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BOCC Should Exercise Much Greater Caution on Parrish Mega-Development

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At Thursday’s land use meeting, commissioners voted 6-1 to transmit comp plan map and text amendments to the state that would be the first steps in transitioning 5,000 acres of Parrish farmland into a future city the size of Palmetto. The lack of caution and concern for such a sharp turn away from long-held growth objectives and practices is troubling on several levels.

The Gamble Creek Village project would turn land currently zoned for a thousand homes, at one per every five acres, into 7,200 homes–and about two miles east of the Future Development Area Boundary. As a master-planned community, the developers would most likely use CDDs to pay for internal roads and infrastructure, including a non-county-owned or operated sewage treatment plant.

Several years ago, I was given a presentation on the project by the applicants and their attorney, Mark Barnebey. Admittedly, I found it to be a very attractive plan on the surface, in terms of design and concept. Development is clustered, it aims to be a walkable, self-contained community with plenty of preserved green space to act as an outward buffer to the rural communities that surround it. As usual, however, the devil is in the details.

When I got home and started digging through the presentation materials, I realized that they needed approval to essentially get more than seven times the density that the land was zoned for, which is problematic even before you consider that it’s east of the FDAB. Barnebey’s main counter, which he leaned on again during his presentation Thursday, is that because the one house per five-acre zoning is east of the FDAB, there’s potential for not only "sprawl" but 1,000 septic tanks and all the potential problems that come with them.

However, claiming that the project essentially prevents 1,000 septic tanks isn’t an intellectually honest argument, as there is zero market evidence of demand for anywhere near 1,000 such homes in that area, or even west of it for that matter. No developer is likely to show interest in developing such a project, and the idea that more than a handful of individuals might contemplate it each year seems just as unlikely.

Alternatively, there's nothing preventing the county from allowing a development plan in which those thousand homes the land has entitlements for are clustered in a non-sprawling development that essentially lays out the same sort of project on a smaller scale.

There are also other factors to consider. Barnebey said that the application was deliberately crafted in such specific language as to make this tract–the largest contiguous parcel of undeveloped land in Manatee County–the only one that could qualify for the amendments unless someone were able to somehow piece together a similarly-sized tract elsewhere.

However, that’s actually part of the problem in that there exists a serious ethical question as to whether the county commission should be in the business of essentially blessing a single landowner with a decision that would increase the value of their landholdings by at least an order of magnitude.

Just like that, the land would be worth many times its current value, and it’s pretty clear that the landowners have no intention of developing the land themselves. It’ll quickly get flipped and developers like Neal Communities, Centex, Lennar, and others will move in.

The next big red flag is the private utilities. Non-public sewage treatment facilities do not have a great track record, particularly in Florida, and, at some point, it is all but certain that the county will be stuck with its operation and maintenance. It’s just hard to do them correctly because, by nature, they have to be scaled up as growth comes along. You can’t really ask for the system that will ultimately be needed to be built upfront, because it would fail, were there not enough inputs to support it.

There’s also the matter of what happens with the land between the FDAB and the project, which would now have a much better argument in terms of compatibility should the developers who own much of it be inclined to ask for amendments as well, which you can be certain will happen.

In some ways, a vote for moving this project forward is all but the same as a vote for moving the FDAB, since that is what is likely to happen. In fact, that would seem like the more practical way to approach this development, essentially asking the board, as Lakewood Ranch’s developers recently did, to move the development line eastward. If that’s a tougher argument to make, which it would be, then commissioners should be thinking really hard about essentially doing it through these amendments.

The only problem was that most of them seemed to be thinking about little more than how neat the concept is. Commissioner Misty Servia (R-Dist 4) was the only exception. I often find myself disagreeing with Servia when it comes to land development issues. A former county and private sector planner, her ethos on things like sustainable growth and compatibility is simply much different than my own, which I often find frustrating since she’s not only, by far, the most educated board member when it comes to land development, but, in my opinion, she's also the most intelligent and consistently reasonable commissioner on the board.

So, when Servia is the only commissioner asking tough questions about a potential development, I tend to listen extra carefully, because if someone like Servia can't get comfortable with a project, there are likely very good reasons. On Thursday, she not only raised every single concern I had previously, but she added a few I hadn’t considered, including how difficult of a time similar developments have had when it comes to actually managing to attract the sort of mixed-use commercial and retail development promised, especially in early phases, when building from scratch in terms of a population base.

Servia questioned whether there had been market analyses done and the answer was that those sorts of things would be contemplated after anapproval was won since they cost money and are moot if the applicant can’t get the amendments. But if you’re essentially telling the county that all of the ones that have been done are more or less incorrect, that growing west to east is not the proper rationale for our future, and that the community will be successful and its long-term stewardship effective enough that the private utilities remain viable, it would seem to require more than has been offered, especially when county planners–who tend to be anything but anti-growth–recommended that the board deny the application.

In their report, county staff note that it is not compatible with state statutes, specifically FS 163.3162, which deals with agricultural lands and practices. Florida laws hold agricultural land in high regard and, when addressing sprawl, prescribe that such developments should not "promote, allow, or designate significant amounts of urban development to occur in rural areas at substantial distances from existing urban areas while not using undeveloped (non-ag-zoned) lands that are available and suitable for development." The planning term for that is leapfrog development, which, as Servia pointed out Thursday, is exactly what this looks to be.

Servia said that, at a minimum, she would want to see bonding or a significant line of credit to demonstrate that the applicant had "skin in the game" on utilities, an aspect none of the other commissioners questioned, which was surprising given that, again, there’s a near certainty that the property will be flipped if and when the final approvals for the changes go through.

Some commissioners fell back on the old, we’re just voting on transmitting it to the state for comments, it still needs to come back to us for a final voteline, but, as Servia correctly pointed out, these things don’t tend to move backwards once they get that first, big green light. Also, it’s not like the state, which has been gutted like a fish when it comes to development oversight, has had a recent history of offering much insight in such comments. This will be a Manatee County decision and, so far, it looks to me like the board is poised to move lightning quick on what should be a much more thoughtful and inquisitive deliberation.

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of ourweekly podcast. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County governmentsince 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Clickherefor his bio. His 4th novel, Burn Black Wall Street Burn, was recently released and is availablehere.



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