Update, Sept. 28. This paper sent four questions to the county’s Office of Public Affairs on Sept. 23, to the media contact named on the advisory. Five days later there is no answer. The questions were what work remains and on what date the county accepts the road, what the widened road now carries, how the $42.5 million divides between impact fees and the Transportation Trust Fund and whether that figure is still a budget, and how many units are approved and unbuilt on the corridor. The county has sent this paper four other press releases since.
Nobody refused. Nothing has been answered either, and the ceremony is Wednesday.
St. Johns County will hold a ribbon-cutting on CR 210 at nine in the morning on Sept. 30, to celebrate the completion of a road the same advisory says is still being built.
Both sentences are in the release. The subheading promises a ceremony that “will celebrate completion of roadway improvements from Greenbriar Road to Cimarrone Boulevard.” Six paragraphs down: “Construction is nearing completion.”
Nearing.
That word is doing a particular job. A ribbon is a date somebody picks. A road is finished when the punch list is closed and the county accepts it, and those two things are allowed to land in different months. Only one of them gets a photographer.
What it cost, in something you can hold
Three miles. About $42.5 million, out of impact fees and the Transportation Trust Fund.
That is roughly $14.2 million a mile, and about $2,683 for every foot of road. A forty-foot lot frontage on CR 210 is a little over a hundred thousand dollars of asphalt, bridge, pipe and pond.
Here is the same number in rooftops, which is the only unit this column really has. One 2018 agreement in this county, under Ordinance 2018-40, set per-unit transportation payments at $7,500 and $15,000 depending on the unit. Priced at that agreement’s rates, three miles of CR 210 runs somewhere between about 2,800 and 5,700 houses’ worth of road money.
That is this paper’s arithmetic rather than the county’s, and the $42.5 million is not all rooftop money in any case, because the Transportation Trust Fund is the rest of us. The conversion is there to make one point. A road on this corridor costs thousands of houses, and this corridor is where the houses are going.
The question the advisory does not answer
The release lists what was built. Travel lanes. New bridges. Sidewalks on both sides, which is worth more than it sounds on a road nobody currently walks on. Curbing, stormwater pipes, two drainage ponds. Three new signals, at Stillwater Boulevard and South Hampton, at Shearwater, and at Greenbriar Road and Old CR 210.
It does not say what the road now carries.
No level of service. No before and after count. No statement of how many peak hour trips these three miles were built to absorb, and no figure at all for what has already been entitled along them and is not yet standing. The county spends a full paragraph on how the project “supports the St. Johns County Strategic Plan by investing in reliable infrastructure,” and not one line on the arithmetic that decides whether the widening holds.
That arithmetic is the whole question on this beat. A road is not improved in the abstract. It is improved against a number of rooftops, and if the rooftops approved alongside it arrive faster than the lanes did, the county has bought a few good years and a familiar argument.
The county did not provide that number. This paper does not have it either, and is not going to print one it cannot stand behind.
Sixteen days, one address
On Sept. 14 the county held a community meeting at Faith Community Church, 3450 CR 210 West. The application was REZ 2026-08, St. Johns Commons Commercial, a rezoning from OR to Commercial General for 9.16 acres with approximately 50 percent open space. The notice gave no address, no square footage and no traffic figure.
On Sept. 30 the county will cut a ribbon on the road outside that building, and the advisory names the church as the landmark.
Nine acres is small, and one rezoning does not fill a road. But this is how a corridor turns over. Not in a single application anybody shows up to fight. Nine acres at a time, in a church hall on a Monday evening, while the widening that makes the nine acres worth rezoning is being celebrated in the road outside.
Who will stand there
Two speakers: Christian Whitehurst, the District 1 commissioner, and Greg Caldwell, the director of Public Works. CR 210 runs through District 1.
The advisory spells the commissioner’s given name Cristian. The county’s own elected officials page spells it Christian.
Osiris 9 was the civil engineer, Eisman & Russo did the construction engineering and inspection, and Superior Construction built it. Naming them is not a complaint. Three miles of new bridges and drainage in this soil is real work, and the people who did it are the only ones at that ceremony who have been rained on.
If you go
Wednesday, Sept. 30, 9 a.m., on CR 210 between Faith Community Church and Stillwater Boulevard. The church is at 3450 CR 210 West, which the advisory does not tell you.
The release says media can interview participants afterwards, and this paper put two of those questions in writing five days ago and has not had them back. What is left to finish, and on what date does the county accept the road. And how many units are approved and unbuilt on this corridor.
Somebody standing in that road on Wednesday will know the first one.
Loading comments…