The City of Kissimmee has extended a moratorium on special event requests while the Connect Kissimmee project is going on.
City Manager Mike Steigerwald presented the request from city staff at the March 4 meeting; commissioners voted unanimously to extend the moratorium on special event permits “as long as it’s needed,” though they would still allow for events by Kissimmee Main Street like Boo on Broadway.
Connect Kissimmee is a wide-ranging effort to improve pedestrian, bicycle and transit connectivity in the downtown area and reduce speeds and cutthrough traffic. Steigerwald said the construction project was set to start right after June, when the current moratorium is set to expire.
Steigerwald said the construction would be scheduled around those events, and said the project was “almost a two year project,” which meant the extended moratorium would go on that long. He added the previous moratorium had gone on for six months while city staff looked at “re-working the city code” and examining how street closures for private events were conducted.
“It didn’t make sense to change the code, change the process, allow people to apply for street closures, only to say ‘hey we cant do this, we got a construction project happening,’” he said.
Not a lot of event permits that will be affected—most of the events that occur are put on by the City or Main Street, such as various holiday events like Boo on Broadway or the Festival of Lights around Christmastime.
Steigerwald said the biggest event he could think of that the moratorium would pause was Three Sisters Speakeasy’s downtown street closures on Friday and Saturday nights for street party events.
“They’ll be primarily impacted,” he said. “We haven’t issued too many other permits—I think there was one other event between Darlington and Monument, but that’s the only two private events that would be impacted.”
Steigerwald said Connect Kissimmee would involve “significant improvements” to streetscapes, with the primary focus being improving pedestrian safety in the hectic, fast-driving climate of the big roads in the area. That will involve widening the streets and adding more pedestrianfriendly landscaping to help people cross the streets more easily. There will be roundabouts and raised table intersections to slow traffic down.
Steigerwald said the project was slated to start construction by September or October this year, with an eye toward being done by 2027. He said people would start seeing changes slowly over the next two years.
“Because it’s such a large expanse of roadways done for this project, different parts will be completed earlier than others,” he said.
