County should reject storm evacuation sham
The Monroe County
Commission is poised to embrace a new level of cynicism by adopting a
paper solution — a numerical sleight-of-hand that almost all acknowledge
to be a sham — to a problem with life or death consequences.
The Florida Department of
Community Affairs, through the Monroe County Hurricane Evacuation
Working Group, has directed the county and municipalities to amend their
comprehensive land-use plans to include phased hurricane evacuation
procedures already in use by local emergency managers.
The County Commission
will consider this directive at 5 p.m. today at the Key Largo Library.
According to DCA
officials, the model used by the state to predict how long a mandatory
evacuation of the Keys would take presumes that 45 percent of Keys
tourists will ignore early evacuation calls and remain on the islands,
thus clogging the Overseas Highway and making the residents' evacuation
process take more than 24 hours.
Exceeding that 24-hour
clearance time, however, poses a problem for future development. Since
1992, new residential construction in the Keys has been limited based on
a state requirement that evacuation not take more than 24 hours. Surpass
that limit and new building permits are supposed to come to a halt.
But, as proposed by DCA
officials, if the county were to merely write the phased evacuation
procedure into its land-use plan, then the state would be willing to
presume that 100 percent of tourists would heed evacuation calls and
exit the islands prior to a full-scale resident evacuation.
That change, at least on
paper, would reduce the overall resident evacuation time to below 24
hours and ensure that thousands of new building permits could be issued
by the state.
But shuffling numbers
does not in reality improve public safety. Advocating such "creative
accounting" to allow further development when models indicate that the
24-hour threshold as been surpassed exposes the mindset of our state
growth management officials. Apparently, they have no qualms about
making public safety secondary to growth.
Despite being called "a
ruse" by County Commissioner George Neugent, a threat to public safety
by Senior Emergency Management Director Billy Wagner and "preposterous"
by Planning Commissioner Jiulio Margalli, the proposed changes cleared
the first hurdle last week by a 3-2 vote of the county Planning
Commission.
Even Chairman Lynn Mapes
acknowledged, before voting to support the proposal, that it was about
allowing new development rather than improving hurricane safety.
The planning board
stipulated that any additional building permits made possible by the
changes be limited to workforce housing, an effort to apply a little
rationality to a farce.
But why are we going
along with such foolishness? The county is required by the state to
develop strategies to reduce actual — repeat, actual — hurricane
clearance times and reduce potential loss of life. Paper solutions
merely enable one to claim improvement when nothing at all has been
accomplished.
While fretting over the
security of future construction, the DCA and the local working group
have wasted precious time by failing to provide for our security. Still
unresolved are problems exposed during last hurricane season's partial
and full evacuations, such as the transport and out-of-county care
options for the elderly and infirm, regional evacuation coordination and
unchecked development in south Miami-Dade County.
What do we have to lose
if we reject DCA's directive? Will new construction come to a screeching
halt if we do not comply? That would appear highly unlikely given the
willingness already shown by state officials to prioritize development
over public safety. And what do we have to gain? Perhaps a second chance
to pursue actual policy that might save lives.
While addressing our
shortage of worker housing is critical to our long-term economic health,
the county should not allow itself to be strong-armed into supporting a
ruse at best, and a threat to public safety at worst.
— The Citizen |
