-restaurant space, headed to a May 7 City Commission vote; 3000 Alhambra St., a tower with 311 residential units plus retail and restaurants at the formerly city-owned Sebastian parking lot property; and the Residence Inn at 425 Seabreeze Blvd., city development officials said.
After those projects are approved, developers will be competing for the remaining 59 “trips.”