Waterfront debacle shows commission's true colors

If anyone had any doubts left that the Florida Keys should remain an Area of Critical State Concern, Monday's County Commission meeting took care of that.

At that meeting, a three-member majority of the commission disregarded the work and advice of their own professional staff, as well as the volunteer advisory board they appointed, and instead took the last-minute submission of attorney Jerry Coleman to change the "working waterfront" ordinance.

The submission came so late that commissioners didn't even have a chance to read it before voting on it. That didn't stop this crew.

"Working waterfront" is now at best a euphemism since Coleman's changes were designed to benefit developers, not protect the last vestige of the most historic viable industry in the Keys.

At least the public wasn't paying Coleman for this. He was representing the owners of Robbie's Marina on Stock Island.

Maybe the commission majority — Mayor Charles "Sonny" McCoy and commissioners Mario Di Gennaro and Dixie Spehar — should save everyone a lot of time and just allow the developers to take their places on the dais.

Very little should surprise us about the three-person majority currently running the largest government in the Keys, but this trick managed it. The move came as such a shock to Planning Board member Sherry Popham, who has fought valiantly in favor of protecting working waterfronts, that she resigned her post. We don't blame her a bit, though we are sorry to lose her input on these critical matters.

Aside from the manner in which this last-minute change was rammed through, we are offended by Coleman's attitude that working waterfronts don't deserve protection since commercial fishing is no longer a viable industry in the Keys.

This is patently ridiculous. True, tourism now overshadows fishing in the Keys economy — but its economic contribution is still significant. So significant that the Keys are the most valuable commercial fishery in Florida, by far, and the fifth most valuable in the entire nation.

That puts us up there with commercial fishing ports in Louisiana, Alaska and New England. That's viable.

Commercial fishing is, as Coleman and property owners have pointed out, subject to regulations that many fishermen find objectionable — but those regulations, which are handed down by industry-dominated fishery management councils, are designed to ensure the sustainability of fisheries, not put them out of business.

Commercial fishing is a business handed down through generations in the Keys. When there's nowhere to land or sell the fish, those families will leave and take part of the islands' character — not to mention economic diversity — with them. They'll find a place to sell their catch, whether it's Fort Myers or even farther away. But we'll never recover the historic industry that makes us what we are.

The good news, if there is any, out of this debacle is that the state is likely to take a very hard and skeptical look at these changes, their effect, and whether anything resembling public input went into the commission majority's decision.

The county's own planning director informed commissioners that the state would likely reject the proposed changes. This didn't stop the three-member bloc from having its way.

But it should make it patently obvious to people in Tallahassee, most especially Department of Community Affairs Secretary Tom Pelham, Gov. Charlie Crist and the Cabinet, that local government in the Keys is at this point incapable of directing responsible growth management for an island chain under such intense development pressure, and with such vulnerable environmental and economic resources at stake.

Under state legislation approved last year, the Keys would cease to be an Area of Critical State Concern in 2009. That approval came with a lot of caveats, though, about steps Monroe County needed to take to demonstrate that we were capable of responsible self-governance.

So far we're failing miserably.

— The Citizen