Proposal Update:

The proposal by the Lee County Attorney's office and Lee County Staff to delete the Pine Island 910 rule from the Land Development Code has been withdrawn. The current package of LDC changes now carries the notation "Amendments to Sec. 33-1052 - 1055 have been withdrawn". Those sections cover the 910 rule.

This action eliminates (at least for now) threats to gut the Pine Island Plan.

Phil Buchanan
email: coolcherokee@comcast.net

The Pine Island Land Plan, a major feature of Pine Island for the last 25 years, is again under attack. This is the third time the Plan has come under attack—all three times by the Lee County Attorney’s Office (LCAO), and all three times at intervals of seven years.

The Pine Island Land Plan is the main reason Pine Island has not been turned into concrete and high-rise condominiums and massive shopping centers like the other Florida coasts and off-coast islands. The Pine Island Plan is a component of the Lee Plan, which is Lee County law, and was adopted in 1988. It restricts development to that which can be handled by Pine Island Road through Matlacha. That section of road is of course already extremely crowded, and cannot be widened without destroying some 70% of Matlacha road-front homes and businesses.

The Pine Island Plan consists in the main of two principle provisions—the 810 rule and the 910 rule, both of which refer to peak hour traffic counts of annual average two-way trips as measured at the sensor located near Sandy Hook Restaurant.

The 810 rule says when the count reaches 810, rezoning’s that would increase the traffic count, with some minor exceptions, are prohibited.

The 910 rule says when the traffic count reaches 910, residential development orders are restricted. The original 910 rule, as adopted in 1988, placed a complete moratorium on all new residential developments.

In 1998, when the milestone 910 traffic count was approaching, the Lee County Attorney’s Office advised the County Commissioners that they could not defend a moratorium in court, a view accepted by a majority of the then County Commissioners. We had no choice but to substitute the moratorium with something less restrictive.

We developed, and after years of contentious debate, the County Commissioners accepted and adopted as law, a procedure by which developers could build residential developments with a restricted number of houses—the number varied on a sliding scale depending on how much native habitat or farmland would be preserved.

The LCAO and the County Staff however strongly resisted implementing the new 910 provisions. In 2005, the LCAO produced a rambling and convoluted legal memorandum saying the 910 provision should be ignored—they said it was inconsistent with the way Lee County does business. 95% of Pine Islanders, however, supported the 910 rule, and in March 2006 the County Commissioners ordered that the law be enforced.

The 910 rule has in fact been enforced for the last seven years and it has worked extremely well. The only residential developments that have been approved have been quality developments with extensive preservation of native habitats. Would-be developers nonetheless continue to protest the rules and bring claims and lawsuits against the county.

On February 22, 2013, the LCAO again proposed that the 910 rule be eliminated. They reportedly told the county staff that it causes claims and lawsuits against the county, which of course is true of all land planning restrictions, including zoning, fees, and requirements for development orders and permits. Eliminating the 910 rule would not cause would-be developers to stop trying to eliminate all land planning by the county, and defending county laws in court is why we hire county attorneys.

The Pine Island Plan is the work of thousands of Pine Islanders over the last thirty years. The initial effort was led by Doctors Gene and Ellie Boyd in the 1980’s and involved hundreds if not thousands of Pine Islanders that were among the first in Florida to get meaningful restrictions on development. Their fight against the developers was heroic and sometimes personally dangerous, but it was also successful and historic, and Pine Islanders owe them a great debt.

The fight by Pine Islanders from 1998 to 2006 to preserve their island was equally difficult and often heroic. Thousands of Pine Islanders rallied against big landowners and developer lawyers and sometimes thugs. Public ridicule and even threats to Pine Islanders were commonplace. Greater Pine Island Civic Association meetings sometimes involved well over 300 people (many of whom had to participate via speakers in the parking lot at the Elks Lodge), and the votes were always some 95% in favor of restricting development.

The epic March 2006 meeting of the County Commissioners when they debated whether to enforce their own land planning laws was held at the County Courthouse in Fort Myers and went from 5 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. before they voted. Hundreds of Pine Islanders attended the meeting and many were locked out their cars when the parking lot closed at 8 p.m. I didn’t heard a single person complain, however, because we won—all five commissioners voted to order the law to be enforced. The Pine Island Plan went on to win state planning awards and national acclaim, and to this day is held out as a model for communities everywhere.

After all that, seven years later, the CAO wants to quietly have the law taken off the books. The only reason they offered publicly was “streamlining the law” and “promoting development.”

Pine Island already has some 6,700 vacant residential lots. Creating more would do nothing to help the economy. In fact creating more vacant residential lots would serve only to further suppress the value of the existing oversupply of residential lots.

It’s obviously a bad idea, and it would undermine some 30 years of very difficult but successful work by thousands of Pine Islanders.

These issues will be discussed at the next two meetings of the Greater Pine island Civic Association, which are on 5 March and 2 April at 7 p.m. at the Elks Lodge. Please be there and defend our coastal rural environment and quality of life.

What follows is the e-newsletter link by which the County Staff proposed on 22 February to eliminate the density table that implements the 910 rule. Look under "More streamlining proposals go to committees"

www.leegov.com/dcd/LDCAmendments

Phil Buchanan
email: coolcherokee@comcast.net