Collier County’s road infrastructure has encountered difficulty keeping pace with the quickly growing population flocking to Southwest Florida for a piece of paradise.   By design, substantial lag time exists between when a traffic improvement need is initially identified and when a road project is completed. That’s because in between are design phases, public hearings, government meetings, planning checklists, engineering challenges, right-of-way acquisition, project bid letting and the actual construction time.    A case in point is the project to extend Vanderbilt Beach Road another 7 miles east into Golden Gate Estates. Although actual construction on the first phase began two years ago and is forecast for completion next spring, discussion about the project began at least 15 years ago.    But the Vanderbilt Beach Road extension was more than a topic of discussion, said Collier County Commissioner Bill McDaniel, whose district east of Collier Boulevard includes the project. “It was triggered by the GMP. We have a growth management plan that relegates us to do certain things infrastructure-wise in order to support the population that we have. The GMP tells us when we put roads and bridges and stormwater and so forth in. It was triggered by the GMP in 2006.”   At that time, the local road project was planned to extend only to Wilson Boulevard in Golden Gate Estates. The first phase now will extend the local east-west route farther to 16 Street NE. Subsequent phases are expected to continue the extension to Everglades Boulevard and eventually Big Cypress Parkway, a future north-south route connecting proposed villages and the eventual Town of Big Cypress between the Estates and Ave Maria.   “The leadership at the time — and that was at the beginning of what they designated as the Great Recession — they decided to not extend Vanderbilt because they had just spent extra money in expanding Immokalee Road, so they were able to forestall the construction of Vanderbilt’s extension because they had just expanded Immokalee Road to six lanes from four,” McDaniel said. “And the budgetary cuts that were imminent because of the Great Recession didn’t afford them the capacity to do the road construction that was triggered in 2006 for the people who had arrived by 2006. It didn’t start construction until I stepped on the leadership and forced them to build that dang road. That’s just one of many infrastructure needs that are requisite for our community that we’re behind on.”    Unfortunately, even the best of municipal planners could not have been prepared for the tremendous growth experienced in Collier County during the past 15 years. But McDaniel argued that priorities were misaligned then.   “If the system had been established to budget the money and the priority to support the critical life-sustaining infrastructure needs of the population, we would have been better able to adapt to the unexpected growth that we experienced,” he said. “But the priorities...