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Holding development line important to Florida Keys
By Alan Farago
Guest
Columnist
On the other
side of the 18 Mile Stretch, where the lifeline of the Florida Keys —
U.S. 1 — meets Card Sound Road, a new city is planned on several
thousand acres now mostly zoned for rock mining.
Much depends
on the public response to this ill-advised development on lands long
identified for purchase by government agencies.
Florida
City is now attempting to annex this slice of unincorporated Miami-Dade,
claiming to only want zoning for one unit in five acres. The owner has
already submitted plans to the state for much, much more: thousands of
homes and associated commercial space.
If Miami-Dade
county commissioners allow the annexation to proceed and later vote to
move the Urban Development Boundary, tract homes will sprout in rows
near the narrow ribbon of tarmac that Keys residents use to evacuate in
the case of hurricanes.
Property
owners and land speculators may feel like it is no one's business what
happens in their corner of the world, but the Florida Keys learned the
hard way that geography matters.
At the top of
the Keys, the land in question is within the "footprint" of the portion
of Everglades restoration that includes the C-111 Canal. That's the
first canal in Miami Dade, at the far end of the 18 Mile Stretch.
In rainy
season, to keep sugar fields and Miami-Dade urban dwellers dry, the
South Florida Water Management District opens C-111 and allows effluent
to pour from that canal into Barnes Sound where the heaving puke causes
massive die-offs of sea grass and marine life, flowing into Northeast
Florida Bay.
Everglades
plans include "spreading" this dirty water into wetlands to reverse some
of the environmental damage that has cost the Keys dearly. But if homes
are built in the area, raising water levels could be impossible and
carry enormous costs.
The result
will be what Miami-Dade allowed to occur in the 8.5 Square Mile Area
where property owners exacted a multi-decade delay on investments in
infrastructure needed to restore the eastern edge of the Everglades,
raising the cost to taxpayers by hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Florida
Keys live the price for allowing growth to supersede sound planning to
protect the economy and natural resources that businesses depend on.
There is no end to the contortions of common sense that money can buy.
The Keys have
their own recent example: how a suggested, phased-evacuation plan in the
event of a hurricane, instead of leave-as-you-will, would reduce drive
times out of the Keys—providing the rationale for lifting barriers to
more construction and development. In other words, citizens who spurn
government on its best days can be relied on to obediently wait until
government tells them it is their turn to evacuate when a hurricane is
bearing down.
Miami-based
Lennar Corporation, one of the nation's large homebuilders, plans to
generate hundreds of millions of dollars in sales once the current owner
converts the economic potential of this property through local county
zoning and permitting processes.
No doubt an
army of lobbyists will produce drawings, counter-studies, and promises
for how the tax revenue from this development will be used to offset
public costs of restoration: all will be well if just one more tract
housing development is allowed to pour from the saucer of the Everglades
into the cooling teapot of industry, profits, and tax base.
The Florida
Keys is not just the classic American story of local control, states and
federal rights struggling to accommodate land use, endangered species,
clean water, and ecosystems, it also suggests the consent of the
governed is marred by collective bi-polar disorder: government is
malevolent, government is necessary, government robs people of
liberties, government must protect the common good—back and forth the
arguments go like a tennis ball across the net in a game whose audience
is exhausted to death or to indifference—the disease of democracy.
Too frail to
participate in the constitutional convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin
offered dim support for our Constitution.
Franklin said
famously -- everything he said was famous -- "I believe farther that
this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years and can
only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the
People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being
incapable of any other."
The Urban
Environment League of Greater Miami is helping to organize the campaign
to Hold the Line on changes to the Urban Development Boundary by the
Miami-Dade county commission. It would be a good idea, if you value the
Florida Keys, to lend support to the campaign. Its website address is
www.udbline.com.
Alan Farago
is a special contributor to the opinion page of the Orlando Sentinel,
where he writes on the environment and politics. From 1988 to 1992, he
lived in Key West where he was involved in many environmental issues. As
director of Everglades Defense Council, Inc., he is involved in the Hold
The Line campaign in Miami-Dade county. He can be reached alanfarago@yahoo.com.
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