Commissioners: Listen to the Science, Listen to the Citizens

Everyone thought for sure that the General Development Plan for Aqua by the Bay would finally come to a vote at Wednesday’s meeting. It didn’t. The meeting was continued yet again but the issue, it seemed, was finally crystallized for commissioners.

The problem for meaningful debate on this controversial development has always been the troubling lack of transparency and when it comes to coastal development, the devil is indeed in the details. Carlos Beruff is seeking approval for an ambitious development plan, the likes of which this community has never seen. The problem is that an overwhelming majority of those who’ve taken an interest don’t want it.

Beruff took over a financially-troubled project that had floundered for more than a decade, after getting a GDP approved in 2004. In 2013, he brought forth a massive project that included a hotel and marina, in addition to plenty of retail to go along with thousands of homes on Manatee’s last major undeveloped parcel of coastal land on Sarasota Bay.

That project met with historic opposition, and finally died after Beruff failed in his effort to sue the county over its coastal development rules. He’s come back with Aqua by the Bay, which seems more modest on the surface, though it doesn’t take much of a closer examination to begin to see that he likely intends to get essentially the same project, only piecemeal this time, hence the opacity.

The sticking points for commissioners are the height of his high-rise condos and desire to dredge a canal behind the mangrove forest that lines the coast. Neither are allowed under the county’s comp plan. Despite this, Beruff has consistently gotten recommendations for approvals from staff in the county’s planning department, who have bent themselves into pretzels giving convoluted and sometimes downright nonsensical defenses of Beruff’s claims on both issues.

Beruff isn’t saying how many buildings over the 35-foot height limit he will ultimately build, but simple math indicates over 67 buildings 75 feet tall in addition to building 16 high-rises up to 95 feet, while preserving the possibility of getting those 145-foot buildings (or higher) by a future request. Regardless of how the buildings are staggered or arranged, there is no question that they will forever alter the shoreline vista.

At one point in the process, staff finally took exception to the unspecified number of buildings over the height limit and briefly changed their recommendation to denial, citing height as the issue. However, without explanation, principal planner Stephanie Moreland changed her recommendation back to approval prior to the next meeting, despite the information from the applicant on that issue not having changed.

I avoid bad-mouthing bureaucrats whenever possible because I think most of them are talented and hard-working, but Moreland’s performance on this issue continues to raise questions on her competence as a planner. The most detailed explanation she’s given as to why she finds height limit exemptions that are so obviously incompatible with the surrounding area to be so, is that compatibility includes consideration of the "survivability“ of surrounding communities.

I have never, ever heard the word survivability used in such a way if I've heard it at all, and I waited desperately for someone on the board to ask her to define the term as it applies to land use. How would it be measured? What does it look like when a surrounding community does not "survive?" Do the buildings implode? Does it simply vaporize and disappear? Fall into the sea like the Lost City of Atlantis?

If the question relates as to whether the character of the surrounding community would survive, the votes are in. It wouldn’t. Dozens of high-rise condos lining the bay front would forever alter the area, changing it from a sleepy and serene, slow-paced coastal paradise to the kind of cookie cutter, condo-on-the-water metropolis that one can find from gulf to ocean all along the Florida coast. Our community doesn’t want it, the plan doesn’t allow for it, and commissioners shouldn’t approve it, regardless of what staff says.

The issue that seemed to give commissioners even more pause on Wednesday was the canal that would be dredged behind an essential mangrove forest, and without the required 50 foot land-side buffer, detaching it from the mainland and posing an existential threat to a critical environmental resource. Commissioners finally asked why Beruff was insistent on doing so, when so many experts have weighed in that it would likely kill the mangroves long-term, while threatening the balance of the food chain in the local fishery by inviting larger predatory fish into what have always been shallower waters where feeder fish spawn (aka the kitchen).

Beruff calls the canal, which he is attempting to use for wetland mitigation on the project, an "estuary enhancement area,“ and claims that it will be built to protect those mangroves. He says that he’s going out of his way and developing the project in a much more expensive manner in order to do so. As Dr. Randy Edwards, who has a PhD in Marine Science, as well as an engineering degree, along with over 40 years of professional experience, much of it conducting studies in these very waters, said at Wednesday's meeting, Poppycock!

Dr. Edwards has consistently showed up to every meeting to counter the so-called experts who give arguments that purport to back the developer’s claim. He’s not getting paid by anyone, he just wants to see his beloved bay protected from a development plan that his unrivaled expertise tells him would ravage it. As commissioners listened to Edwards lay down the relevant science, they needn’t be experts to understand that his arguments had more strength and made more sense.

Edwards and a handful of other local experts like Jack Merriam, who was Environmental Manager for Sarasota County from 2005 to 2012, Larry Grossman, who spent his career as a public planner in Virginia, Andy Melee, a scientist who spent his career dealing with similar issues on the Hudson and has both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Environmental Science from Bard College, John Steveley, a sea grass expert, who spent 35 years as a professor at the University of Florida, have been doing the job that the county's staff should be doing instead of bending over backwards at every turn to support the claims of the applicant.

Their advice: If you want to protect the mangroves and our wetlands, don’t dredge the canal and, by the way, your own rules don’t allow you to dredge anyway.

By deliberations, however, commissioners seemed to finally grasp the true magnitude of this decision, despite the mountain of obfuscation. Commissioner Charles Smith asked whether, despite the developer having to come back for a site plan and various other approvals–all of which would be in the hands of a questionable planner like Moreland–this was essentially the last decision the board would be making on this massive, 25-30 year development's impact. He was told yes, and that is correct.

If the commissioners open the door to such drastic variance in coastal height limitation, the skyline will certainly not grow shorter in the future. And if they open the Pandora’s box to allow the dredging of an 8-foot-deep canal where one ought not to be, there is absolutely no telling how great the eventual impact on Sarasota Bay will become. Beruff will almost certainly seek to connect the canal to the bay. In fact, Edwards says that the large volume of water flushing in and out of the small creeks through the mangroves will make them passable by small boats, naturally, in just a matter of months.

Despite promises of "no motorized boats," navigable waters are the purview of the state, and the canal will ultimately be under state authority and not that of a homeowners association. With 78,000 sf of commercial available in a gated community, could a marina be somewhere in the future plans? Absolutely!

Beruff is also seeking sea grass credits through a contested mitigation bank that would enable him to dredge the bay's pristine sea grasses. He could use these credits to connect the non-compliant, dredged canal to the bay and accomplish essentially the same effect on those waters that he sought in 2013, one piece at a time. Again, everything from the docks to the boats, to the protection of the mangroves and the effect on the kitchen would be mooted by denying the dredging of the canal, which, as all of those local experts so succinctly explained, is not allowed under our rules anyway.