The recent revelations about the proposed Flagler Drive waterfront park should trouble every West Palm Beach resident. Not because a waterfront park is a bad idea, but because of how this plan came to be.
For months, Mayor Keith James worked behind closed doors with the city’s largest developer to reshape our most iconic public roadway and pressure a beloved local business into selling. No public hearings. No traffic analysis. No community input. Residents learned about it from a newspaper report, not from their own government.
Let’s be clear about what was proposed: eliminating Flagler Drive from Banyan Boulevard to Fern Street and rerouting all that traffic onto Narcissus Avenue, a narrow corridor already strained during season and special events. Any traffic engineer will tell you that removing a major roadway from a downtown network without a rigorous analysis of the impacts on surrounding streets isn’t planning. It’s guessing. And the people who live, work, and drive in this city would bear the consequences.
City officials keep making backdoor deals. It’s a broken process.
Then there’s the treatment of E.R. Bradley’s. The Coniglio family, which has operated this landmark for decades, reported being pressured for months to sell, with the mayor himself acknowledging he considered using eminent domain. That’s not collaboration. That’s coercion.
The mayor now says he’s pausing the project for “listening sessions.” But a pause is not accountability. The fundamental problem remains: a plan of this magnitude was developed in private between elected officials and a single developer before the public had any seat at the table.
This isn’t an isolated incident. It echoes the same pattern we saw with the Elizabetta deal and now with the Salvation Army lease buyout on Rosemary Avenue, where the NAACP demanded a halt because the city staff moved forward without community notification. When elected leaders repeatedly make major decisions about public assets behind closed doors, the issue isn’t one bad project. It’s a broken process.
I’ve spent almost eight years in county government, where transparency isn’t optional. When consequential decisions come before us, the public is engaged early, not after deals are already in motion. That’s how you build trust.
Something as significant as rerouting Flagler Drive should be put before the voters in a referendum. West Palm Beach has done this before on major issues like height limits. The residents of this city, not developers, should decide what happens to their waterfront.
A great city deserves great public spaces. But it also deserves a government that respects its residents enough to ask them first.
Gregg K. Weiss represents District 2 on the Palm Beach County Commission and is a candidate for mayor of West Palm Beach in 2027.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: West Palm Beach deserves better than backroom ‘park’ deal | Opinion
Reporting by Gregg K. Weiss, Opinion Contributor / Palm Beach Post
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