By the PBPOA and Mangrove Action Group (MAG)
May PB Post Article
The Conservancy is our last hope in the disagreement between the people and the Collier Enterprises. It is no accident that the county is named after the family. They owned it and still do. Yes, we bought pieces of it and collectively we have every right to protect what we have but the laws are skewed towards the developers. They wrote them. Everyone should be allowed to develop their land to the maximum as permitted by law, but let’s look at the law. The law holds that every acre has some eight layers of value, mining, drilling, agriculture, etc., only one of them being a housing unit. So, when the Conservancy wants to dedicate an acre to wildlife habitat, the developer gets credit for losing all the values. The values are then converted into housing units. This is how the original Rural Lands Stewardship Area (RLSA) of 182,334 acres, zoned at one housing unit per five acres, or a maximum of 36,467 housing units and 72,933 cars, when reduced to a 45,000-acre development morphs into 180,000 housing units and 360,000 automobiles. This “legal” manipulation dwarfs the biblical “Loafs and Fishes.” But there is more to this problem. We are going to provide the infrastructure of water, sewer, roads, schools, etc. Immokalee Road is the only road to service the RLSA located in the northeast corner of Collier County. To ease this problem the county is already planning to extend Vanderbilt Beach Road further east. This will open the development to the gulf coast where residents are already concerned about One Naples and Vanderbilt Beach. Furthermore, the Colliers have already sold the entire coast years ago. They never planned on saving any for future use nor did they plan on saving east-west corridors for access roads. This is clearly abuse of our system and it is time to end it now. In addition, we have not been good custodians of our surface water management and this plan will add to the mismanagement. Development throughout the county has not faithfully followed the principal, held by the South Florida Water Management District and the Growth Management Plan. “Development, after completion must not have any increase in water run-off than existed before development. That is the purpose of retention ponds. Instead we have built channels that collect and deliver the polluted fresh water to the coast negatively impacting the coastal mangroves and fishery habitats while depriving our aquifers of replenishment.
