No-fly zone

REVIEW SUMMARY
Entrepreneur. Pamela Templeton
Company. Fort Myers Toyota
Key. Keep an eye on local government because politicians and bureaucrats could put you out of business if you're not watching them closely.

Pamela Templeton has never been afraid to speak up.

When she was a 21-year-old entrepreneur in Northern Virginia, Templeton stared down machinist-union thugs who wanted her out of the airplane-cleaning business at Washington D.C. airports.

So when she found out that local transportation officials were proposing to build an elevated roadway in front of her family's Toyota dealership in Fort Myers, she didn't hesitate to take government officials to task despite the fact that it was part of a monster road-building project backed by powerful special interests.

The ordeal Templeton faced to halt the road project illustrates the challenges that business owners have in keeping tabs on local government. They're so busy managing their business and often involved in so many charitable endeavors that they don't have time or resources to monitor potential mischief by local politicians and bureaucrats.

Templeton's vigilance paid off when the project was removed from the county's long-range transportation plan in October, but at the cost of hours away from her business and charitable events that she was devoted to. “I really resent having to watch my back,” Templeton says.

Templeton wasn't worried about any backlash for halting such a massive project, which stretched from Charlotte County through Cape Coral and into Fort Myers at a cost of nearly $1 billion. “What are they going to do, take away my birthday?” she snaps.

Besides lobbying receptive politicians in Fort Myers and Cape Coral, Templeton galvanized businesses along the Colonial Boulevard corridor and alerted business owners on the connecting Veterans Parkway across the river in Cape Coral. “I wasn't speaking just for myself,” she says.

Stopping a freight train

Will Prather, owner of the Broadway Palm Dinner Theater on Colonial Boulevard, first alerted Templeton about the proposed flyover in front of her dealership in late 2009. “He came to me, pale. You have to see what they're doing,” she recalls him telling her.

Despite owning about 25 acres around the intersection of Colonial and Fowler, Templeton says she was never notified of plans to build the overpass or alerted to a federally mandated meeting with transportation officials in December 2009. “Our attorneys hadn't picked up on it,” she says.

“Do we even have a shot at stopping this freight train?” Templeton remembers asking herself.

Indeed, the overpass at her intersection was just one of eight that was proposed along Colonial Boulevard to speed traffic on its way. With growing congestion over time, transportation studies promised that elevated roadways would speed drivers down Colonial Boulevard in 10 minutes compared to an hour it would take without any improvement.

In the county's long-range transportation plan, the Colonial project was tied into road improvements on Veterans Parkway, which links the city of Cape Coral to Colonial across the Caloosahatchee River from Fort Myers. Further, Veterans looped around the west end of Cape Coral and the project included Burnt Store Road northwards into Charlotte County where it would connect with Interstate 75.

In all, the Burnt Store Road-Veterans Parkway-Colonial Boulevard project would have cost taxpayers nearly $1 billion, according to study estimates.

But the flyovers would have devastating effects on the businesses at these important interchanges. To make matters worse, one proposal recommended tolling the roads to finance the project. That would force employees and customers to pay to visit businesses on Colonial and push others to use nearby non-tolled roads. “It would decimate this business corridor,” Templeton explains.

Meanwhile, Fort Myers Councilman Tom Leonardo had also been sounding the alarm because Colonial Boulevard is in his ward. “Eight of the city's top 10 commercial taxpayers are on the Colonial expressway,” Leonardo says. “We saved the City of Fort Myers from financial collapse.”

Leonardo says Templeton immediately grasped the impact of the overpass on her dealership. “She had just spent $5 million expanding her business,” he says. But both Leonardo and Templeton say it was more than just their self-interest at stake. “It wasn't about Ward 6, it was about our region.”

Templeton says she was shocked to discover that Lee County had already spent millions of dollars on traffic studies when many of the affected businesses were opposed. “What else is happening over there that we don't know about?” she wonders.

(Officials with the Lee County Department of Transportation couldn't be reached for this story.)

Tackling government

Once she became engaged, Templeton organized meetings of dozens of business owners, contacted news organizations and lobbied county commissioners to stop the project. “We had meetings at the truck center,” she says, enough room for the representatives from about 80 businesses who showed up.

As it turns out, the Colonial expansion part of the project had been in the county's long-range transportation plan in some form since 1988, says Don Scott, director of the Lee County Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO). MPOs are regional agencies made up of elected officials from different municipalities who determine which projects should receive state and federal road funds.

But the road project had been dormant until the Lee County Department of Transportation commissioned studies on the feasibility of the project in recent years. So Templeton and others lobbied the county commissioners to halt the studies, which they agreed to do in June while the MPO decided whether the project should remain in its 2035 plan. “By June we had stirred up enough controversy that the commissioners voted to stop the meter,” she says.

Despite the tough business conditions, Templeton had to delegate more responsibility at the Toyota dealership, where she's been the owner and partner as well as vice president and treasurer since 1991. For example, she handed the advertising responsibilities to an employee, a task she had long overseen.

Her community calendar suffered too. Templeton missed Rotary Club meetings and had to curtail some of her activities as a board member of the Southwest Florida Symphony. “I hardly made any concerts last year,” she says. “My husband's a saint,” she adds.

Instead of spending all her time running her business or helping charitable organizations, Templeton became a political activist. “What I've been through is very difficult,” she concedes. “Once you lift the lid up, you can't put it back down.”

Using data she commissioned separately, Templeton persuaded commissioners and city politicians that the road-building studies had underestimated the impact of the project on businesses on the Colonial corridor. As for the increased traffic, she says it would run more smoothly with simple fixes. “Signal timing is a good start and they don't have that down,” she says.

Meanwhile, Templeton alerted business owners on Veterans Parkway at the intersection of Santa Barbara Boulevard in Cape Coral that an overpass was in the works there too. “Don't ever think you can't speak out to get things done,” she told them. “They minimized the impact to those surrounding the project.”

In October, the MPO held a vote to withdraw the project from the long-range transportation plan and it passed 8-6, backed by a coalition of representatives from the cities of Fort Myers and Cape Coral. Without the MPO's blessing, the project's lifeblood of state and federal funding wouldn't be available.

While the project might reappear one day, Templeton says it's unlikely to because of the support she's garnered. “That put a hurtin' on it,” she says.

And she'll be watching.