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What We
Talk About When We Talk About Carrying Capacity
By Nancy Klingener
How
much more development can the Keys take? How much more do we want? How
much more do we need?
On
a group of small islands, connected by a single road, hydrated by a
single pipeline, these questions matter. They affect our lives every
day. We are 80,000 year-round residents but we play host to 2.6 million
overnight visitors each year, with another million people coming to Old
Town Key West via cruise ships and who knows how many day-trippers
traveling U.S. 1 to the Upper Keys.
Development is usually examined for its direct impacts to the
environment and rightly so. A hammock covered by pearock and a pineland
replaced by a swimming pool are lost forever. But development, and
changing the use of property, can also affect our communities in
far-reaching and indirect ways. And they can affect communities far
away, as when a new hotel in Key West requires many of its visitors to
drive along the length of U.S. 1. Or they can affect environments far
from shore, like seagrass beds criss-crossed with propeller scars.
For
almost a year, a group of intelligent, hardworking folks has been
wrestling with these issues. They came at it from very different angles
– some are municipal planners and managers, others are
environmentalists, others are in businesses that rely on development.
They went by the not-particularly-harmonious title of the Florida Keys
Carrying Capacity Implementation Working Group.
This week they held their final meeting and, not surprisingly, they did
not come up with any numbers for future development in the Keys.
Numbers are hard to come by and harder to reach consensus on and,
besides, that decision is really up to us, the people of the Keys,
through our elected representatives in City Hall, county government and
Tallahassee.
For
a few years, we were under the impression that a computer program might
answer the question for us. The Florida Keys Carrying Capacity Study was
ordered up by the Governor and Cabinet in 1996 to “determine the ability
of the Florida Keys Ecosystems, and the various segments thereof, to
withstand all impacts of additional land development activities.” The
Cabinet specified that the analysis should “consider aesthetic,
socioeconomic (including sustainable tourism), quality of life and
community character issues, including the concentration of population,
the amount of open space, diversity of habitats and species richness.”
If
only a study could make that call. The problem is, some of those
standards are hopelessly subjective. Others were hopelessly complex –
the computer model’s marine component was deemed a failure in part
because it could not capture the circulation patterns of the nearshore
waters of the Keys. Well of course it couldn’t! There are mangrove
channels, sandy shorelines, dredged canals, tides, winds, currents, the
Gulf Stream, Florida Bay, the Atlantic Ocean, groundwater movement,
stormwater runoff – all kinds of things affecting where the water comes
from and how it moves around. It would be hard enough to capture that
for one location much less make predictions for 40-plus islands along
120 miles. Flats guides and smugglers spend decades studying the local
waters and figuring out how it moves and when, and even they just nail
it for their own select locations.
(My
personal favorite moment from the numerous presentations I attended on
this study was when they showed us what happened when the computer model
attempted to link propeller scars in seagrass beds to development on
land. It turns out that scars are not necessarily more frequent near
heavily developed areas, or even near marinas. It turns out, you see,
that prop scars are most frequent where it’s shallow. Next
they’ll be telling us our islands are completely surrounded by water!)
Bashing the Carrying Capacity Study is fun and I’ve certainly done my
share. I was part a large coalition of environmentalists who demanded
that the Study’s final version be submitted to independent scientific
review, as a draft version was. That final review found that the Study
and model were much improved from the draft version but still had some
serious problems.
But
there was a bright spot, if you want to look at it that way. The Study’s
terrestrial module, the section that looked at upland habitats, was by
far the most solid. This was helpful since the Study was aimed primarily
at land-use decisions, which directly and indirectly affect those upland
habitats.
The
Study found, in that terrestrial section, that building in the Keys “has
surpassed the capacity of the upland habitats to withstand further
development” and that any more could push several protected species over
the edge and cause damage even through secondary and indirect impacts.
Despite this finding – and the state’s mandate to the Keys to implement
the findings of the Study by July 2003 – our local governments have been
unable to bring themselves yet to any meaningful actions to acknowledge
these findings. The county commission, after months of agonizing over
the summer, backed off from even a temporary moratorium protecting the
best of its remaining habitat. The commission did identify lands it
would like to protect – but applied no new money to acquiring this land.
The
implementation working group spent an awful lots of its time debating
whether a minimum habitat patch deserving of protection should be one
acre or four acres, and an awful lot of time talking about affordable
housing – although its pro-development members insisted that only
market-rate housing, which today means Mediterranean mansions, would
serve to support our local building trades.
There was even some talk that the government has no business regulating
development in the Keys at all, that under the American system of
capitalism, the marketplace should dictate all. Well, OK. There go your
affordable housing supports for one thing. And for another, how much
development in the Keys would there be without the significant publicly
funded facilities such as the Overseas Highway and its 43 bridges, the
water pipeline, electric lines, the airports and the dredged Key West
harbor? How many visitors and residents would we have if you had to get
here by private ferry, run generators and collect water in cisterns?
It’s an interesting theoretical situation but it bears no resemblance to
reality.
So
where are we left? Not far from where we started, unfortunately, with
some more scientific data to back up years of studies finding that
natural ecosystems of the Keys are mere remnants. There’s also the
marine ecosystem – the one found by an administrative law judge back in
1996 to be already exceeding its carrying capacity to assimilate
additional nutrient pollution (ie. we were already putting too much crap
in the water via wastewater and stormwater). You know, the marine
ecosystem that is the foundation of our tourist economy? The one that
includes mainland America’s only living coral reef. That one. The people
charged with creating the Carrying Capacity Study and computer model
were given an impossible task and could not come up with definitive
answers for us on marine carrying capacity. That does not mean the
marine ecosystem is not feeling the impacts of development in the Keys,
both residential and through the growth of tourism. There are more than
500 boat groundings a year in the Florida Keys National Marine
Sanctuary, most of them in seagrass beds that are the nurseries for our
recreational and commercial fishing industries. Live coral cover on our
reef has declined 37 percent since 1996. Our marine ecosystem is in
serious trouble and we have to acknowledge local and regional impacts as
well as asking our national government for help with the larger issues.
Speaking of asking the government for help: We have heard over and over
again for years that the state has done little or nothing to help the
Florida Keys while putting us under severe restrictions of being an Area
of Critical Concern.
This is a lie. The state has spent millions in the Keys since we became
an Area of Critical State Concern. Specifically, the state has spent
more than $125 million on land acquisition, thus saving areas like Curry
Hammock and North Key Largo from becoming the densely developed
cityscapes that the county government was approving in the 1970s and
80s. More recently, the state has given the Keys more than $17 million
for sewage treatment improvements. Since 1997, the state has given us
$652,000 for affordable housing. They even gave us $431,000 for a
stormwater master plan that, if we actually follow it, will help us
correct a major cause of nearshore water pollution..
Two
important committees of the state House of Representatives, those
working on Natural Resources and Local Government, recently held field
hearings in the Keys. There’s a lot of talk that the Area of Critical
Concern designation may be lifted. There’s a lot of hope that the state
may be willing to put up more significant help for land acquisition, and
that affordable housing may be part of the mix. The Governor and
Cabinet, within the next few months, will determine whether the local
efforts to implement the Carrying Capacity Study are sufficient.
Still, we are going to be left with our own political decisions, fought
out month by month in front of our local commissions. These will have
the most impact on our daily lives. How much new development do we want
in the Keys? How long do we want it to take to drive from Marathon to
Key West in February? How long is an acceptable hurricane evacuation
time? How many daytrippers do we want to encourage in Key Largo with a
wider, faster road? How many cruise passengers do we want to invite to
Key West? There may not be an absolute number, a specific carrying
capacity for the Keys or even any individual island. But there is a role
for the citizens to play in the future of their communities and now is
an extremely good time to get engaged, whether it’s with your city and
county commissioner, your state representative or your governor.
Nancy Klingener is Florida Keys Program Manager for The Ocean
Conservancy and Vice President of Last Stand. |
