Wednesday night was no exception as nearly 100 residents stayed late in the evening to make sure the City Council heard their desperate message: Don't touch our wall.
Residents of Country Club Estates, an eastern Plantation neighborhood adjacent to the busy U.S. 441 commercial corridor, turned out in droves to protect an eight-foot concrete wall they say has improved their neighborhood.
``Motorcycles used to race through the neighborhood, people would wander up and down our street,'' said Priscilla Hawk. ``The wall has alleviated that.''
The wall was built in stages in the early 1990s, after the area's first master plan called for building buffers between commercial and residential properties on both sides of U.S. 441. The side streets leading into Country Club Estates were also closed off.
The Plantation residents loved the idea and say since the wall was built, property values have gone up and they feel safer. But the proposal caused the opposite reaction among residents in the unincorporated area to the east, who called the wall a way to lock them out of the city. It was never built on the east side of U.S. 441.
Now, nearly 10 years later, the city is reviewing a new master plan to revitalize the aging commercial corridor and one part of the initial proposal was to start opening Country Club Estates back up to the neighborhood. Carr, Smith, Corradino, the Miami-based engineering firm, suggested taking the wall down on certain streets - a proposal met with anger from residents.
Officials and Corradino backed off the idea last night, telling residents they weren't ready to bring the wall down.
``The best thing you can do is just leave well enough alone,'' said Mayor Frank Veltri, to loud applause and a near-standing ovation from the crowd.
But with so much of the attention focused on the wall issue, there was limited discussion of how the rest of the plan would work. The planning firm designed an aggressive revamping, including an artisan village, a linear park, an office tower and revamped commercial buildings in the area.
``We have a design that [the firm] has put out and we are not actually looking at what they proposed,'' said Sydney Brown, a business owner on the corridor.
The council has another month to review and change the plan. While many at the meeting seemed to like it, support was not unanimous. Veltri criticized it from the beginning for being too expensive and difficult to achieve.
``It has a Rolls-Royce cost,'' Veltri said. ``Let's get the recipe that we
can work. It may not be angel food cake, but it will be a cake we can eat.
Herald staff writer Deirdre Davidson can be reached by e-mail at ddavidson@herald.com