County Commission Bows to Beruff ... Again

At Thursday’s land use meeting, Manatee County Commissioners validated the concerns of citizens who felt that the stipulations they were sold in a 2017 approval of a controversial development would ultimately prove meaningless once the approval was issued.

For a full rundown of what happened at the time, click here. The short version is that after years of back and forth and failed efforts by the developer to build proposed projects that did not conform to the county’s rules, commissioners approved a general development plan for a massive residential and retail development on the county’s last major undeveloped portion of the bayfront. There were, however, a number of stipulations sold to the public as compromises to make them feel more comfortable with the more controversial aspects of the plan.

It was a weird process all the way through. Most notably, county planning staff made numerous mistakes and misinterpretations during the proceedings and were it not for the diligent work of a massive group of concerned citizens–many of whom had expert backgrounds in relevant areas–there is little doubt a much more egregious version of the development would have gained approval.

There existed this strange dynamic where the public seemed to be doing the job of the county planning staff, while they seemed to function as a consultant for the developer. As I wrote at the time, "At every turn, staff in the county's planning and environmental departments seemed to bend over backward in recommending approval of a project that clearly didn't conform with the comp plan and land development codes.“

One of the chief concerns at the time was that the high-rise condos would create a so-called "wall effect,“ forever altering the area’s pristine seascape, along with the views of existing homeowners in the area. Because the GDP lacked specificity in this regard, the developer’s consultant at the time–current county commissioner Misty Servia–proffered a stipulation that the applicant would come back before the BOCC after the first 750 units and then every 750 units moving forward so that both the board and public could see and weigh in on site plans to ensure that they conformed with the intent of what was being approved.

This was a departure from the normal process in which only county staff would need to approve preliminary site plans once the general development plan had been approved. It was important not only because it was such a massive development that would take place over 20-30 years during which time the board would see much turnover and eventually have no one left who’d even been familiar with what was originally agreed upon, but also because county staff had given the public very good reason to question whether they were equipped to exercise proper oversight that conformed to the spirit of the approval.

At Thursday’s meeting, staff again gave a full-throated recommendation that the board do as the developer pleased, the same way county planners did when Beruff wanted to dredge a two-mile canal that would have been much deeper than surrounding waters–inviting ecological catastrophe. Beruff then sued the county unsuccessfully, only to come back with a similar proposal that both he and county staff ludicrously claimed was not "dredging,“ only for both to ultimately concede that it was but again somehow try to argue that it should be allowed.

There was fairly broad agreement by all parties on Thursday that the stipulation as adopted (in much more general terms than the language Servia initially offered) was not specific enough and allowed for competing interpretations of what "completed“ meant. Did the developer have to come back every time site plans were approved for a total of 750 units, or could they continue to get site plans approved until 750 units had been built, inspected and issued certificates of occupancy?

It was an issue of clarity, and the obvious solution was for the board to vote to continue the item, allowing the county and the applicant to work together to come up with less ambiguous language and bring it back to commissioners for approval. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy. Throwing out the stipulation altogether seemed beyond drastic to the point of skepticism as to the intent. This is what opponents worried about all along, that once the approval was issued, the developer would chip away at all of the stipulations that were ostensibly put in place for the benefit of preventing the worst concerns from being validated and commissioners would develop collective amnesia as to what had been promised previously.

That takes us back to that October 2017 meeting, when it seemed oddly important to the applicant and several commissioners that an approval be issued that day, despite warnings from the county attorney's office that attempting to negotiate from the dais and changing so much of the plan without having it go back to the planning commission, be readvertised and then come back to the board with another opportunity for public input, could prove to be legally problematic. As I wrote at the time, "There's just something odd about the preoccupation Beruff and his team seemed to have about simply getting an approval, any sort of approval, at all costs."

To her credit, Commissioner Carol Whitmore seemed to be the only one who recalled or was otherwise interested in revisiting the intent of the stipulation. She urged her fellow board members to consider continuing the item so that the language could be made more clear and the stipulation that had been sold to the public could remain intact. No one listened, however, and the board voted 6-1 to give the most politically-powerful developer in Manatee County exactly what he’d asked for while breaking a promise it had made to citizens. In other words, it was business as usual for Manatee County where money talks and integrity seems to die a thousand deaths every day.