The MDX: Driving Miami into the abyss of more sprawl ... by gimleteye

The board of the Miami Dade Expressway Authority, or MDX, is in the midst of approving the extension of the Dolphin Expressway/ SR 836 south into farmland and open space and needs to hear from the public why that is a terrible, horrendous idea. What is at stake is including this project in the MDX 5-year plan. If approved by the MDX board, it will trigger another in a long list of skirmishes at the Urban Development Boundary; this is where the battle to protect the Everglades has been fought over the decades in Miami-Dade County. Unfortunately, the MDX board is poised to do the bidding of land speculators. The board includes land use lobbyists like chairman Felix Lasarte, Gonzolo Sanabria, Al Maloof and Maritza Gutierrez. 

Today is the deadline for public comments. It is worth a moment of time to write to MDX and express your own thoughts about more suburban sprawl next to the Everglades. As if the western edge of Miami-Dade County isn't littered with enough foreclosures and ghost suburbs to last a lifetime. Ask the MDX to withhold approval of this boondoggle from its 5-year plan (the project identifier is #83618). tgarcia@mdxway.com


The MDX is planning to expand the 836 Dolphin Expressway west toward Krome Avenue and then south to Tamiami Airport. In other words, a massive highway project to bail out powerful land speculators whose investments are gathering dust because there is zero demand for the suburban sprawl they helped scatter throughout Miami-Dade County. Ramon Rasco, Sergio Pino, Rodney Baretto, Ed Easton are just some of the shareholders who could extract value from their speculative investments-- made near the top of the real estate bubble-- and fatten profits for land they may or may not even be paying mortgages on. While these issues are beyond the purview of the MDX board, they provide atmospherics of environmental destruction familiar to Southeast Florida: build highways, build sprawl, wreck the Everglades, and make taxpayers foot the bill.


Big highway projects have always served to lubricate the relationship between politics and developers. Given the overdevelopment of Miami-Dade, this kind of project -- and the fraudulent underpinnings of the "extend and pretend" economy-- ought to rejected.


Sierra Club and Tropical Audubon Society write: "We ask the MDX board to remove the 836/Dolphin Expressway Southwest Extension (project 83618) from its 5-year plan. We question the necessity of the this project and am concerned about the impacts to residents, agriculture and America's Everglades. We believe this road is unnecessary and will actually will increase, not alleviate, congestion on SR 836. Commuters currently have the option of taking several highways into downtown Miami. The existing 836, the Florida Turnpike, the 874, the 878 and the 826. Most of these roads have been or are currently being rebuilt to handle greater capacity. Future and existing toll revenues should be used to maintain these roads and provide for public transit alternatives, not to build new roads into environmentally sensitive areas. The project will threaten Everglades National Park and nearby federally-protected wetlands. A new layer of highway extending away from the city will fuel sprawl because of its proximity to the Urban Development Boundary. This highway would attract development of agricultural and wild lands buffering the Everglades and pose a direct threat to the $12 billion federal-state Everglades restoration project."

What this project would also do, is to reinforce exactly the growth pattern that failed Miami-Dade County, wrecked the Everglades, jeopardized thousands of acres of wetlands and farmland, and imposed billions in unfunded infrastructure costs on taxpayers. You don't get out of a ditch by digging the same ditch, deeper. But that is the kind of logic Miami-Dade lobbyists and appointees embraced, in the run-up to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Watch what they do, now.