Alligator Alley

GREG KAHN / Daily News

Cars head west on I-75, in the area commonly known as Alligator Alley, in the early morning on April 23, 2008.

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True or false: Five times the people should make five times the noise.

Answer: it depends on what they are talking about.

While Collier County residents have raised an ever-growing cacophony against the potential lease of Alligator Alley, their eastern neighbors are causing far less of a ruckus.

“I don’t think anyone knows about it,” Broward County Mayor Kristin Jacobs said. “I think it’s simply lack of knowledge. We haven’t had one news article and there was one editorial about a month ago.”

Jacobs led a charge in June to get a resolution passed by her fellow Broward commissioners in opposition to the lease proposal. Alligator Alley doubles as Interstate 75 as it cuts across the state through Collier and Broward counties.

The Florida Department of Transportation in April began public efforts to put the alley up for bid, and has since issued two requests for qualifications, the initial step in gathering interest in a project. The first request, issued in May, was modified and re-issued in June to refine the information sought by the department.

Along the way, a group of vocal Southwest Floridians has led the charge against a possible privatization, spearheaded by the Citizens Transportation Coalition of Collier County.

No organized group of its kind exists on the eastern side of the state, observers say. Rather, a small handful of individuals have mobilized against the lease on their own.

“Southeast Florida is a larger community,” FDOT District IV Secretary Jim Wolfe said. “There’s more population and more issues, and I think Alligator Alley is just not as big of an issue.”

At a May 29 public meeting in Weston, near the alley’s eastern toll booth, about half of the 50 attendees were from Collier County.

Members of the Citizens Transportation Coalition made the trek after a similar meeting in Collier County just two days before, which was attended by about 100 people.

“There weren’t a lot of people at (the Broward) meeting,” Coalition founder Gary Eidson said. “It was in the most western part of the county that they could find a hotel.”

Eidson said it was reminiscent of the first public meeting held on the Alley privatization. Many critics of the Alley proposal were soured from the start when officials planned an April meeting for investors in Orlando, hundreds of miles from the Alley and the main population it serves.

To Eidson and others, the location seemed designed with exclusion in mind.

“Why would you have a Broward County meeting on the edge of the Everglades when the population base was in the center?” Eidson mused. “It was very difficult to access, hard to publicize, and typical of what FDOT has been doing.”

But to state Rep. Matt Hudson, R-Naples, the location seemed based on a reasonable assumption of who would be more interested in the alley’s privatization.

“In Collier County, Alligator Alley kind of connects right into our community directly,” said Hudson, whose district stretches across Collier and Broward counties. “Over there, it really kind of connects into the Everglades, then toward the towns.”

Hudson remains opposed to the lease concept, a stance he declared in May at the Broward and Collier meetings. He regularly travels the Alley himself, shuttling between the towns at either end of his district.

“The community most affected would be Weston, because when you get off the Alley, you come into Weston,” Hudson said.

But Weston Mayor Eric Hersh said the alley lease hasn’t been an issue in his city.

“You probably have more people from the west coast who commute to the east coast,” Hersh said. “From my personal perspective, privatization of public roads has worked in other parts of North America, and I think it remains to be seen what will happen. I think until the details come out of what it really means to people, there’s not going to be a lot of reaction.”

A draft of the concession agreement is slated for release Aug. 21, a day after DOT intends to release a short list of proposers invited to bid on the 50- to 75-year lease. Until then, the state is remaining mum on how much the state could gain from the lease or what projects would be funded with the profits.

But some observers fear that the sluggish and apathetic response from Broward County residents is a result of ignorance, not a “wait-and-see” attitude.

“It’s a pretty big deal, but it’s been done very quietly, and so people have been left out of it,” said Steve Breitkreuz, a town council member in Southwest Ranches, a small community to the southwest of Fort Lauderdale.

His town is an island of activity against an Alligator Alley lease, surrounded by a sea of disinterest, it seems.

“I think historically, Southwest Ranches has been a politically active town,” Breitkreuz said. “We have some strong (homeowners associations) that, when something like this comes up that is not right, they do a pretty good job of getting the word out to their members.”

Even if there is no organized group in Southwest Ranches leading a charge, as in Collier County, the outpouring of opposition from there has been marked. Aside from Naples residents, people living in Southwest Ranches appear to make up the largest contingent of residents who have written the governor to speak against the lease.

Southwest Ranches resident John Riley said he got interested in the lease proposal through a “small breakfast group of retired guys.”

He wrote the governor in June to express his displeasure.

“It’s like spending your inheritance in advance,” Riley said. “Everyone I know has felt the same way as me, and thinks it’s a stupid idea.”

And response from government entities, while it has been slower in Broward County, is starting to gain steam.

On July 10, the Broward County Metropolitan Planning Organization passed a resolution opposing the lease. It mimics a resolution passed in June by Collier County’s MPO, the agency in charge of long-range road planning for the county.

Mayor Jacobs, a member of the Broward organization, sponsored that resolution, too.

Eidson said his organization has considered a drive to raise awareness at the eastern end of the state, but has its hands full in Collier County.

Since June, Citizens Transportation Coalition members have been handing out pre-written letters to Gov. Charlie Crist opposing the lease of the alley.

From letter-writing drives at the county’s libraries to leaflets left in area stores, coalition members have collected roughly 900 letters signed by residents, coalition director Gina Downs said.

They fax those letters in batches to the governor’s office.

“We were hoping to do 5,000 for the month of July ... but are optimistic that it will exceed that,” Downs said.