Dean Park residents have welcomed plans for the Fort Myers Parks and Recreation Department to renovate and move offices into a warehouse that borders their historic community. But plans for a lot where city employees would park and leave big trucks overnight are proving a point of contention.
Fort Myers officials have held public meetings with Dean Park residents to talk about the plans and hear concerns. The most recent meeting focused mainly on the parking lot.
Fort Myers Parks and Recreation owns a parcel of land roughly four acres in size, according to Google Earth. The warehouse is located on the east side of Dean Park at 2801 Michigan Avenue. The proposed parking lot nestles on a triangular piece of vacant land between Michigan Avenue, Seaboard Street and Palm Avenue.
Residents have put up yard signs protesting the parking lot, and a petition opposing the plan is circulating among people in the historic Dean Park community.
The community was one of the first planned neighborhoods in Fort Myers, with a mix of architectural home styles. Starting in the 1920's it was a preferred location for many of the city's business owners and wealthier residents.
The city named Dean Park a historic district in 1997. The U.S. Department of the Interior named Dean Park to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013.
Fort Myers said the warehouse will be renovated into an office space for about 10 employees. But another 60 employees would park their personal vehicles in the employee lot, and then transfer to city vehicles for their daily work around Fort Myers.
About 45 city vehicles, including Ford F-250 pickups and large landscaping trucks, would be parked in the proposed lot. It would be a paved, lit and fenced-in parking lot bordering Dean Park.
According to the city, the parcel is zoned for water drainage and commercial use. Residents are concerned about how water will drain if asphalt covers the ground. Dean Park has had a history of flooding during hurricanes and tropical storms. Even heavy rainstorms can cause street flooding at times.
“The city engineers are aware of this issue [flooding in and around Dean Park] and will continue to mitigate through the current infrastructure and future design planning for this area,” Noelle Casagrande, the City of Fort Myer Public Information Officer, said.
Michelle Nugent lives in Dean Park and has experienced flooding in the neighborhood and along Michigan Avenue where the parking lot is planned. Nugent proposed a solution.
“I think there's really two options in my mind: they relocate the parking lot to another area or maybe they could even take their truck home at night, like other companies do,” Nugent said.
In the recent meeting the city stressed this location was the most logical for the parking lot. It would allow employees to leave their personal cars near the new parks and recreation headquarters. Then workers would take city-owned vehicles to various job sites.
The city said it is hearing the concerns, and has revised plans to move work trucks to a side of the lot farthest from Dean Park. Employee personal vehicles would park in an area of the lot closer to the edge of the historic neighborhood.
“Based on the June public input meeting, we moved the park to the safer, north side so not facing busy Michigan Avenue,” Casagrande said in an email. “As shown at (the recent) meeting, the parking lot is in the Michigan Avenue and Seaboard area, with the parks and recreation vehicles facing the more industrial side and the landscaping for the employee lot facing the Dean Park community.”
Fort Myers said plans for the parking lot are not final, but the parks and recreation offices are expected to move into the renovated warehouse sometime next year.
WGCU is your trusted source for news and information in Southwest Florida. Addyson McCullough is working as an intern for WGCU News as part of the News Path program.