Bobwhite-Manatee Transcript

Dwight Fisher

10.10.2024

UWF GIS4043/L

Project Background

• The Power Utility company Florida Power and Light (FPL) has decided to connect an electric power generation station in Manatee county Florida, to a substation south of it in Sarasota County. However, many variables must be addressed when deciding what route this transmission line will take.
• Above ground arial transmission lines are very expensive to construct as is, so we want to minimize the costs of disrupting the local community and environment when choosing suitable path.
• We will be addressing four main issues that this project faces before a shovel strikes ground.

• Homes - Local homes in the community between the two power stations.
• Schools - Local schools in the community that may fall within a select path.
• Environment - Protected wetlands and water ways are everywhere in Florida
• Cost - The longer the route, the higher the costs.

Project Background

The First image that we will look at is the model that has been created to detail the process by which we will follow along to completion. As we identify the problem statement, we can then identify the four criteria. (listed above)

You'll Notice that our problem statement is as follows:

The most efficient, cost effective, and least intrusive route for the new

Transmission Line that runs from FPL Manatee Energy Center in Parrish to The Proposed Bobwhite Substation.

Now that we have identified our problem statement and decided our criteria, lets take a look at the first one.

The first criteria to analyze is whether or not there are any Homes within the corridor or buffer 400 foot buffer. So first we figure out where our corridor and buffer are will be and what areas of land it will cover, change the transparency just a bit so we can see the underlying imagery, and start placing points from our two created point files on each home we can find.

Cartographic Model

Project Background

• Those homes are represented in the red circles within the yellow area (the buffer) and the orange dots within the green area (the corridor). After the homes are identified and labeled, we make sure that our drawing order is set so that the symbology for the homes is clearly seen. We then establish that our study area is clearly displayed and doesn't subtract from the important data.
• Lastly, a neutral tone base-map below all other layers helps give the viewer some sense orientation that this is a smaller part of a greater area. Our table, legend, scale, and North Arrow are all added.

Project Background

• Homes

As you can see from the map above, There are many homes within the proposed route that will be impacted if a transmission line were built. Many times, these home owners don't look favorably on a large Power transmission line right outside their back door. So working with the community is extremely important! For this step I created a map and labeled it "Homes". Within this map I added multiple feature classes and structured them, styled them, and arranged them according so my needs. My first tool that I used in this map was the (BUFFER) tool, and ran the program to create a 400 Foot Buffer around the Preferred Corridor Polygon. I then created a new (POINT) feature class and labeled it Homes within Corridor and a second Point shapefile named Homes within 400' Buffer.

I then created points within the buffer at each location that looked like there was a home on the imagery Raster Datasets, which are Arial Imagery datasets from the time this project actually took place back around 2010.

Analysis / Results

• I then created points within the buffer at each location that looked like there was a home on the imagery Raster Datasets, which are Arial Imagery datasets from the time this project actually took place back around 2010.
• After selecting my symbology for both new layers, I created a new table from the attribute tables that would serve as the start of my new table that showed homes and Parcels that would be impacted by the new project.
• Lastly I used the Analysis Overlay tool (INTERSECT) to determine how many parcel polygons were within the boundaries of the buffer.
• After compiling this data to a new standalone table I began creating my layout. This process went relatively quickly as I now had all the data required to fill it out and move on to Schools.
• What about projections?
• We cant forget those! When working with multiple sets of data such as we are here, we have to remember to work within one projected coordinate system. "Not all data is equal you know!" Below is the "properties" pane for the map that the working data files were projected to before creating our map.

Analysis / Results

• Schools
• After creating a new map, I imported much of the same base layer data from the Homes map by copying the selected layers into it. This sped up the process a bit because I didn't need to projected any of the data to Albers Conical Equal Area again.
• I added a feature class from module 4 called Manatee County Schools in which I had previously geocoded the information for locations of all public schools in Manatee county. However for Sarasota County I took a bit of a different route. Because much of the transmission line was in Manatee county, I knew that there might be one or two schools within the vicinity of the corridor in Sarasota County, So I went searching for local Schools in the area and added them to the map myself for efficiency sake.
• As you can see, there aren't any local schools that would be impacted by this corridor thankfully. Much of working in this map was adjusting Symbology more than anything to make it easy for the viewer.
• Based on the layout, the conclusion is that there are no schools that would be affected by the proposed transmission line.

Analysis / Results

• Environment
• In the same ways that we tackled the first two criteria, we will do the same thing here, except we want to answer two important questions.

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• How many acres of sensitive land are in conflict with the corridor.
• How many different bodies of wetlands would be in conflict with the preferred route.
• The table below will show us those answers.

As we see in the above table, there is a significant portion of the corridor that will affect the surrounding wetlands. Equally important, are the state protected lands. More specifically Conservation areas such as

The Lake Manatee Lower Watershed

The Lake Manatee State Park

Heritage Ranch Conservation Easement

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Analysis / Results

• Total Length of Transmission Line
• As we come the our last map, we will take a look at what the total length of transmission line will be as it travels through both counties.
• Although there are several ways to measure the length of the Transmission line corridor, I chose to draw a line segment and enjoyed taking the time lining it up with the center of the corridor. I ultimately came to the conclusion that the total length of this proposed transmission line would be 25 miles long.

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Cost