City stalls taking ownership of Maitland Avenue

Maitland Avenue won’t be going on a diet anytime soon.

On Monday the Maitland City Council agreed to postpone the city signing an interlocal agreement with Orange County to take ownership of Maitland Avenue. Owning the road is the only way the city can go forward with plans to narrow the downtown street from four lanes to two, a goal set by the city more than a decade ago.

But taking control of the road comes with a price tag, Acting City Manager Sharon Anselmo said. In this case, she said, it would cost the city roughly $100,000 a year in upkeep and maintenance.

Without a clear vision of what the future of the street will hold as Maitland’s new downtown starts to rise from the ground around it, four out of the five City Council members agreed that the city needs a plan before it starts shelling out money to maintain it.

“Before we widen or diet this road, we need to know what it is that we want to develop on this road...We need to have a plan and right now I don’t know what the plan is,” Councilwoman Bev Reponen said.

Council members John Lowndes and Joy Goff-Marcil agreed that taking ownership of the road now would be putting the cart before the horse.

Councilman Mike Thomas called the agreement proposed by Orange County, in which the county turns the road over to the city but still has veto-power over what the city does to it, “ridiculous.”

“In the interest of saving time, I just say we just reject this and be done with this,” Thomas said. “…I think we need to give people another five years to get over Horatio before we touch Maitland Avenue.”

It’s only been about two and a half years since the Horatio Avenue construction he referred to, which reconfigured the intersection at U.S. Highway 17-92 and reduced Horatio to one lane in each direction between there and Maitland Avenue. The construction, which ripped through the intersection in late 2013, caused a cacophony of complaints from residents over the impact it had on traffic.

Later, in 2014, then-Mayor Howard Schieferdecker would admit that the city had made a mistake in how it overhauled the intersection. The plans for that construction project went back to the same transportation study from 2004 that set the goal for reducing Maitland Avenue from four lanes to two.

Maitland Mayor Dale McDonald wants to stick to those 2004 plans, mentioning on Monday that the shrinking of Maitland Avenue is the only goal set back then that hasn’t come to fruition today. He said the city can’t keep ignoring the road-trimming goal just because residents might be resistant to the change.

“We cannot continue to let Horatio Avenue and Maitland Avenue continue to be the chaos it is today,” he said. “…We're pretending this crisis doesn’t exist because it’s uncomfortable … I’m of the idea that sooner or later we need to address this.”

Goff-Marcil and Reponen each said that, other than the mayor, they’ve yet to hear many residents in the city say that they are excited about narrowing the road.

“I haven't come across anybody that says this is a grand idea, or even a lukewarm idea,” Reponen said.

The Council agreed to put the plans on the back burner until its new master plan is completed later this year. Once the vision for downtown has been finalized, they agreed to relook at what agreement can be worked out between the city and the county for Maitland to take ownership of the road.

“It's not the wrong project, it's the wrong time for this project,” Reponen said.

“I believe it would be a nice two-lane road down the road,” Thomas added.