Plans to turn eastern Port St. Lucie into a profitable tourist destination are not new topics of conversation among its residents.
The 1.65-mile Village Green Drive corridor that bridges Walton & One to local neighborhoods, however, will have to contend with newer amenities despite few, if any, design changes to a potential improvement plan in development since 2021.
Approximately 65 visitors – many of them elderly residents of nearby communities, including the Spanish Lakes Golf Village – took these plans to task at a Nov. 20 presentation at Walton & One, the first meeting to discuss the plans since June 2021.
Around 20 developers from Fort Pierce-based design firm Culpepper & Terpening, Inc. and city staff members presented the latest steps forward on improving Village Green Drive in the Ruby Room of the MIDFLORIDA Credit Union Event Center.
Roberto Cabrera, a project engineer with Culpepper & Terpening, estimated that the Village Green Revitalization planning phase has reached around “30 percent” completion.
Port St. Lucie would apply for an unspecified amount of federal grant funding to move the project forward, Cabrera added. He specified that planning meetings to discuss Village Green Drive would continue across “three, potentially four” more meetings until “December 2026.”
Improvements to Village Green Drive separate the road into three segments: light industrial businesses between U.S. 1 and Southeast Industrial Boulevard; trails near the Hogpen Slough between Industrial and Southeast Walton Road; and the recreational corridor from Walton to Southeast Tiffany Avenue.
These same components, mostly left unchanged, now coexist with more potential boons, including the $80 million, 6,000-seat soccer stadium to be built at Walton & One by early 2027.
The Village Green Revitalization project remains separate from the soccer stadium’s construction despite its close vicinity, said Cabrera and city Project Manager Thomas Salvador, who co-presented. The stadium will be built under the supervision of the Ebenezer Group, a shell corporation formed by Argentine investors in 2023.
The prospect of the new stadium still rankled attendees fretting over possible traffic congestion. “During construction, all access will be maintained and traffic will be slower,” Salvador said. He added that new roads along Village Green would facilitate more robust pedestrian and non-motor vehicle access.
Once such sector of improved non-motor routing would be over the Hogpen Slough, a 21-acre tributary connected to the St. Lucie River. Planners first proposed a boardwalk throughout Hogpen Slough in June 2022.
The boardwalk continues to promise a pedestrian-friendly district to be built alongside $4.3 million in improvements to the Slough’s outflow system from now until 2028, city records show.
Few, if any, studies on the water content of Hogpen Slough exist since the Florida Atlantic University Harbor Branch Oceanographic Campus last conducted theirs in 2018, city records show.
New studies from Captec Engineering, Inc. of Stuart, will emerge as Port St. Lucie determines how best to affect cleanup in the Slough, according to Culpepper & Terpening senior vice president Stefan Mattes.
Culpepper and Terpening sub-contracted Captec to develop a “master drainage plan” and acquire permitting for the city to make repairs by “mid-late January,” Mattes said. “They’re going to work with us to determine how to make sure that we get permits for the improvements we’re doing.”
One of the more vocal attendees was business owner Stix Nickson. Nickson (born Gregorios Vassilios Nikolaidis), 75, has owned and operated the Drummersonly musical instrument store, 1532 SE Village Green Drive, since 2008.
The bulk of Nickson’s grievances centered around new bioswale medians that would incorporate planting more trees throughout the first segment of Village Green Drive. “I appreciate the beautification (but) I run a business there,” Nickson said to the presenters. “I want to know what the concept is when you’re designing this. How are you going to get visibility for the businesses that are on there already?”
Nickson, a longtime musical instructor, mostly conducts sales and lessons online throughout Port St. Lucie and a newly acquired branch in Miami. “It’s a very minute part of where I have to market,” he said of his business, which mainly caters to percussionists.
Nickson moved to Port St. Lucie in 1989 during the mayorship of Robert L. Minsky, who endorsed development in the western sector that would later become Tradition.
“I’m looking at the Village Green corridor virtually the same way,” Nickson said. “Growth is inevitable; when I moved here, it was nothing but NIMBYs – ‘Not-In-My-Back-Yards’. That’s not going to happen because progress means growth.”
Beata Hunton, 71, shared her disappointment with her home near the corridor being part of a “disadvantaged area” designated by the Justice40 federal infrastructure initiative in past years, she said. “I never felt disadvantaged here; our traffic patterns are fine, we are a very safe neighborhood.”
The Justice40 initiative formed under the Biden administration in 2022 to designate roadways in need of rehabilitation and more robust pedestrian access. It was rescinded via executive order March 1, federal records show.
“You don’t see much dilapidation; it’s all well taken care of,” Hunton said of Village Green near Spanish Lakes.
Other plans to improve Village Green and its environs going back to 2001 bothered Hunton, as well, from high-rise apartments to more retail buildout. “We already have stores all over U.S. 1 and adjacent (lots),” she said. “A business goes in for a year and they can’t make rent.”
The city did not respond to additional requests for comment by press time.