Poll may help sell traffic plan

By Jon Steinman, The Orlando Sentinel

?A poll that shows many Orange County voters are more concerned about public safety than long commutes may help Chairman Rich Crotty win support for a massive transportation plan that will likely require a tax increase.

Crotty said this week that he isn't interested in simply seeing his blue-ribbon transportation panel produce a plan that looks good on paper. He wants something the public will buy, and a poll solicited by the Orlando Regional Chamber of Commerce may give him some ammunition.

"I think it would be safe to assume that any recommendations that come out in the near future will be things we think will have a strong likelihood of success," said Crotty, whose Chairman's Transportation Commission is charged with developing recommendations for easing gridlock. The CTC, which has only two scheduled meetings remaining, is to present its plan to the County Commission early next year.

"I'm not interested in failure," Crotty said.

The poll of 1,095 Central Florida voters was conducted by Consensus Communications Oct. 15-24, with a margin of error of 3 percent.

The polling revealed little new - residents support widening Interstate 4 and building arterial roadways - and didn't address whether respondents would support a tax increase to pay for transportation fixes.

It did, however, offer some interesting twists, albeit ones that contradict widely expressed public sentiment.

For instance, a significant initiative in the Chairman's Transportation Commission's early discussions -- growth management -- drew mixed, and somewhat confusing, reviews in the poll.

The CTC has broadly suggested that any transportation plan should also recommend that developers focus on urban-core areas. The theory is that without stronger growth management, no amount of road and rail fixes will relieve traffic.

Of the respondents asked to rate issues from 0-10, with 10 being very important, 17 percent said managing growth and development was a high priority and 18 percent said it was a low priority.
The great bulk of those polled, 62 percent, fell somewhere in the middle.

However, a similar question about whether managed growth is important polled much better, with 47 percent saying it was a high priority.

Crotty would not say how he interprets the data or otherwise comment on poll results. But if a recent public hearing is any indication, he can rest assured managing sprawl is important to county residents.

At that gathering, support for a growth-management element in the commission's final plan rang so loud that CTC Chairman Bill Frederick said it was assured to be a part of the ultimate recommendation.

The biggest items in play are accelerating plans to widen Interstate 4, improving and widening major arterial roadways and implementing a commuter-rail system that could ferry commuters from DeLand to downtown Orlando.

The poll revealed that 30 percent of those responding want to widen existing roads; 27 percent want to expand or create some kind of mass- transit system, 19 percent want to build new highways and 17 percent want a combination.

Responses included:

• While 67 percent of voters across Central Florida reported traffic has become worse in the past five years, only 29 percent of Orange voters polled declared bumper-to-bumper commutes to be a "major problem." In Seminole County, 25 percent found it to be a major problem and in Osceola County, 24 percent.

• Helping law enforcement get to the scene of a crime or accident rated as a high priority for 40 percent of those polled, and reducing pollution was a high priority to 65 percent.

• More respondents ranked tackling gridlock a low priority, 25percent, than a high priority, 16 percent.

• While 18 percent across Central Florida described traffic as a major problem, 28 percent described it as "not much of a problem." The poll found that 43 percent of voters said congestion is "somewhat" of a problem.

• Expanding freeways and roads was a "high priority" to 55 percent of voters; building new freeways was a high priority for 46 percent. Building a regional mass transit system was a high priority for 37 percent of voters.

Crotty's plans to use poll results to sell his final vision troubles some, including Bob Spears, the head of CountyWatch, the local government watchdog group.

"I don't think the poll addressed how the problems should be solved. They have addressed what people think the problems are," Spears said. "We're taking this approach from an isolated county perspective. We'll build more roads that go to the county line. That causes more sprawl, which causes more gridlock. And we have the problem even more."

Others think that taking into consideration what residents want is just smart.

"We've got to sell to the public what will work. You don't want to sell magic beans to the public," said Brady Lessard, Sanford's mayor and a board member of Metroplan Orlando, the regional agency that directs federal transportation dollars to Central Florida.

Others familiar with the issue agree, with some suggesting that Crotty might want to offer incentives to voters to win their support, much like he did earlier this year to help win passage for a school sales-tax referendum.

Many credit Crotty's move to link September's half-cent sales-tax increase with a small property-tax relief measure. Without this, the school sales-tax referendum may not have passed.

"I'm older and wiser," said former Orange Chairman Linda Chapin, who in 1997 saw a sales-tax referendum to help schools and county infrastructure lose at the polls. "We haven't had much success on these. I think you have to be strategic."

Chapin said she hoped Crotty would consider offering a similar carrot to voters next year when they're expected to decide on a transportation sales-tax increase. Crotty said he would weigh the idea in coming months.