Chicken Little: THE PARKING DECK IS FALLING

 

This appeared on my phone text at 3:30 p.m. on Weds. 12/4:

Being confused I called my city hall source and was told this concerned a letter that Mayor Andy Betterton had sent the council from the engineering firm, LBYD Engineering. This is the firm from Huntsville that was hired in 2018 and compiled a report showing the work that needed to be done to the structure of the parking deck at Tennessee and Pine St. This letter had been sent from the chief engineer Ashley Cardin and stated that the deck was in such bad shape that it could pose a safety threat. The notice made it sound like this meeting was being called due to the parking deck falling to the ground or something.

Fortunately, that was not the case, and the meeting was kind of overblown. The sky wasn’t falling, and neither was the parking deck. This is the video recorded by David Carson on his Facebook page; Florence, Alabama Open Meeting Project, of the meeting:

You will notice that Jimmy Oliver latched onto the phrase from the LBDY engineering letter “life safety concern”. If Andy Betterton was playing the part of Chicken Little in this “nursery school drama” Jimmy Oliver sounded like Henny Penny from the fable sounding the alarm. QUICK, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! The parking deck is falling. It was a little dramatic. At first it seemed all the council were going along with the tale of the dangerous parking deck. And then Blake Edwards spoke. He asked the mayor if the engineer who wrote the letter had inspected the deck recently. Betterton said no, he had just made a phone call to Mr. Cardin asking for a letter on the assumption that no repairs had been done since the inspection. 

It seems Betterton is determined to see the deck demolished. You could tell some on the council knew they had been deceived but it was too late to back out. And the truth is the parking deck is in bad shape, in places. I recently walked the entire structure to see for myself. It does have cracked foundation supports and exposed rusted rebar but that is primarily confined to the top two floors that I saw. But I am not a structural engineer. I was just going by what was visible. Thank goodness, I didn’t get hit in the head with any falling chunks of concrete. I think.

The bottom line to this story is that neglect caused the parking deck at Tennessee St, and Pine to deteriorate and for some unknown reason the previous mayor and council and the current mayor and council chose to ignore the findings in the engineering report and let the deck rot before it’s time. The “original” parking deck at the corner of Tennessee St. and Pine will close at 5 p.m. on Friday 12/6/2024. Chicken Little, Henny Penny and the rest of the barnyard would do well to be more interested in taking care of the buildings we have now than trying to impress the king of tourism and other metropolitan areas. $95.75 million taxpayer dollars in debt is not chicken feed!

The Florence Detective