Our Observation

Did Winter Park live up to its New Year’s resolutions in 2011? Last year we asked City Manager Randy Knight to take out his crystal ball and see a full year of changes. He obliged but, a year later, was he right?

For the most part, the city lived up to his prognostications for the year. A new Community Center rose from the rubble of its predecessor, and the budget balanced out. Popular programs remained and services stayed at their lofty standards. But take a drive through the city and it’s easy to see where one of his predictions fell short.

A bright, energy-efficient Community Center opened its doors on Sept. 23, boasting updates that blew away any memory of the outdated center it replaced. The building was razed and then reborn in just more than a year’s time.

Knight and the City Commission also skillfully balanced the budget during a rough year. With revenues still low compared with four years ago and with pension liability still growing, city staff and the Commission managed to keep the city’s budget even, and did so while helping grow the general fund and while avoiding a property tax increase.

But all was not sunny in Winter Park, as budget woes and political entanglements kept some issues from seeing a long-term resolution.

A year later, Fairbanks Avenue may not look much different than it did at the start of 2011, despite predictions of the project seeing significant moves forward in the past year. The only solid change on the horizon: A McDonald’s opening near the corner of U.S. Highway 17-92 and Fairbanks Avenue, and 4Rivers Smokehouse moving about a quarter mile east to a much larger location.

Grander plans to add landscaped medians and to spruce up sidewalks and building frontage along the city’s western commercial corridor stalled in 2011, as the project slowed to a crawl while the city grappled with the Department of Transportation and merchants’ expectations. The defining issue: form versus function. Tree-lined medians and broadened sidewalks may look pretty and improve walkability, but they take up valuable real estate and make it harder to drive into parking lots along the notoriously busy highway.

When McDonald’s attorneys approached the city about the move, city officials were immediately confronted with the problem of whether the fast-food restaurant would be the first to adopt proposed design standards intended to improve the look of the Fairbanks Avenue business corridor. It won’t be your average McDonald’s, sporting a more subdued color scheme and less prominent drive-thru. Though the restaurant will adopt many of the features city staff had come up with, the city stopped short of expanding the easement in front of the restaurant to allow for a broader, landscaped sidewalk.

“I don’t want to set precedent on what we’re going to expect, on this project,” Mayor Ken Bradley said at a Nov. 14 meeting.

Police and fire pension reform has taken on horror movie proportions when commissioners talk about the future. With a slew of city public safety employees heading for retirement age in the next decade, the subject of how the city will be able to afford their retirement pensions has caused more than half the Commission to predict financial doom if the city can’t find a way to cut down on what it pays retiring employees, or at least get them to contribute more to their own pension funds.

The city’s contribution to the pension funds has increased to 20 times what it was ten years ago. As of 2011, the city was putting $3.1 million annually into the funds. By 2018 that number is expected to balloon to $4 million.

This year, as predicted, Knight succeeded in negotiating police and fire contracts for the year. But negotiations fell short of what Commissioner Carolyn Cooper said was necessary for the pension fund to be sustainable. Other commissioners agreed, though they stopped short of calling for immediate reforms.

“I can’t go back to a contract where the ink isn’t even dry yet to do this,” Commissioner Tom McMacken said in September.

With the city wading cautiously through the depths of an enduring economic slump, Knight, the Commission and city staff have made commendable strides toward fulfilling resolutions for 2011. Considering the hardships other cities have faced, Winter Park could easily have fared far worse.