The City of Brooksville will not lower the speed limit on North Avenue after residents of the area rejected the idea.
In November, the Brooksville City Council instructed City Community Development Director David Hainley to notify residents in the North Avenue area that the city was contemplating lowering the posted speed limit in that area from 25 miles per hour to 15 miles per hour.
During their regular Dec. 4 meeting, City of Brooksville Community Development Director David Hainley told members of the Brooksville City Council that a poll had been conducted via phone call and email to tap residents’ opinions of the notion.
“We sent 166 letters out to the property owners (and) we got 40 responses back in time,” Hainley said.
Of those, 34 responded against lowering the speed limit, six favored lowering the speed limit and some of those requested the installation of speed humps in that area.
“One came in late and they did favor lowering the speed limit,” he said. “That’s about a 25 percent return (of the poll) and that’s a pretty fair survey number.”
Brooksville Mayor Blake Bell said he had also heard from opponents of the idea. “I think I heard from about 30 of those ‘Nos,’” he said. “So I know this was not a popular idea when we first brought it up.”
In response, Hainley told the panel that the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office had suggested that in lieu of lowering the speed limit, the city could install signs that flash the driver’s rate of speed compared to the actual speed limit.
“Those would cost about $6,000 for two of them in the box and so you would double that to get them in the ground because it has
to have a foundation (and other foundational items to hold up the structure), and they’d be solar powered so we wouldn’t have to put them anywhere where we have to (draw) power,” Hainley said. “So that would be an option in the future if you want to look at that, too.”
For now, though, Council member Thomas Bronson said that any motion connected to reducing the speed limit was out of the question. “The people have spoken,” Bronson said in reference to the survey response. “Motion denied.”
Council member Casey Thieryung seconded Bronson’s motion to deny.
The motion passed by a vote of 5-0.
