SEBASTIAN — Since the close of the last millennium, Lisanne Monier Robinson has been trying to get the City of Sebastian to admit that U.S. 1 in the heart of the city is hazardous and do something about it.
Last week, she claims she might have seen a teensy bit of progress, or at least acknowledgement.
“Maybe it’s like a 12-step program. Now that they’ve admitted that U.S. 1 is dangerous, maybe we can get somewhere,” said Robinson, who served on the council from 2004 to 2006 and ran again unsuccessfully in 2009.
Robinson’s kitschy art and curiosities shop, the Beyond Useless Boutique, is the kind of place that gives parts of Sebastian its unique, slightly funky character. Since she bought the place and moved in – painting the exterior various daring colors including chartreuse and now purple with turquoise trim and green front steps – Robinson’s store has been a magnet for visitors, but they can’t really cross the street from Vic’s Pizza in Washington Plaza or the riverfront Tiki Bar to get to her.
U.S. 1 is treacherous to traverse on foot, especially during weekday drive time when people are in a hurry, or on the weekends when aimless wanderers populate the road, looking for turnoffs to the river or even to the beach if they’re a little lost. There were lots of wanderers last week during the Sebastian River
Area Chamber’s Light Up Night, trying to follow a map listing dozens of businesses offering free goodies. As she was preparing to open up for the event, Robinson said she glanced out and saw city workers doing something in front of her shop.
“I looked out and they were putting up a large A-frame sign – blocking the sidewalk – telling pedestrians that they need to use the crosswalk,” she said.
Robinson asked the workers who gave them instructions to put up the A-frame sign and she was told the word came, either directly or indirectly, from City Manager Al Minner. She immediately called Minner.
“He answered the phone and said, ‘Lisanne, are you at your shop?’ He didn’t even need to ask who it was because he has Caller ID,” she said. Minner drove to the shop and explained that he was told by the Sebastian City Council members to do something about the potential hazard to pedestrians from the cars on U.S. 1.
The upshot of the conversation was that the barricade blocking the sidewalk came down, but Robinson couldn’t pass up the opportunity to remind Minner about what she views as unkept promises the city has made to local businesses regarding the U.S. 1 corridor and traffic calming.
“Al Minner told me that the U.S. 1 project was complete, that construction was over,” Robinson said. “They were going to stamp the pavement and Art Inc. (the Sebastian Riverfront Fine Art and Music Festival Robinson founded in 2002) was going to pay to put landscaping in the median. So I guess none of that is going to be done.”
In August 2011, city officials stated in a public meeting that the pavement was going to be stamped to call attention to streetside parking and that decorative landscaping and other enhancements would be installed on U.S. 1 between Main Street and C.R. 512. Minner said the stamping of the parking spaces was completed, but that a larger landscape plan was attached to a “bump-out” concept that was rejected by the city council because it would have cost upwards of $200,000.
“As far as the landscaping goes, I’m not sure where Lisanne is headed. She’s always been unhappy with our landscaping. In my conversation on Friday, I relayed that there’s no plans to re-landscape the medians on U.S. 1,” Minner said.
Minner said the sign placed in front of Robinson’s business – and removed at her request – was the result of council concern for pedestrians during that isolated event which draws thousands into the area. “The concern was centered around Light Up Night, not typical pedestrian traffic,” he said. “We can’t stop the flow of traffic on US 1 and have people cross in different locations. We put up the speed trailers. Then there should have been the other message trailers that should have said a message like ‘holiday event, use caution’ and then we put cautionary signs on the sidewalks directing people to crosswalks.
“We put one in her (Robinson’s) spot because we thought it would help with pedestrian flow,” Minner said.
The decorative stamping of the pavement and the landscaping, Robinson said, are devices used by other cities and towns to calm traffic in downtown or shopping areas. She learned about traffic calming and other techniques for creating walkable communities when she attended workshops put on for and by Main Street organizations.
“We don’t have a Main Street here so we can’t have a Main Street organization,” Robinson said. “But we can do traffic calming and we can work with the Florida Department of Transportation to get the speed limit reduced.
Other cities have done it,” she added and cited numerous places around the state that have successfully reduced speeds on U.S. 1 as it passes through their central business districts.
“You can’t tell me it can’t be done,” she said. “U.S. 1 (called Federal Highway in South Florida) is 25 miles per hour right in front of the FDOT headquarters in Fort Lauderdale.”
The speed limit in Sebastian’s U.S. 1 commercial corridor from Main Street to County Road 512 is 40 miles per hour. Robinson has tried to get the city to work with the FDOT to get the speed lowered to 35 or even 30 miles per hour through that sector of town. Minner said on Monday that the city petitioned FDOT yet again to study and reduce the speed on U.S. 1, but that request was rejected by FDOT early in 2012.
“Every time we try to slow down that road, we are told by FDOT that we can’t do it. I think Lisanne has chosen a difficult battle to fight. I think she blames the city for US 1 and the city does not control U.S. 1,” he said.
“If you look at other downtowns throughout the state such as Ft. Pierce or Vero, all of those areas are off U.S. 1. What we’re fighting with is trying to get that look onto U.S.1, but I appreciate where Lisanne is coming from.”
Instead, Minner said, Sebastian is doing its best to improve the side streets in the Community Redevelopment Area from the railroad tracks to the river.
“If you look at how that district has changed over the past seven years, we’re changing the character of that area through street paving, putting in landscaping, putting in lighting. Those are our right of ways. We manage that,” he said.
Minner said it’s unfair to say that the city isn’t working to help small businesses thrive. He said the city has granted about $100,000 to local businesses to upgrade their signage and efforts to enhance the redevelopment district, despite a huge chunk of it being on U.S. 1.
“Our efforts are huge in what we’re trying to accomplish, trying to create downtown ambiance, and pedestrian connectivity and trying to create that out of a riverfront and a road that’s a part of the federal or state highway system,” Minner said.
“I think Sebastian is challenged because of its old General Development Corp. history. We’re trying to marry downtown issues and create pedestrian traffic on a road that we don’t control,” he said. “To sit back and say that the city is ignoring small businesses is an unreasonable statement.”
In the meantime, cars packed with shoppers and hungry locals and tourists pass right on by the Beyond Useless Boutique and other local businesses, such as the Southern Sisters Café just down the road. Drivers might fly right on by the quaint Village Square shopping center if they don’t notice the driveway off U.S. 1. If so, they would miss a great local shopping opportunity, with jewelry stores, an art gallery and even a new, lively pub called the Beach House.
Robinson said Sebastian businesses did not at all capitalize on the national “Shop Small” movement surrounding Small Business Saturday during Thanksgiving weekend and they lost out on an opportunity to make cash registers go ka-ching.
“I did $100 in sales on Black Friday and I had the first person walk into my shop at 2 p.m. on Saturday,” Robinson said. “Businesses are really struggling, things are bad out there, but no one will talk about it.”
Robinson says she’s skeptical whether her business and several others in the area will even make it through this season, unless owners continue to bleed cash and keep pouring money in to pay the bills.
“We do economic development all wrong in this county,” she said, referring to the county’s Jobs Grant program which offers cash to businesses to relocate to Indian River County.
“We give grants to big, new businesses to create 20 or 30 jobs, but we do nothing to help existing small businesses. I would hire a couple of people if business was better and I could afford to and so would the other business owners I know,” she said. “We could take that same money and help 10 existing businesses hire two or three people each and create the same number of jobs.”
