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Land
buying money must be local first, then state will follow
Two committees of the
Florida House of Representatives -- Natural Resources and Local
Government -- recently held two days of field hearings in the Florida
Keys. This is a remarkable, unprecedented and positive event.
Tallahassee is a long
way from the Keys, but the state capital plays a large role in our
affairs because of the Keys' status as an Area of Critical State
Concern, a status invoked in the 1970s when it became clear that local
government was inclined to open the floodgates to development in an area
with limited infrastructure and important natural resources.
Through the years, the
county and municipal governments of the Keys have often chafed at the
harness of critical concern designation and frequently there has been
talk about how the Keys can once again control their own destiny and
have this embarrassing ward-of-the-state label lifted.
After taking a tour of
the Keys and hearing from a range of local viewpoints, it is clear that
it is possible critical concern could be lifted, and that there is help
we can hope for from Tallahassee. It is also clear that even under
critical concern, some of our problems are up to us to solve.
Lifting Critical
Concern -- and more importantly, protecting the Florida Keys environment
and making this a community where we want to live -- is about more than
land acquisition.
The state can offer us
significant help in buying land for environmental protection, as it has
done throughout the years, spending tens of millions on North Key Largo,
Curry Hammock and other important areas. During the recent visit, state
officials clearly said they would do all they could to use the
Conservation and Recreational Lands program to buy natural areas.
State officials even
said they could use state money to purchase land the county has already
bought for preservation, thus giving the county money to use for other
purposes, such as affordable housing and water quality improvements. And
the state is willing to send help for the time-consuming and staff
intensive job of actually acquiring the land, another welcome sign of
cross-government cooperation.
Sending significant
amounts of money and help in the next legislative session would be a
good way to make this relationship stronger.
But there were other
messages sent by state lawmakers and officials during the field hearings
and we hope the local governments were listening.
Some of our challenges
are up to us to fix, and we have to ensure that the source of our
booming economy -- tourism -- is paying its fair share of the associated
costs.
Monroe County has the
lowest unemployment rate in Florida, just 2 percent. We don't need more
development to create more jobs. We need more places for our work force
to live and to stop hemorrhaging people, the constant turnover that
makes our communities feel more like temporary postings than real
hometowns.
The state has so far
sent the Keys $17 million for water quality improvements. Yet outside of
the advances made in Key West, it's hard to see the ball moving forward
on that front. Stock Island is in open rebellion and the county
commission does not have a coherent plan or a happy partner in
wastewater projects. We must prove we can use the money responsibly
before we can expect the state to hand over more of its scarce funds.
There have been many
good ideas, and some promising signs of cooperation between the business
community and environmentalists in the last year as the Florida Keys
Carrying Capacity endgame has played out.
One important point is
that the local funding sources -- to take care of environmental
protection, land acquisition and affordable housing -- should be
presented to voters as a package, a suite of solutions that will
distribute costs and provide enough money to make significant progress.
Commissioner Murray Nelson, in particular, has had an unsettling habit
of suddenly presenting a "solution" and demanding that others fall in
behind in support. Taking a series of piecemeal answers to the voters
repeatedly is a recipe for failure.
Cooperating, planning
and showing that the proposed solutions can pay for real answers to the
Keys problems is the only way to get ourselves truly back in local
control and provide the healthy future that the residents of the Keys
deserve.
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