This blog post presents a recent op-ed written for The Orlando Sentinel assessing the impact development is having on Florida's wildlife and wild places.
It’s Florida: a sunny paradise that’s rapidly changing. Whether you moved here recently or have been here for decades, you likely chose a community to live in based on its character; maybe you live in an area with beautiful oak trees and quiet streets, or you’ve chosen a place with plenty of room to grow your family, vegetable garden or small business. Perhaps you live in an area because your family has chosen to call it home for generations.
Whatever the reason you choose to live here, local decision-making and community members should have a say in the goings-on there, including development. That is, unless out-of-state developers have their way with Florida. They’re working hard in Tallahassee right now to fast-track approval for massive developments on city-sized parcels of 10,000 acres or more with limited community input or local planning, just a giant rubber stamp that reads, “Yes, pave over Florida and QUICKLY.”
Incentivizing development in Florida is nothing new. Stripping away nearly all meaningful local input and creating even stronger appeal processes for developers, however, is new and deeply troubling. Right now, two bills (CS/HB299 and SB354) are moving through the Legislature, misleadingly called “Blue Ribbon Projects.” The bills claim to “incentivize large landowners in this state to be good stewards of the natural environment” by providing developers a green light for the equivalent of new small cities without comprehensive planning, and without impactful local input if the developers create “reserve areas” of 60% of the land within the project’s boundaries.
You may envision a reserve area as a beautiful park with old-growth trees, but as written, it could actually be giant retention ponds, wastewater treatment facilities and utility lines. Although HB299 recognizes that not all of a “reserve area” should be a giant retention pond, as one of the most biodiverse states in the country, Florida should be ensuring reserves are nature-forward, not a granted offset to development impacts.
Perhaps even more shocking: these “projects” of more than 48,000 new residences could be located on land with any future land use designation previously determined by local government; in other words, just because a city set aside land for conservation, agriculture or low-density rural development, that intended land use no longer applies and previous zoning goes out the window.
If you purchased a home or land with the idea that it was in a rural area or adjoined a county-designated conservation area, those designations will go up in bulldozer smoke, potentially along with your quality of life. In short, if part of your community is slated for a Blue Ribbon Project, you could soon find around 50,000 new neighbors in your backyard.
If that isn’t enough, not only do these bills supersede local planning and fast-track approval, the projects are also recorded as “title to the land” which means they create a property right to development that cannot be revised for 50-75 years, even if the project causes major pollution or contributes in unanticipated ways to flooding or undermines public safety no matter how significant.
So how did we get here? Florida has very few guardrails on growth management since former governor (now senator) Rick Scott eliminated the Department of Community Affairs in 2011, sending development oversight to local governments. At one time, projects the size of a Blue Ribbon Project would have been evaluated for regional — not just local — impacts and carefully considered. Local review is often all we have left. If the intention is to truly incentivize good stewardship and protection of Florida’s environment, thoughtfully placing communities to be aligned with wildlife corridors and compatible with the character and needs of existing communities is paramount.
As written, these bills strip away the remaining local input on large projects, leaving nothing in the way of the wealthy, land barons and non-Floridian developers. If you are tired of rampant growth now, just wait.
Katherine Sayler of Gainesville is the Southeast representative to Defenders of Wildlife.
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