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State action leaves sharp divide over building plans
BY TRAVIS JAMES TRITTEN
keysnews.com
County Mayor
Murray Nelson is touting the Florida Cabinet's approval Tuesday of major
changes to the county's environmental agenda, changes that will guide
protection of its native forests and nearshore waters over the next
three years.
The changes
will allow hundreds of homes to be built over the next year and could be
a boon to stymied home builders and some workers struggling find
affordable housing.
But some
environmental groups are bristling at the new growth allowed and talking
about a possible lawsuit.
Many
environmentalists believe the county has been growing irresponsibly for
years — even decades. They say allowing growth to increase — by about 25
percent — will damage the forests and water down the environmental work
the plan is supposed to protect.
"Politics
happened there," said Richard Grosso, executive director of the
Environmental and Land-use Law Center. "It has nothing to do with
science and merit and what is right."
Grosso and
others are considering whether to challenge the county's new
environmental plan in court once it becomes law. Any lawsuit will have
to wait until the state finishes its formal rule-making process. The
Cabinet's approval Tuesday was the first step in drafting a formal law,
which likely will take months.
A loose
coalition of environmental groups has existed at least since a lawsuit
in the mid-1990s helped force the county to include a scientific study
of growth in its land-use plan.
"We convinced
the Cabinet that the county was not doing what it was supposed to be
doing," said Capt. Ed Davidson, of the Florida Keys Citizens Coalition.
Meanwhile, the
county continued to allow development for about three years while
concerned residents fought for and won a judicial ruling that the Keys
had surpassed its ability to support growth.
The Florida
Keys Carrying Capacity Study was to be completed and adopted by the
county last July. Though the study was completed by its deadline, it was
found to be flawed by a review panel of independent scientists.
The panel said
the land portion of the study was the most reliable — a section that
found Keys forests are overstressed due to growth.
The plan
approved Tuesday allows the county to return to growth rates of the mid-
and late-1990s. In the first year, the state will allow 337 new homes to
be built, many of them market-rate.
"We find it
incredible that the well-documented misgovernance of natural resource
management in the Florida Keys ... that the same county officials are
now being rewarded by restoring the permits they were penalized in past
years," Davidson said. "We have to consider legal options because this
is our last, best shot to save the Florida Keys."
Nelson, who
drafted the plan, urged environmentalists to get behind the changes and
defended the growth as a positive for the environment in the Keys.
"It seems to
me they are running around and saying 'The sky is falling,'" Nelson
said. "That [growth] is what we got for spending $310 million for
wastewater, $95 million for environmentally sensitive land and $30
million for workforce housing."
Environmental
groups would "themselves be doing the most damage" by holding up
protection with a lawsuit, he said.
"It's up to
them to screw it up," Nelson said.
ttritten@keysnews.com |
