Florida development threatens beloved greenway with road and flooding

Reporters file a lot of legislative stories datelined Tallahassee, so people might have the wrong impression of our fine capital city. When the session is on, you could echo Obi-Wan Kenobi’s grousing about never finding “a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

But the rest of the year, Tallahassee is a charming little city with four National Register Historic Districts in or near downtown, a world-class independent bookstore (Midtown Reader) and everything from a gospel music festival to the music and literature celebration known as Word of South. I hear there might even be some college football, but I haven’t personally verified that claim.

There are also lots of nearby outdoor recreation possibilities — camping, canoeing, fishing, birding, you name it. One of the most popular spots is just five miles from the Capitol Building: the Miccosukee Canopy Road Greenway, a linear park of about 500 acres with a crushed gravel trail that runs parallel to the Miccosukee Canopy Road for about 6.5 miles.

“A haven for wildlife, its rolling hills also are home to breathtaking oak, hickory, and pine stands,” the Tallahassee Democrat reported. One fan called it Tallahassee’s version of New York’s Central Park.

Some 2,000 people a week flock to the trail, according to Rob Lombardo, president of the Friends of the Miccosukee Canopy Road Greenway. That number includes hikers, bicyclists, horseback riders, dog walkers, and everyone else itching for the freedom of the great outdoors in the capital of the “Free” State of Florida.

“It was the first urban greenway in Florida,” Lombardo told me.

And now some Leon County folks seem determined to ruin it.

“It’s kind of a tale of woe,” Lombardo said.

The tale involves a developer, of course. As we often see in Florida, this is one of those projects where the name tells you what the project wiped out, like Cypress Woods, Panther Trace, or The Wilderness Country Club.

“The development is called The Canopy,” said Eric Draper, former boss of the Florida Park Service and a fan of the Miccosukee Greenway. “Of course, the first thing they did was cut every tree down. It was 500 acres of land and it was completely treeless.”

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the developer now wants to run a road through the greenway, slapping an asphalt slab in the middle of the natural expanse.

Meanwhile, the development’s poorly designed stormwater retention pond has kept part of the greenway flooded and inaccessible, Draper told me.

“For four months,” he said, “people have been unable to use that part of the greenway.”

Getting jiggy with it

The Miccosukee Greenway has not always been a nature trail, of course.

Udo Fleischmann, one of the heirs to a fortune from a yeast product that revolutionized bread baking (no I’m not making that up), used his share of the money to buy and create a quail hunting plantation in rural Leon County. He named it Welaunee, which means “Yellow Water.” No, it’s not a reference to urinals — get your mind out of the gutter.

His widow ditched the quail in favor of cattle (I’ve eaten both and think she made the better choice). Eventually a nephew named Mettler took over. As with so many Florida ranches, his heirs decided that a herd of houses would be worth more than a herd of cows.

The heirs put together a company with the incredibly humble name of “Powerhouse.” In 1990 Powerhouse persuaded city officials to annex the entire 11,000 acre Welaunee property before launching its building projects.

“They have a 30-year plan to be able to develop all this land,” Leon County Commissioner David O’Keefe, another greenway fan, told me.

Some community members wanted to preserve some of it intact. They worked with the Trust for Public Land to buy the property for the greenway, and in 1998 TPL sold it to the state for about $4 million for preservation. The state owns it, but Leon County manages it.

The greenway’s been public property for more than a quarter century. To give you a better idea of how long ago that purchase was, the “Billboard” hot singles that year included Will Smith’s “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” waaaaay back before he became better known for slapping than rapping.

Environmental activists who worked on the acquisition were, if not jiggy, then at least giddy about the purchase.

Lombardo told me he and everyone else involved in securing the preservation deal felt “an uplifting euphoria of not only protecting Miccosukee’s canopy road but also what would become a swath of conservation land that would remain undisturbed in perpetuity. We were given plaques and honored as forward-thinking conservation planners.”

They didn’t realize that the seeds of the greenway’s destruction had been hidden inside the purchase agreement the state signed.

Preserved until it’s not

The next part of the story is one we’ve seen all over the state lately. Natural land is preserved — but only until some developer needs it.

This happened with Split Oak Forest in Central Florida and with Pasco County’s Serenova Preserve. Up in the Panhandle, Walton County keeps trying to ram a new road through the Point Washington State Forest to help developers. There was even an attempt this year to lop off part of the Estero Bay Aquatic Preserve — all to help a developer make money.

In the case of the greenway, the developers had slipped a booby trap into the purchase documents and no one noticed, Lombardo told me.

What makes the greenway so appealing is that there are no interruptions. You can stay on it to the end of the line. Now, imagine how dismayed its fans were to learn what they didn’t know.

“None of us realized that the state’s purchase had four reserved road easements,” Draper told me, sounding bitter.

Kate Brown of the Trust for Public Land says her organization, at least, knew about the easements, noting that the future development of the rural area was the primary reason for creating the greenway in the first place.

The developers had wanted those roads there for all the new residents to drive on. Heaven forbid they reserved any room in the development for a route that would avoid crossing this natural gem.

When Lombardo and other greenway fans complained to county officials about this, they were told there was little the county could do. The developer is building the road — not the county.

The developers recently applied for their road building permit, O’Keefe said, but except for adding several requirements for slowing down traffic, there are no roadblocks that county officials can put up.

“We don’t have any basis to overturn these road easements,” O’Keefe told me. He said there’d been some discussion of asking the developers to elevate the road, but that’s not required by the state, so the county can’t require that.

The Florida Department of Environmental Don’t Look Now — er, I mean Protection — will also do nothing to protect the publicly owned land that everyone thought would be preserved forever, Lombardo told me.

The new road and the development it feeds will block the use of controlled burns typically employed in Florida’s fire-dependent landscape to maintain healthy forests, he predicted.

Worse, where the two-lane road crosses the greenway, there will be no stop sign or stoplight. The plans show the builders have opted for a roundabout, which means vehicles speeding along the road don’t have to stop.

Good luck to hikers on the greenway making it across, not to mention the bicyclists and horseback riders. Florida is routinely ranked as the deadliest state for pedestrians and this won’t help.

Wait til you hear about the part of the trail that might appeal more to canoeists and kayakers if they have a strong stomach.

Making a splash

One thing few people know about the capital of the Sunshine State: Tallahassee is the ninth rainiest city in the contiguous United States.

Yet, surprisingly, Leon County does not take this into account when issuing permits for new development such as The Canopy. The stormwater pond there was built to handle the amount of rain a storm that theoretically happens every 25 years — nothing more, even though we seem to have storms that size about every five or six years.

That’s because, O’Keefe said, far worse storms have been hitting, fueled by climate change creating more moisture-laden air.

In 2018, the Democrat reported on the first flooding disaster at The Canopy. The development’s stormwater pond had overflowed onto a nearby road and days later it remained under water.

“The stagnant water reeked, prompting some nearby residents to question whether the flooding was linked to a larger problem with the massive community now under construction,” the paper noted.

One longtime local resident told the paper, “The flooding here is a symptom of a poorly designed very, very large stormwater pond.”

One of the developers, perhaps following the advice of Milli Vanilli, blamed it on the rain.

“We couldn’t catch up. It was too much rain and too quick,” he told the paper. “We are doing everything we are supposed to do.”

Actually, they had done a lot less than they were supposed to do. The Northwest Florida Water Management District told the builders to stop work because they’d failed to follow the law.

“This project is unusual in that there’s quite a bit of construction that’s outside a state-issued or district-issued permit,” one state official told the paper.

The water district wound up hitting the development with the largest fine in the agency’s history: $112,400 (which should tell you how lightly other developers have gotten off).

But that was not the end of it.

In April, part of the Miccosukee Greenway flooded. Water rose to the point where no one could use it and the flood waters are still there, Draper said.

“The water covers 5 acres, including a live oak hammock,” Draper said. “The water is pretty nasty-looking too. It’s got some big algae scum growing on it.”

The county has a pump trying to flush the water off the trail, but it has to pause from time to time or the flow will overload nearby neighborhoods, O’Keefe said. Meanwhile, county officials plan to build culverts under the greenway in case of future flooding, he said.

I wondered whether the Powerhouse folks or their partners were grateful to the taxpayers for literally bailing them out. But when I tried reaching the developers I never heard back from them. Perhaps they were too busy imitating Scrooge McDuck doing an Olympic diving demonstration in their money bin to answer my calls.

Of course, the more they build — houses, stores, roads, etc. — the more impervious surfaces they create, so the rain doesn’t soak into the ground but has to be disposed of some other way.

It sure seems to me like this flooding is a serious problem that that’s likely to get worse. But I think it could offer a solution, too.

What if county officials offered the Canopy’s developers a swap?

The county could offer to redesign and rebuild the stormwater pond so it no longer overflows. In exchange, to show its appreciation, the developer would build its one new road by elevating it so drivers soar over the greenway, letting its users proceed undisturbed underneath.

And it would drop its claim to the other three easements, so nobody has to deal with this all over again.

Smart builders should want to make sure the Miccosukee Greenway sticks around for at least another 26 years. After all proximity to such a terrific linear park is a wonderful amenity to offer buyers in a new development — no matter what the place may be called.

We’ll know if they plan to mess it up if they call the next phase of development “The Greenway.”

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