Public Meeting #3

On Wednesday October 8th 2008 I was able to attend a public meeting in regards to traffic calming on West Minnehaha Street in Tampa. This meeting was held a Leto High School cafeteria and the contact person was Steve Valdez. Jim Hunt was the hearing master of this meeting and he was joined by Jim Hosler and Robert Wood the project engineer. The intent of this meeting was to slow the ever increasing traffic due to the growing concern over the safety of the neighborhood children.

In order to get a meeting of this nature the public first must have a petition signed by at least five people. Once the petition is received by the county they then will try to select a time and location convenient for the people who signed the petition at hand. At this meeting they are required to have a hearing master, an official recorder of the responses, and lastly a videographer of the event. In some cases such as this an engineer of the proposed project would also show up to help answer questions posed by the attending public. To help explain the options to the public they also provided a description of the types of speed humps they have available to choose from. On the sheet that they had prepared it described the public’s options as a parabolic speed hump that was 3 inches high or a flat table speed hump that would have measured 3-1/2 inches high but would be flat instead of rounded off. The parabolic speed hump would allow the traffic to travel through the neighborhood at speeds of 15 to 20 miles per hour whereas the flat top table hump would allow cars to travel between 20 and 25 miles per hour. In addition to those differences the parabolic speed hump would cause a delay of approximately 10 seconds per car and the flat top speed hump would only cause a 5 second delay per car.

All that being said this is meeting had the attendance of zero. Not one person who signed the petition showed up and neither did anyone else. In my humble opinion this was a much needed act to help slow down the traffic in this area. Not only did it seem like a good idea but according to Hunt it was pretty much a slam dunk to get approved because all of the other roads in the surrounding areas had the speed humps in place already. This was still a very interesting meeting to attend because I got to see exactly how they handle situations like these. First of all they had to wait the maximum amount time, which was 30 minutes, to see if anyone showed up for the meeting. Due to the fact that we sat there the entire allotted time and no one showed Hunt looked into the camera and stated what the meeting was about and that due to the lack of attendance this request would not be approved. One last point to note was that even though absolutely nothing was accomplished at this meeting everyone in attendance still got paid, with exception of me of course. My point here is if you don’t find that something is worth showing up for then don’t sign a petition because you could end wasting taxpayers money, just like all these people did.