Powerful Florida developer hears a rare response from Manatee County: No!

There’s a tradition that when someone sings Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” everyone has to stand. So please rise as I warble several heartfelt hallelujahs over what the Manatee County Commission did last week.

The headline in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune tells only half the story: “Manatee County commissioners deny development of hundreds of homes in Parrish.”

Missing words from this summary include “in a flood-prone area.” Also missing: “Wetlands were going to be wiped out” and, most surprisingly, “The developer is one of the most politically powerful people in the state.”

Oh, and, “The commissioners were unanimous in rejecting it.”

Of course, the developer, former state senator Pat Neal, told the Herald-Tribune he plans to fight the decision: “Standby. This is not over.” I picture him singing this like King George III in “Hamilton” telling the rebellious Americans, “You’ll be back!”

We’ve seen a lot of discouraging environmental news lately. Gov. Ron DeSantis has decided that reviving his national political profile by building a detention center with a catchy nickname is more important than saving the Everglades. He also vetoed money to tear down the old Rodman Dam and restore the Ocklawaha River. Meanwhile, the Legislature slashed the funding for buying more land to preserve it.

In so dark a world, a move like Manatee County’s shines like a rare beacon of hope.

“The board’s denial … is the first time commissioners have outright denied a project pitched by one of the region’s most prominent developers,” the Herald-Tribune reported.

Here’s how it happened: “A few of us strangers who are neighbors banded together; that’s what made it possible,” one of them told me this week.

‘Make me an offer’

Neal’s Linkedin page says he’s been the CEO of Neal Communities since 1970, which is a loooooong time to be doing just one thing. He’s built 25,000 homes so far.

He’s also taken control of a lot of land. In 2014, the Bradenton Herald reported that Neal was trying to snap up as much ranch and farmland as he could to convert it to residential and commercial buildings, regardless of size, location, or zoning.

“If you have land, we want it,” Neal told the paper. “You can even put my personal cellphone number in the newspaper. Make me an offer.”

Forbes magazine ran a more recent profile of Neal noting the current economic slowdown. The headline said, “He made a billion building houses for Florida’s ‘Marvelous Middle.’ Now things aren’t so marvelous.”

Yes, you read that right. The business magazine estimates Neal’s company, Neal Communities, is worth $1.2 billion-with-a-b.

He hasn’t been shy about sharing his wealth with quite a few political entities. In just the last three years he’s donated $50,000 to the Florida Republican Party and $45,000 to Senate President Ben Albritton — ironic, considering Albritton claims to be a champion of the state’s remaining rural areas.

His biggest contribution of all, $200,000, went to a PAC named Better Roads for Florida that’s — surprise! — headed by an executive of Neal Communities. I wonder if he just moved the money from his left pants pocket to his right one.

Because of his generosity, when Neal wants something, he usually gets it.

For instance, he wanted this year’s Legislature to block local governments from making any changes in their development codes that would better protect people from hurricane damage. With Senate Bill 180, he got what he wanted. Gov. DeSantis, apparently feeling he hadn’t done enough horrible things to our state this week, signed it into law on Monday.

Like the Wizard of Oz, though, Neal prefers not to be seen pulling the levers of power. He deploys a cadre of consultants to speak for him. In April, when he made a rare personal appearance at a Manatee County Commission meeting to talk about more road construction as a solution to developer-caused traffic congestion, he admitted it was his first time standing before the board since 1979.

He didn’t show up in person to push Pope Ranch. Instead, the petitioner was one of Neal’s companies, this one named SimplyDwell, which had requested a rezoning of 217 acres of agricultural land.

SimplyDwell would use that rural land to build a new subdivision of 440 homes. But the board said a word Neal seldom hears: No.

“The county commission is correct to reject Pat Neal’s proposal to build in a flood zone,” Glenn Compton of the venerable environmental group ManaSota-88 told me. “It’s encouraging to see locally elected officials place the public’s interest ahead of a developer’s profits, something that rarely happens.”

Parrish is perishing

Parrish is an old farming community, named for a pioneer rancher named Crawford Parrish. Like a lot of Florida farming communities in recent years, parts of it have been smacked by sprawl.

Cows got moved out as developers moved in, building 1,000-home subdivisions. Out went the pastures, in came the pickleball courts and dog parks. Longtime residents fear their quiet, old Parrish is perishing.

The previous version of the county commission threw their door open wide to allow in all of that change. They approved every developer request, no matter how damaging to its neighbors.

They even voted 6-1 to get rid of the county’s strict wetlands protections, despite how important wetlands are for flood control and groundwater recharge.

Voters could see what was going on. Many had turned out to oppose the wetlands rollback, only to see their commissioners ignore their wishes and kowtow to developers.

Meanwhile, all the new development made their traffic and stormwater problems much worse, especially when Hurricane Debby hit last August.

“My whole house had a moat,” recalled Ariel Lowe, whose Parrish property backs up to the site of the Pope Ranch development. She keeps goats, chickens, and other livestock: “My animals looked like they needed snorkels.”

The Pope Ranch property fared about the same as she did, she told me: “Where they were trying to build got saturated from being totally flooded.”

The neighbors could all picture Neal’s development pushing the floodwaters off the Pope Ranch property and onto their own.

After the storm, “there was a flooding forum and I was a part of that,” said Abbey Tyrna, executive director of the environmental group Suncoast Waterkeeper. “A lot of the people who showed up seemed surprised to see that they weren’t alone.”

The forum, organized in part by the East Manatee Preservation Association, drew a packed house, said other participants. County officials at the forum acknowledged that much of their floodplain data are outdated and obsolete, which was far from comforting.

Tyrna told me her main message to the forum attendees was how important wetlands are for soaking up flooding. Get rid of them and the flooding is bound to get worse.

Another of the neighbors of Pope Ranch, Kate Horne, told me that they’ve already lost too many wetlands because “the previous commission just approved everything.” She could tell the loss of wetlands has gone too far because “I’ve had flooding on days when we had no rain.”

Snow in Florida

Whenever I have questions about Manatee County, I call up former commissioner Joe McClash, who publishes the Bradenton Times. He told me the unpopularity of the wetlands rollback, followed by the flooding, helped doom the pro-development county commission.

Then, making the voters even angrier, DeSantis appointed one of the pro-developer county commissioners to be the new supervisor of elections, despite having zero experience at running elections.

McClash joked that DeSantis, by removing one of the commissioners, deserves the credit for allowing the voters to flip a majority of the commission seats during the fall election. So did the decision by the most pro-development incumbent to run against the lone anti-sprawl commissioner—and then he lost.

Suddenly, there was a new commission majority—still all Republicans, but for a change willing to listen to their constituents. The new commissioners were talking about imposing a one-year development moratorium and requiring developers to pay much more in impact fees.

The developers, not accustomed to such independence, made noises about not negotiating.

“They told me it would have to snow in Florida before I could get the builders to come and see me,” one of the new commissioners said.

Meanwhile, when the commissioners tried to restore the wetlands rules that had been in place before, they were slammed against the hall lockers. The bullies were four, count ’em, FOUR state agencies that answer to DeSantis, each one questioning whether being so protective of wetlands could possibly be legal.

“This is bat s*** crazy,” one of the newer commissioners said in disbelief.

This should give you a good idea of why the commissioners reacted the way they did to seeing Neal's proposal to build more than 400 new homes at Pope Ranch.

The ranch, by the way, is in a designated Coastal High Hazard Area. And the plans called for destroying wetlands to make room for the entrance and exit roads, Lowe told me.

If the plans had been approved, Lowe said, she knew what would happen during the next flood. The roads in and out would have been underwater.

“He would’ve left everybody in that development landlocked,” she said.

Selling swampland

To speak for this unpopular project, Neal dispatched a platoon of planners, consultants, and engineers, plus his longtime attorney, Ed Vogler. Vogler insisted that the development wouldn’t make the region’s flooding worse.

“We sympathize, we empathize, we understand” the objections of the neighbors, he told commissioners during a May meeting. He said Neal was willing to take “extraordinary measures” to deal with the flooding, adding, “We can’t solve the historical problems, but we can make it better.”

Nobody bought it, though. One opponent, Mark Van De Ree, joked, “I’ve lived in Southwest Florida almost my whole life, but I didn’t know we were still selling swampland to Yankees.”

Indeed, Tyrna pointed out to me that the Pope Ranch plans submitted to the county showed no buffers along Gamble Creek, the source of much of the flooding. Instead, she said, “they showed some Adirondack chairs lining the creek.”

Those chairs look nice, but they don’t do much to soak up floodwaters.

Because Neal was asking the county for a rezoning, that made it easier for the commissioners to tell him no, McClash said.

The developer knew that land was zoned for agriculture when he bought it. There was no legal guarantee that he would be able to change the zoning to build a subdivision.

That’s something for other counties to bear in mind when destructive projects like this come up. Given how the governor and Legislature have tied their hands to keep them from restricting development, the smart thing to do is to stick to what’s in their growth and zoning plans. Don’t let builders build in places that have been deemed inappropriate.

Another is to focus on the needed infrastructure, such as roads, stormwater ponds, and sewage lines. Urge your county to require those facilities be built upfront.

“We know we can’t stop development, but we can slow it down long enough to get everything in place,” said Lowe.

Several people mentioned to me the importance of networking for pulling the neighbors together to fight damaging development. Whether meeting in person or virtually over social media, connect the community so they can all rise up together.

Another piece of advice: Stick to what the evidence shows.

“We can’t fight with emotion,” Horne told me. “We have to fight with facts.”

If you live in another part of Florida that’s being inundated by a flood of poorly planned development, follow these steps in shoring up your defenses.

Then, if you succeed in saving your slice of paradise, feel free to cut loose with a whole chorus of hallelujahs. I promise that when you do, I’ll stand up, and so will everyone else who really cares about our state.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.