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view from the hill
Why
Do They Keep Doing It?
by Nancy Klingener
Last
week, Last Stand and the Florida Keys Citizens Coalition went to court
to stop implementation of the Tier System, the latest method to govern
land use in unincorporated Monroe.
The
reaction has been, predictably, how could they? Or from some more battle
weary, here they go again.
Those
obstructionist environmentalists, those NIMBY elitists, preventing us
from building affordable housing. I am a past vice-president of Last
Stand, so I’m obviously inclined to be sympathetic to the cause. I
haven’t been privy to any of the deliberations that led to this
decision. But I have an educated guess as to why the
environmentally-minded would go to every legal length to fight our
current plan for managing growth in the Florida Keys: Because for the
last decade and a half, the enviros have been winning the arguments and
losing the results. And because this set of rules, coming in the wake of
study after study showing the Keys’ ecosystem is teetering on the edge
of disaster, actually
weakens
the
rules and increases the danger to the remaining natural areas that make
the Keys the Keys.
This
all stems from the formation of Monroe County’s current land-use plan,
called the 2010 plan, because that’s when its planning window was set to
expire (that seemed inconceivably far in the future when this thing was
under construction … and yet here we are within spitting distance).
The
County Commission approved said plan in 1993 and enviros challenged it
in court. In 1996, state Administrative Law Judge Larry Sartin ruled the
enviros were largely right, that the nearshore marine system could not
handle any additional nutrient pollution.
We
could have new development in the Keys only if we did not, in the
process, add more nutrients.
That —
and the shock and horror of the Governor and Cabinet when they learned
we were still using cesspits and semi-functional septic tanks in a coral
reef ecosystem — led to the giant sewer-the-Keys enterprise we are
currently attempting, only a couple decades after engineers and
biologists started pointing out that fossilized coral isn’t such a great
substrate for septic systems. Sartin also found that the Key deer could
not lose any more habitat, and that 24 hours was the top limit of a safe
hurricane evacuation time for the low-lying island chain.
The
Governor and Cabinet adopted Sartin’s findings, the county was given a
maximum number of new homes under a hurricane evacuation model and the
Keys started its long and nightmarish journey toward modern wastewater
treatment.
But the
true implications of the case, that development in the Keys was already
over the limit, could not be absorbed, politically or financially (the
state was not going to pony up to buy all the land that could not be
developed). So the state and feds came up with a way to buy time and
look for answers.
This
was the Carrying Capacity Study, a six-year, $6 million odyssey ($3
million of that went for a stormwater plan) that was required “to
determine the ability of the … ecosystem … to withstand all impacts of
additional land development activities.”
The
study’s designers came up with a fancy computer model that won awards
and degrees but few compliments from the people who were supposed to use
the thing, or a panel from the National Academies of Science that
reviewed it.
The one
part of the Carrying Capacity Study that was deemed solid and reliable
by the National Academies’ reviewers was the part that studied the
land.
In that
part, the study found the Keys had “surpassed the capacity of the upland
habitats to withstand further development.”
By the
time the Carrying Capacity Study was done and delivered to the county,
three years late, the county had already embarked on a new path. That’s
the Tier System, envisioned as a three-layer method of classifying
property as really important environmentally (Tier 1), scarified so go
ahead and build on it (Tier 3), or somewhere in the middle so let’s look
and think hard (Tier 2).
That
middle tier gave the county all kinds of heartburn, so the county got
rid of it, pissing off the Governor and Cabinet (remember, we’re still
an Area of Critical Concern and they still expect us to do what we said
we’d do). So then Tier 2 came back in a bastardized form as Tier 3-A.
There
were all kinds of fights about how big a parcel of land has to be to
qualify, whether all roads are dividers or just US 1, etc. etc.
No
normal human could be expected to follow the ins and outs of this
process. But here’s the bottom line: Ten years after winning the
challenge to the land-use plan, three years after the Carrying Capacity
Study was completed, the Tier System is supposed to be the final answer,
the strongest protection for the environment we’re going to get. These
regulations are about the same or possibly less protective than the ones
we’ve been living under up until now — the place where, we’ve learned
over and over, the Keys’ ecosystem is doomed if protections are not
substantially improved.
But
what about affordable housing? For this, the county and state have to
take the rap. For one thing, in parceling out building permits, the
county intentionally gave out 20 years’ worth of permits (under the
hurricane evacuation limit) in 10 years. They knew there was little risk
they would actually be required to live within the limits and that, just
like in 1996, coping with reality would be beyond our political will.
For another, the county kept its ratio of market rate to affordable
housing in new construction at 80 percent market rate to 20 percent
affordable. That just makes the problem worse, with all the market rate
(luxury) homes creating jobs, with fewer places for the workers to live.
No
environmentalist I know would object if 80 percent or even 100 percent
of new construction in the Keys was dedicated to affordable housing. It
was the contractors, not the enviros, pushing to keep that ratio for the
benefit of the upper end of the market. Now the cheapest place to build
the affordable housing is, you guessed it, in the most environmentally
sensitive land. So when enviros object, they are tagged as elitists.
So what
do the enviros want? Basically, I suspect, they just want what everyone
wants — for the people they’re dealing with to live up to their end of
the bargain. Not to mention a sustainable future for the Keys. Which for
humans and a tourism-based economy, means an environment that’s a little
different from your average concrete-and -heavy-traffic seashore. You
can get that a lot cheaper in Fort Lauderdale or Fort Myers Beach.
nklingener@keysnews.com |
