The State Road 405 (S.R. 405) Causeway is the most direct connection between the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Launch Complex and the City of Titusville, which is home to most of Brevard County’s aerospace suppliers. It serves thousands of military and civilian personnel working at the Cape Canaveral Spaceport, and is also the only route to the KSC Visitor Complex.
The bridge’s integrity has been compromised and will need to be replaced in the near future due to the impact of natural disasters like Hurricane Irma and sea level rise. To this effect, the East Central Florida Regional Planning Council (ECFRPC) partnered with the North Brevard Economic Development Zone and other stakeholders to develop a valuation analysis of S.R. 405 in order to attract the appropriate investment for its replacement.
Luis Nieves-Ruiz, Economic Development Manager, and Matt Siebert, Planner I, from the ECFRC will join REMI for their guest webinar presentation, “The Bridge to Space: The Value of S.R. 405 to Florida’s Space Economy,” that will be held on Wednesday, April 29th from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. (ET). This discussion reviews their use of the REMI PI+ model to perform multiple economic impact simulation scenarios, including an economic valuation of the bridge, an estimation of the potential loss of new economic activity due to the bridge’s closure, an examination of the long-term effects of losing aerospace and tourism activity, and a comparison of the economic impact of using state or local funds to pay for the causeway.
During their webinar, Mr. Nieves-Ruiz and Mr. Siebert will explore how to incorporate aerospace company sales and visitor expenditures into modeling procedures to estimate the economic value of S.R. 405 to Brevard County’s economy, the methodological approaches used for their different analyses, and the project’s major findings.
