It's almost impressive, how fast the Monroe County Commission can
fulfill expectations and start reneging on its agreement with the
state of Florida to protect habitat.
During the long month of August, when the governor and Cabinet
were holding the county's feet to the fire before approving a
much-heralded agreement, most of the attention was on reaching a
deal with the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority on how to build sewers
in unincorporated areas.
But part of the holdup also concerned the Tier System, the
county's new growth management method, which classifies land and
makes it more difficult to build in some areas than others.
The agreement at issue between the county and state will free up
affordable housing permits, provide for county funding for
wastewater and lead the state to spend almost $100 million to buy
natural lands for preservation.
In order to win the governor and Cabinet's approval, the county
agreed that parcels of land as small as 1 acre would be protected,
and that U.S. 1 was the only road that would be considered a divider
between parcels.
Now, less than a month later, the commission is considering a
review of the parcel size and whether U.S. 1 should be the only
divider. A quick phone call to state officials determined that this
was not a good idea — so the commission decided to wait until after
its next Cabinet appearance to really go into revisions.
All this despite the fact that County Commissioner Murray Nelson
won great praise from Cabinet members at the final meeting, and the
county even got some grudging respect from environmentalists for
protecting smaller parcels and making U.S. 1 the only divider.
A lot of this goes back to the dreaded Carrying Capacity Study, a
$6 million state-federal undertaking that was supposed to tell us
how much more development the Keys could take. Much of the study —
and its award-winning but virtually useless computer model — now
appears to be a terrible waste of time and money.
But the one part of the study deemed legitimate by a review panel
from the National Academy of Sciences found that the Keys have
already lost too much natural area. So figuring out how to protect
what's left is an important subject.
Besides that, there's the utter foolishness of this move. Surely
the county commissioners, who have spent a lot of time in
Tallahassee recently, don't think the Cabinet members and their
staffers are stupid.
They expect exactly this kind of backsliding from the Keys,
although this particular case may have set a new land-speed record.
No doubt the governor and Cabinet will be well-briefed before the
Oct. 25 meeting, when they are scheduled to hear an annual review of
the county's progress on its work plan to protect habitat and build
wastewater treatment systems.
We hope the commission reconsiders its intent to reconsider and
goes forward with protecting habitat, giving the governor and
Cabinet full faith in its intent to hold to its side of the hard-won
agreement.
