Naples Potpourri by Bill Barnett

I am so glad that this last City Council Election is finished and I hope the. candidates that were chosen will do a good job for our City.  I do know but don’t understand just how ugly this election was, especially after all the candidate forums were finished. Perhaps the most upsetting to me were some of the cards that were sent signaling out certain candidates and why you shouldn’t vote for them. The City of Naples has been and still is a NON-PARTISAN ELECTION CITY. Obviously, the Collier County Republican Executive Committee certainly knew this before they sent those degrading cards out to the public. I have always chosen my friends because we had something in common whether it was about kids and family, sports, politics, and just about anything. I never gave it much thought, you know if you like someone or not, or just don’t have an opinion about them one way or the other.

But when an organization singles out a group of candidates because their party affiliation is not the same as theirs and then berates them like they were evil people and makes accusations that were as false as could be about them, well, I don’t know about you but that’s where I draw the line. Those candidates mentioned on those cards are all good community people that ran for City Council because they felt they could make Naples a better city. They didn’t deserve to be chastised by a single-minded political group.

As we move into March, I can honestly say that I have never seen traffic as bad as it has been so far this season and I can’t imagine it will get any better and it certainly can’t get any worse. Yesterday I needed to go down to Wynn’s Market, and I know some shortcuts that never let me down. It was 3:30 in the afternoon and my shortcuts let me down, they weren’t shortcuts anymore, they had turned into traffic nightmares.

There were no traffic issues when I first moved to our city in 1973 and I would say it pretty much remained that way until the mid 80’s. When I was elected Mayor for the first time in 1996 and it seems from then on traffic became the subject every season and as Mayor the buck stopped with me. We took every measure we had at our disposal from synchronizing traffic lights, to buying the best equipment we could to control traffic. Each addition worked for a period of time.

I remember when we installed a huge screen in one of our city departments buildings and we could visually see and manually control the traffic lights when needed at intersections. It worked really well but it finally got to a time where they did no good at certain times because the traffic had nowhere to go no matter what color the lights were. We tried on Fifth Avenue South from 4pm to 6pm having a traffic officer manually direct traffic at the intersection on Eighth and Fifth during the Christmas Holidays and February and March. It eventually was the same as everywhere else; traffic was so backed up that it did absolutely no good to direct it.

Here we are thirty years later, I’m retired, and candidly we don’t venture out too much, if at all, during the season. I am still constantly asked when I’m grocery shopping in Publix and see people that I know “Bill, how about this traffic?” My answer remains the same these days that, unfortunately, with the growth in Collier County, and those that commute daily to Naples from points North I don’t see any magical solutions. I still love Naples as much as I did 53 years ago. Our shopping, restaurants, and all of the amenities that we have to offer still makes it a great place to live. As for traffic, plan to add an extra 10-20 minutes to your schedule and grin and bear it. I do:)

Be thankful you’re here especially with the weather going on in the rest of the country!

All the Best,
Bill Barnett, Former Mayor
239-777-7952
I do respond to e-mails at: mayornaples@gmail.com