Latest news with #KeithJames
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
PBAU will scale back plans for West Palm parking garage 'monstrosity' after controversy
WEST PALM BEACH — Palm Beach Atlantic University has agreed to scale back its plans for a massive parking garage along South Dixie Highway after two weeks of controversy and scathing criticism from the city's mayor. The private Christian college won permission from the City Commission on April 14 to build a 25-story tower and 11-story garage. If built, the garage would have been the largest parking structure in the city. Mayor Keith James had called the plan 'a monstrosity' and had tried unsuccessfully to persuade commissioners to block it. In a turnabout, James announced April 28 that the university had agreed to amend its plans and will lower the garage's height to no more than seven stories. OPINION: Good PBAU campus parking worth an 11-story 'monstrosity' in downtown West Palm 'I'm appreciative of PBAU's willingness to work with my vision of a city that creates attractive public spaces, and sustains neighborhoods with attractive streets designed for people, not just cars,' James said in a news release announcing the move. The change represents a significant reversal for the school. City planners had asked the school previously to lower the garage's height to seven stories but the school had declined. Commissioners voted 4-0 to approve the garage at 11 stories anyway. The controversy led to the resignation last week of the city's top development official. Rick Greene, the city's longtime development director, left office abruptly April 24 after he said James ordered him to fire a city planner over her handling of the garage. RELATED STORY: West Palm development boss: I resigned after mayor ordered me to fire a city planner Greene, who had overseen the city's building and planning departments since 2012, said he stepped down rather than fire the planner, who he said did not deserve termination. This is a developing story. Check back at for updates. Andrew Marra is a reporter at The Palm Beach Post. Reach him at amarra@ This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Palm Beach Atlantic University West Palm parking garage scaled back
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Good PBAU campus parking worth an 11-story 'monstrosity' in downtown West Palm
I look forward to the day when the skyline of West Palm Beach will be noted for an 11-story parking garage along Dixie Highway. I know that Mayor Keith James has already called the planned parking facility at Palm Beach Atlantic University a 'monstrosity.' But one of the advantages of being a mayor is you always get good parking, so he's probably not the proper judge for these kinds of amenities. It's like asking a vegan what he thinks of pork chops. So, let's not shortchange the value of good parking. I would put good parking as one of the top 'goods', right up there with good home fries, good WiFi, and good arch support. West Palm mayor hates it: PBA gets OK to build 25-story tower, city's largest garage It would take a lot for me to come out against good parking. The 11-story garage will be a complement to a proposed 25-story tower that will serve as a new dormitory for nearly a thousand PBAU students in some 275 dorm rooms. These skyscraper-sized developments are part of a general growth plan for the small private Christian university as it plans to expand from 3,000 to 5,000 students. Luring them with good parking is a great idea. If I were the PBAU recruiters, I'd make the great parking central to the pitch to prospective students. It might go something like this: 'Sure, we may not be as selective as some other schools, but hop in my golf cart and allow me to drive you up a few ramps at our new parking garage.' Opinion: Florida's future shouldn't be at the expense of wildlife. New bill honors both. Just the sight of all that fresh asphalt in a sea of empty lined parking spaces would be enough to trigger an early-admission question. Especially if there's no 'reserved for compact car' spaces. That whole idea is a failure, which is why most of them are filled with Cadillac Escalades, Chevy Suburbans and Ford F-350 pickup trucks. But I digress. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Not many colleges and universities can say their student parking options include an 11-story garage with a capacity to park nearly a thousand cars. 'Taking higher learning to new heights!' would be how I'd market it. Maybe even change the school mascot from the sailfish to a condor, or some other bird noted for its high-altitude flight. Opinion: Hope Florida scandal puts obstacle in Casey DeSantis' pathway to governor Even the University of Florida, the flagship university in the state system, a university with about 60,000 students, can't compare to PBAU in the all-important tallest parking garage category. The tallest parking garage at UF is only seven stories. Disappointing. Mayor James doesn't get it. And he seems more worked up about the towering parking garage than the 25-story building next to it. 'It is a monstrosity. It is not appealing. We have been moving more toward a pedestrian-friendly urban corridor,' James said. I guess he's worried that tourists will come from far and wide, clogging the downtown streets just to get a look at the giant parking garage. It's right up there in size with the 12-floor Palm Beach County Jail on Gun Club Road, and much higher than the seven-level parking garage at Palm Beach International Airport. So, yes. It will probably attract some parking garage tourists, people who aren't fit enough to climb Mount Everest, but still thirst for a high-altitude fix. PBAU can take things to the next level, so to speak, by constructing a giant water flume down the side of the garage, one that empties students on ground level next to the academic buildings. This will double as both a recreational attraction and a way for students not to be late for class during those times when the elevators in the garage aren't working. The giant parking garage will also keep PBAU in the public eye as Vanderbilt University partners with the city of West Palm Beach to build a downtown graduate campus for the Nashville, Tenn.-based university. The Vanderbilt campus is supposed to be a $300 million investment where students will study everything from business, to data science to artificial intelligence at an eye-catching campus that will feature a tourist-drawing arboretum. 'The tropical arboretum will showcase a diverse array of indigenous South Florida species,' Vanderbilt announced. 'Visitors might expect to see slash pines reaching for the sky, vibrant Cherokee Beans adding splashes of color and the iconic sabal palm standing proud. 'Other local flora like sea grape, gumbo limbo and buttonbush will further enhance the connection to the South Florida environment.' Without the 11-story parking garage 'standing proud' at PBAU, the small local private school would be hopelessly outgunned by Vanderbilt's gaudy arboretum. So, let's celebrate the future addition of a sun-blocking, 11-story 'monstrosity' on Dixie Highway where good parking spots will flourish. Frank Cerabino is a news columnist with The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA Today Network-Florida. He can be reached at fcerabino@ This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Where to park at Palm Beach Atlantic University? Stay tuned | Opinion
Yahoo
17-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘A city that basically screwed them': West Palm Beach leaders stunned by old, racist city plans
WEST PALM BEACH — No one in the City Hall meeting room, surely, was under any illusions about their city's segregated past, about the ways its historic Black neighborhoods had been forced for decades to subsist cut off and underserved. But a presentation at a city commission meeting this week brought the hazy bigotries of decades past into vivid focus for the gathered leaders. An overhead projector was displaying the yellowed paper of an old city document from 1923 on Monday, March 10. It was a West Palm Beach planning proposal, and it had a solution for what it called the 'problem' of providing for the 'negro population.' 'The question of providing for the future negro population of West Palm Beach is one of the important problems that needs to be solved,' the old master plan proposal stated. It was a premise with a racist solution: ensuring that the city's Black residents would confine themselves to certain sections of town — Pleasant City and the area around Tamarind Avenue, both north of downtown and west of Dixie Highway. Such segregation would have to be done indirectly. The plan warned that 'it is not possible legally to set aside such districts and restrict them to any race or color.' But it continued: '…such districts can be established and every facility provided to encourage the settlement therein of people for which they have been planned.' One benefit of pushing the Black population into that section of town, the plan noted, was that it would be partly separated from the rest of the city by existing railroad lines and future ones. 'The line of the railroad would thus definitely bound the district practically on all four sides,' it stated. It was a jarring presentation for Mayor Keith James and the city commissioners, offered up by an executive from the Quantum Foundation as historical context for new plans to revive the city's Coleman Park neighborhood. But it was hardly surprising. A century later, the effects of segregation efforts remain. Those neighborhoods are still the traditional heart of the city's Black community, and they remain largely cut off by the same railroad tracks and underdeveloped compared to the fast-growing neighborhoods to the east. 'Let this sink in, everyone,' James, the first Black mayor since the city moved to a strong-mayor system in 1991, told meeting attendees after the documents had been displayed. 'This was part of the city's master plan back in 1920,' he said. 'I don't want us to rush through this. This is intentional, institutional. So when people talk about the lack of progress in some of these communities, that was designed.' Indeed, there was more to the historic presentation. A slide showing yellowed city maps revealed the lack of paved streets and sewer systems in what had been designated the 'negro' neighborhood. A notation next to it made clear the city's intentions: 'Will not improve.' Raphael Clemente, executive director of a Quantum Foundation initiative called Palm Beach Venture Philanthropy, was leading the presentation, and he called attention to the notation. It meant, he said, that 'the city will not make investments for infrastructure improvements in these neighborhoods.' 'For the vast majority of that area, particularly north of Banyan (Boulevard), there was no street pavement, there was no water system and there was no sewer system,' he said, 'even though these were neighborhoods that were occupied, and quite densely occupied.' Six years after the planning proposal was submitted, city leaders in 1929 approved an ordinance to officially designate Pleasant City and adjoining neighborhoods as the "negro district," according to a city timeline. Clemente, who led the city's Downtown Development Authority for 12 years before moving to the Quantum Foundation, had a particular point in showing the century-old documents, which he said an acquaintance had unearthed in an historic archive. Clemente and the foundation are putting together a plan to reinvigorate the Coleman Park neighborhood, which sits squarely in the city's historic Black sector, north of Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard and east of the Florida East Coast Railway tracks. The plans are ambitious, from murals and public art to attracting a fresh food market. The foundation wants to ensure all bus stops in the neighborhood have benches and shade, start a tree-planting initiative and add buffering along the Brightline railyard. It wants the city to extend 17th Street to create a better connection between Douglass Avenue and Tamarind. It envisions a community land bank and a business incubation program supporting the neighborhood. Achieving all those things will require investment from the city government, he said, but it was needed to make up for decades of underinvestment and discrimination. 'What took 60 or 70 years to do I think we can significantly undo in a decade,' he said. 'This is an opportunity for meaningful change.' Commissioner Shalonda Warren, who is Black, said it was 'very stunning' to see the old city plans — not just for the chilling formality of their segregationist aims, but the way the effects still overshadow the city. 'My heart is pounding in my chest now today,' she said, 'just in retrospect of how deliberate the exclusion was and how there's still barriers that are being overcome today more than a century later.' James said residents in those neighborhoods today have every reason to distrust the city. 'This is a city that basically screwed them, for lack of a better word, for years,' he said. 'So why should they trust city government? So that's a hurdle that we have to overcome as city leaders, unfortunately, but it's understandable.' James noted with dismay that one of the authors of the proposed city plan had studied at Harvard University, where James received his bachelor's and law degrees. 'What he probably never anticipated,' he said, 'was that a 'Negro' would be mayor of this city.' Andrew Marra is a reporter at The Palm Beach Post. Reach him at amarra@ This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Old plans for segregated city remind West Palm leaders of racist past
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
West Palm mayor: City has 'proposed transportation system' that will address rapid growth
West Palm Beach Mayor Keith James used his sixth State of the City speech Thursday to call for unity and highlighted the growth that has rocketed the city forward in the years since the coronavirus pandemic. "I'm proud to report that our city, your city, is stronger, healthier and more prosperous than ever before," James told a packed ballroom at the Palm Beach County Convention Center. That prosperity and growth has brought more people into West Palm Beach's downtown, either as residents or because of work. The resulting traffic backups have frustrated some residents, who have taken to social media to complain about a reduced quality of life. Some have either emailed or called James to express their frustration. James addressed those complaints Thursday. "I'm happy to share that we will be advertising a proposed permanent transportation system, one that will significantly expand access to transportation and mobility to over 95,000 people across our city," he said. "That's a big deal." The mayor, re-elected without qualified opposition to a final four-year term in 2023, did not provide more details about what that transportation system will look like. He did note that the city is expanding its bicycle infrastructure and has been leaning on its RideWPB mobility program to help seniors get to local destinations. "As our population grows, we need to assure that we make our city more connected, exploring ways to move people and not just cars," he said. "See, I know that at times traffic congestion gets bad." In addition to a new transportation system, James told the audience of another development — the Cleveland Clinic's plans to expand its operations in West Palm Beach with a new hospital, the first new hospital in the downtown area in more than a century, the mayor said. "A broad range of specialties will be provided in the new hospital with the flexibility to adapt and add specialty care as the needs of the Palm Beach community evolve," Dr. Conor P. Delaney, president of the Cleveland Clinic's Florida Market, said in a December news release. "Priority specialties will include heart, vascular and thoracic care, digestive disease care, neurological care and cancer care." WEST PALM NEWS: Why did city pick a firm whose CEO is under fraud indictment to rebuild Currie Park? The Cleveland Clinic's decision to expand in West Palm Beach is yet one more sign of the city's growth and prosperity, James said, pointing to a list of others that included: WEST PALM NEWS: Mayor says still-shuttered Sunset Lounge good to go this summer The Cox Science Center's $115 million expansion. $30 million in new city infrastructure projects. Vanderbilt University's plans to build a campus and "innovation hub" in West Palm Beach. The Boys and Girls Club's plan for a $13 million facility in Dreher Park. Continued reduction in overall and violent crime in the city. James said the coronavirus pandemic, which shuttered businesses for months, forced cities to adapt. 'The challenges of the last five years have taught us that the old ways of doing things will no longer cut it,' the mayor said. Communities must remain united and focused on challenges in order to tackle them, he said. "Together, we create safer neighborhoods," James said. "Together, we connect every corner of our city. Together, we fortify the strong foundation. Together, we offer a future of boundless possibilities. This is our time." Sign up for our Post on West Palm Beach weekly newsletter, delivered every Thursday! Wayne Washington is a journalist covering West Palm Beach, Riviera Beach and race relations for The Palm Beach Post. You can reach him at wwashington@ Help support our work; subscribe today. This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: West Palm mayor addresses transportation needs in State of the City
