Hello WWC Community! We are excited to launch our second City Spotlight, featuring newly certified Port St. Lucie, Florida! We'll spend the month highlighting the City's achievements and you'll have the chance to hear directly from their team through events, blogs, and resources. To get started, we're sharing the story of Port St. Lucie's Sidewalk Master Plan.
Port St. Lucie is one of the fastest growing cities in the country, adding more than 35,000 new residents in the past three years. This rapid growth comes with benefits and challenges. But, with the help of data and resident input, the Mayor, City Council and staff are successfully managing today's growth and planning for the future. Residents have made it clear that improving mobility around the city should be a priority. In 2023, only 4 in 10 residents said it was easy to walk around the city and even fewer thought it was easy to bike or use public transit. These findings are not necessarily surprising. Port St. Lucie was developed as a retirement community in the 1960s and included few sidewalks. But, in line with resident feedback, the City has made adding more sidewalks a key infrastructure priority in its strategic plan.
In 2017, the City Council approved an enhanced 10-year Sidewalk Master Plan to add 35 miles of sidewalks, particularly on streets within a two-mile radius of schools, and to create a network of connected sidewalks. Progress on the plan has been helped by a resident-approved half-cent sales tax increase for infrastructure projects. As with its other strategic goals, the City tracks its performance on the Sidewalk Master Plan on a public dashboard.
In the coming weeks, Port St. Lucie will share more about how they revamped their Stat program. The changes they made have enabled better collaboration on mobility solutions in response to traffic data. The Police Department also has a Stat program in place as part of their data-informed approach.
In 2022, Port St. Lucie installed 4.9 miles of new sidewalks and repaved 49.94 miles of roads. And the City has not stopped with the Sidewalk Master Plan. In 2021, it began exploring multimodal planning as a way to increase sidewalk connectivity, expand transit coverage, reduce congestion, and accelerate street repairs and improvements. State legislation allows local governments with multimodal plans to collect flexible mobility fees on new developments instead of road-specific impact fees. The City adopted both a Multimodal Plan and a Mobility Plan in order to access this flexible funding. As of September 2023, the City had collected $22 million in mobility fees to invest in projects that will have the biggest impact for current and future residents.
Kate Parmelee, Deputy City Manager for Strategic Initiatives & Innovation, summed up the City's efforts: "The City of Port St. Lucie has a strategic plan to bring the City towards an even better future. Each year, our nationally award-winning planning process begins with listening to the input and ideas of Port St. Lucie residents. Through this process, residents can truly help shape the future of their City." Follow along with the City Spotlight to learn more about how Port St. Lucie incorporates their residents' input into decision-making!
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