The road Broward didn’t want will be bigger than ever | Steve Bousquet

When Broward County’s Sawgrass Expressway opened in 1986, it was widely ridiculed as a “road to nowhere” and a costly excuse to pave open space to intensify urban growth out to the Everglades. You can see the result.

For years, the toll road struggled to make money. But now, with hardly any public attention, the six-lane Sawgrass is being widened to 10 lanes.

Starting at its south end, where I-75 and I-595 converge, and moving north to Commercial Boulevard, the state will add two lanes in each direction to make room for a lot more cars and trucks.

The rest of the 22-mile road, north to I-95 in Deerfield Beach, will also be widened in coming years. The road less traveled also will get stronger noise walls and interchange improvements, according to the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT).

Back in the beginning, it was to have been called the University Expressway, then the Deerfield-Sawgrass Expressway, and finally the Sawgrass.

The project made headlines for years for all the wrong reasons, from dredging problems to cost overruns to cronyism and corruption.

That spawned a lengthy grand jury investigation that ended with scathing criticism, but no indictments.

In the middle of it all was Gerry Thompson, a happy-go-lucky county commissioner from Wilton Manors. The road’s No. 1 champion, he headed the expressway authority that built the Sawgrass, handing out contracts to friends along the way.

The project took its toll on Thompson, no pun intended. The grand jury probe dragged on for more than two years, longer than to build the highway itself, and he was punished for an ethics violation, but he still easily won re-election. The contractor responsible for many construction problems such as over-dredging of canals was Vito’s Trucking and Excavating Co., a target of multiple organized crime investigations (you can’t make this stuff up).

The Sawgrass balance sheet was grim in those early years — even though tolls were higher than on Florida’s Turnpike. The county found a way to unload the debt by transferring the road to the state, which made it part of the Turnpike system. That deal was the result of much political fighting in the Legislature in Tallahassee and unburdened the county of having to pledge part of its gas-tax revenue to compensate for the Sawgrass Expressway’s red ink.

Imagine Broward County, with its traffic problems, trying to get rid of a road. It actually happened. Then Hurricane Andrew struck south Miami-Dade in 1992 and west Broward’s population spiked. So did traffic on the Sawgrass.

Now that the Sawgrass is clogged with cars and making money, the county’s loss is the state’s gain.

By the time motorists got around to discovering it, the Sawgrass more than lived up to its promise as a magnet for development. What came to be known as the “Sawgrass corridor” spurred development of communities such as Bonaventure, Jacaranda and Weston. The toll road’s presence surely helped Sawgrass Mills and Amerant Bank Arena, the Florida Panthers’ hockey home.

When FDOT held an online hearing in September on the widening project, nobody spoke for or against it. Sunrise Mayor Mike Ryan said his city strongly favors adding the lanes.

“With the agreement of the state to finally construct a full interchange at Amerant Bank Arena and Sawgrass Mills, the city has been fully supportive of the efforts to improve and expand this infrastructure critical to quality of life for our residents, visitors, workforce and businesses,” Ryan said.

That’s not all. Decades too late, the state will finally complete a so-called missing link, and a three-mile stretch of highway will link I-95 to the Sawgrass in Deerfield Beach along S.W. 10th Street, as part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Moving Florida Forward initiative.

The connector is still years away, but it’s finally coming. For 37 years, drivers have been forced to endure turns and traffic lights because thousands of politically influential retirees in a nearby Century Village retirement community didn’t want so much traffic whizzing so close to their jalousie windows.

From a “road to nowhere” to 10 lanes — if that’s not an apt metaphor for the story of Broward growth, I don’t know what is.

“Gerry Thompson wasn’t given enough credit for his foresight,” said Jack Moss, a former Broward commissioner who also served on the expressway board as an appointee of former Gov. Bob Martinez. “He was the prime motivator — the last of the old-school politicians.”

Thompson didn’t live to see a Sawgrass Expressway that was 10 lanes wide, but he’s one who wouldn’t have been surprised.

Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. Contact him at sbousquet@sunsentinel.com or (850) 567-2240 and follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @stevebousquet.