Land-use lawsuit about Keys' long-term future
Two local groups, Last
Stand and the Florida Keys Citizens Coalition, recently filed a
challenge to the state's most recent growth management rule for
unincorporated Monroe County and Marathon. This came as no surprise to
those who follow the growth management soap opera in the Florida Keys.
The challenge is the
latest chapter in a long saga, dating back to the origins of our current
comprehensive land-use plan. In the early 1990s, environmentalists
challenged the plan and won a ruling from a state administrative law
judge, who found that Monroe County had exceeded its carrying capacity
for nearshore water quality, seagrass beds and endangered species
protection.
Because the Keys are
an Area of Critical State Concern, all land-use decisions are reviewed
by the state. The governor and Cabinet have ultimate authority over our
land-use plan. Faced with the judge's finding that the Keys had built
too much for the ecosystem to handle, the governor and Cabinet (a
different set of people than the current office-holders) punted.
Shutting down all building in the Keys was a political and financial
impossibility. Instead, they decided to look into this carrying capacity
question with an unprecedented study, a $6 million federal-state effort
that managed to defer the question.
In the meantime, the
state allowed 255 new homes a year in what was then unincorporated
Monroe (and now includes Islamorada and Marathon) and the county
embarked on its long-overdue quest to provide adequate wastewater and
stormwater treatment. It was an interim compromise that everyone agreed
to live with. And the total number of new homes, it should be noted, was
based on hurricane evacuation.
That carrying capacity
study, as everyone knows by now, had some serious problems. It was an
ambitious effort, especially the computer model that attempts to run
scenarios under different growth-management regimes and tell planners
how these scenarios might affect the Keys' carrying capacity.
In the end, after
scrutiny from all quarters and two reviews from independent scientists,
the most validated part of the study found that the terrestrial
ecosystems of the Keys have already exceeded their capacity to absorb
development. Unfortunately, the marine module of the study was the most
heavily criticized by reviewers. Unfortunate, because the marine
ecosystems of the Keys are our bread and butter in the economic and
ecological sense.
So here we are. The
question of how much development to allow in the Keys has still not been
answered. The independent scientific reviewers told us that we cannot
use a study or a computer model to make that call, that these are
political and social decisions (as well as legal ones). That's a good
point, though it's too bad we already spent that $6 million creating
not-very-useful computer models instead of buying land or building sewer
plants.
According to the
current regime, from Tallahassee to the County Commission, that's all
water under the dam. Mayor Murray Nelson and state Rep. Ken Sorensen
have touted their agreement with the state, which includes laudable
county commitments to finance wastewater treatment systems and some
significant commitments on the state end.
Now the same crew is
claiming that the legal challenge — whose primary objection is that the
state has awarded Monroe and Marathon with more permits when they are
more than a year late on legal requirements such as implementing
findings of the carrying capacity study — could derail the county-state
agreement. That's a serious charge and it would be nice if Mayor Nelson
explained exactly how a challenge to provisions of the state's rule
could prevent either the state or county from moving forward with their
commitments.
The citizens groups
who are challenging this growth management rule are exercising their
legal and democratic rights. They are demanding that the future of the
Keys be determined with a view toward long-term sustainability, not
short-term gain that pushes the islands to the point where they will no
longer be a place where people want to live and pay big bucks to visit.
But they should also
realize — and the carrying capacity study was a big reminder — that
decisions about the future of the Keys will always be made by humans,
not computer models, and that their biggest challenge is not in the
courtroom but in making their case to the general public, especially
those who vote.
— The Citizen
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