Alachua County folks - Mike Byerlys (and Stand By Our Plans) thoughts about the Plum Creek development proposal: Most of you have heard by now of a proposal by the Plum Creek Real Estate Investment Trust, the largest landowner in Alachua County, to build a new city on their timberlands in the rural eastern part of the county. This is likely the single most significant decision affecting growth, water, and the environment that the county will make in our lifetimes, and Im emailing you to ask you to take some time to familiarize yourself with their proposal. Over the past year, Ive met with Plum Creek officials four times, carefully reviewed their application, and spent many hours discussing it with county staff. Ive come to believe that their proposal is not in the countys best interest. Plum Creek has spent a lot of money over the past two years orchestrating support for their proposal. So far, the public has only heard their side. Ive been working with a group of citizens with a different perspective on Plum Creeks proposal, and who, like me, believe the countys Comprehensive Plan offers a better blueprint for the future growth of the county. Below is a synopsis of our position. Please visit our website at StandByOurPlan.org for more information and to receive news and announcements, and/or visit our Facebook page. Regards, Mike ============================================================================== The Alachua County Comprehensive Plan is as close as we can get to a political consensus of our community. The product of many years of citizen advisory committee deliberations, workshops, public hearings, and legal challenges, and formally adopted and continually revised by an elected county commission, it provides a carefully considered blueprint for future growth in the unincorporated areas of our county. It balances the public interest with the rights of property owners by directing growth to appropriate areas and protecting public health, neighborhoods, farms, wetlands, and significant natural areas. Now the Plum Creek corporation, the largest landowner in Alachua County and one of the largest Real Estate Investment Trusts in the country, is asking for their own plan, with different rules that would apply only to their 60,000 acres in eastern Alachua County. The differences are critical. Plum Creeks proposal features basic planning concepts: a mix of land uses, efficient use of resources, clustering of development, and land set-asides for conservation. Theyve earned kudos from around the state for embracing regional planning. Lost in Plum Creeks public relations campaign is the fact that our Comprehensive Plan already requires all these things, but from the broader, more appropriate perspective of the entire county. Plum Creek provides a good answer to the wrong question: rather than debating how to develop their land into a new city, the community should remain focused on how best to accommodate growth countywide. Even the best-planned development is bad for the community if its in the wrong place. Our Comprehensive Plan steers mixed-use growth to suitable areas adjacent to existing cities, and requires open-space set-asides. In contrast, Plum Creek wants to build a sprawling new city on their timberlands in some of the wettest and most remote parts of Alachua County, straddling a significant state wildlife corridor. Like all urban sprawl, their proposal would drain investment and growth away from cities, drive up the cost of public services, and fragment natural landscapes and wildlife habitat. Under our Comprehensive Plan, the rights from all of Plum Creeks scattered lands would theoretically allow them to build about 7,400 homes. Whether all together or piecemeal, any such development would have to be clustered on half the land, with the most environmentally sensitive half permanently protected. They have no commercial rights. In contrast, Plum Creek now wants 10,500 homes, and a staggering 15.5 million square feet of commercial, industrial, and manufacturing space. To put that in perspective, the commercial space is equivalent to about 15 Oaks Malls. The total footprint of their development would be more than twenty square miles. Our Comprehensive Plan protects all wetlands, including the small, seasonal, and dispersed wetlands we now know are critical for flood control, water quality and quantity, and numerous wildlife species. It also requires that half the uplands in designated strategic ecosystem areas be permanently protected. In contrast, Plum Creek’s proposal would destroy many wetlands, reduce the buffers around the wetlands that remain, and eliminate strategic ecosystem protections. Even more troubling is that Plum Creeks proposal at this stage is broad and general; the critical details would only emerge much later in the process, after the county commission has given the go-ahead. These details would be considered under a different approval process that would make it legally very difficult for the public or the county commission to deny anything or change course. And once the floodgates have opened, more permissive changes to the initial plan could be proposed at any time to a future county commission. From a planning perspective, the community is being asked to sign a blank check. Their proposal would also set a dangerous precedent. Plum Creeks lands are surrounded and interspersed by smaller parcels with other owners, all of whom would have every right to demand equal treatment. This piggy-back development would not be a part of Plum Creek’s master plan. Stand By Our Plan does not oppose Plum Creek. We support our Comprehensive Plan. Plum Creek bought timberland, and has no right to any expectation of urban development. Growing trees will remain the most appropriate use of their land for the foreseeable future. Much of their land is appropriate for potential purchcase under future public land conservation programs. Plum Creek sold a substantial parcel of their land to the countys Alachua County Forever land conservation program, and the development rights to about a third of their land have already been sold to the state. Stand By Our Plan is committed to informing the public about the critical differences between the Comprehensive Plan and Plum Creeks proposal. Ultimately, we encourage a decision by the Alachua County Commission thats in the best interest of all. MYTHS Plum Creeks elaborate public relations campaign has naturally framed their proposal in the best possible light, and created a number of misconceptions along the way. Here are a few of the worst. 1. While completely unsubstantiated, their biggest selling point has been the enticing promise of 30,000 new jobs over the next 50 years. Of course, its highly risky predicting even five years into the future, and Plum Creek wont actually create any of those promised jobs themselves. Population and job growth occur at a relatively fixed rate, so most of those 30,000 jobs would simply displace the jobs wed expect to emerge over the same 50 years in and around the countys nine municipalities, with whom Plum Creek would be in direct competition. Only one aspect of Plum Creeks proposal is potentially unique enough to lure more people and business to Alachua County than what wed expect anyway: large parcels of land suitable for major factories or warehouses. If analysis shows this to be true, Stand By Our Plan would support Comprehensive Plan amendments to make land available for industrial development near the city of Hawthorne, on their only parcel close to a city. Plum Creek has stated that this land, over 1200 contiguous acres close to rail and highways, is their top priority, and it contains no strategic ecosystems. However, there is no justification for giving away 50 years worth of development rights in other parts of the county to achieve this goal, and any suggestion that their proposal is all or nothing should be rejected by the community. 2. Recognizing political opportunity, Plum Creek has worked hard to link their proposal to the prospect of benefits to economically challenged east Gainesville. Theyve offered no evidence, other than that East Gainesville and East Alachua County both contain the word east. While the burden of proof lies with them, consider that I-75 is closer to east Gainesville than even the closest boundary of Plum Creeks land. The Hawthorne center proposed for the greatest job growth is further away than the Town of Tioga, in Jonesville. If all the growth along the I-75 corridor and everything in between hasnt helped east Gainesville, then how would Plum Creeks city in the swamp, with its own schools and stores, on the other side of Newnans Lake? The best hope for economic growth and diversification in east Gainesville lies with the continuing revival of nearby downtown Gainesville, the benefits of which are gradually spreading in all directions. Plum Creeks sprawl would undercut this very progress, as the Oaks Mall and I-75 to the west once did. 3. Plum Creek has aggressively courted the environmental community with variations on the following argument: Over the next fifty years, all of Alachua County will be built out. Plum Creeks proposal would tie up a substantial majority of their land through conservation easements. It allows for a huge intensification of development on the remainder, but at least this clusters the impacts, rather than allowing large numbers of smaller, dispersed developments. Also, we cant rely on the state or future county commissions to honor the protections in the existing Comprehensive Plan anyway, so better to cut a deal with Plum Creek now that permanently gains better protections than we might otherwise expect. Reasonable enough, but this perspective ignores a number of realities about Plum Creeks situation. Under our Comprehensive Plan, even the worst case scenario is preferable to what Plum Creek is asking for, in part because so much of their land is legally or economically impractical to develop. Over a third of their land is already permanently protected, because the former owner sold the development rights to the state of Florida. Of what remains, between a third and a half is wetlands and their buffers, and even more is within the 100-year floodplain. Almost all the uplands are in county-designated strategic ecosystems, so half of this would be permanently protected as well. Theoretically developable areas are scattered across the landscape, many far from roads and with numerous environmental constraints, making development problematic. Some smaller parcels along roadways could be sold and developed individually into subdivisions, but all the Comprehensive Plan protections would still apply. The total potential environmental impact of this kind of piecemeal development, while significant, is still substantially less than under Plum Creeks proposal. Recognizing all this, Plum Creek is instead proposing to transfer all their existing residential development rights into one area, radically expand their rights there, and set aside key Comprehensive Plan environmental protections so that it can be far more intensively developed. Unfortunately, the area they want to transfer rights to has more environmental significance than the areas they want to transfer from, which is the opposite of how clustering is supposed to work. And what of the third of their land that Plum Creek promises to place into conservation? Under their definition of that word, theyd be allowed to continue their particularly harsh form of monoculture tree farming, with roads, utilities, and stormwater facilities mixed in. What does the environment really gain? By far, the most critical need for the preservation of biological diversity is adequate wildlife habitat areas, and corridors that allow free movement between them. Climate change will particularly necessitate north-south corridors, and the best one in Alachua County is straddled by Plum Creeks proposed development. The paltry conservation land that would be left within this corridor would be badly fragmented by subdivisions, roads, utilities, lights, invasive plants, barking dogs, and feral cats. A doomsday future scenario has scared some environmentalists into supporting Plum Creek: all wetland protections abolished, all local control of growth pre-empted by the state, no more land conservation initiatives, and market conditions that support wall-to-wall development of eastern Alachua County. All these things are possible, but is it wise to base our public policy on this kind of extreme possibility? Is the winning scenario in this future even worth fighting for? Nothing can be certain, but Stand By Our Plan believes that our Comprehensive Plan, combined with public land conservation programs, offers the best hope for meaningful long-term protection of biological diversity in Alachua County, not Plum Creek.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 15:32:01 +0000