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DCA questions county's 'intent'
State wants
mayor to clarify details of proposed building moratorium
BY TRAVIS JAMES TRITTEN
keysnews.com
Monroe County
and the state Department of Community Affairs have different ideas of
how threatened native forests should be protected in the Florida Keys,
despite a major conservation agreement last week.
DCA Secretary
Colleen Castille said Tuesday that the agency does not approve of
subsequent county plans to use its own conservation maps -- maps that
may omit many 2- and 3-acre parcels -- to designate where development
will be prohibited under a planned moratorium.
County Mayor
Murray Nelson has said that only areas designated by the county's maps
will be covered by the one-year ban on development agreed to during a
Jan. 6 commission meeting.
"I clearly
understood that the proposed moratorium would apply countywide to all
areas containing 2 or more acres of native upland vegetated habitat,"
Castille wrote Tuesday in a letter to Nelson.
The
disagreement comes just two weeks before the county goes before Gov. Jeb
Bush and the Florida Cabinet for a yearly review of progress toward
resolving land-use issues. The county commission agreed to the
moratorium, a measure it opposed over the summer, to avoid state
penalties that could come from a bad review.
There was no
discussion of using county maps during last week's negotiations, said
Castille, who will make a recommendation to the governor and Cabinet.
Instead, county staff agreed to use data from a state natural lands
inventory and the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to
choose what land will be protected, she said.
Following last
week's meeting, Castille withdrew a notice of violation in a "spirit of
cooperation," she notes in her letter. "I am now asking that we properly
clarify the intent of the Board of County Commissioners ..."
The DCA notice
cited about eight violations, claiming the county's current growth
regulations do not go far enough in preventing developers from building
in the natural areas.
Tim McGarry,
director of county Growth Management, said the county did not agree last
week to protect all forest land within the county.
"Basically,
what was committed to was looking at a moratorium on any upland area of
2-acres within the conservation areas," McGarry said. "It includes all
the significant uplands area."
Last week,
Nelson said unequivocally that the county agreed to protect the
conservation areas shown in the county maps, but said staff had a handle
on protecting the smaller parcels.
Castille also
asked Tuesday that the language describing land protected by moratorium,
which is expected to be approved by commissioners Jan. 21, be changed
from "upland vegetated land" to "tropical hardwood hammock and
pinelands."
For months,
the new DCA secretary has used a carrot-and-stick approach to press the
county into protecting the Keys environment, and it appeared there was a
stick included in the letter Tuesday.
A county
request that its yearly allotment of home-building permits be restored
by the state is still pending, Castille wrote.
Building
allotments were reduced by the state several years ago because the
county failed to make progress on environmental initiatives. The
reinstatement of the permits could be a windfall and mean about 103 more
homes could be built in the county each year.
However, the
governor and Cabinet could impose an additional 20-percent reduction if
it is determined that the county has again failed to make substantial
progress.
ttritten@keysnews.com |
