Who Pays for Growth in Collier County, Florida: Part 5
This is the fifth in a five-part series of articles about how new planned development in Southwest Florida’s Collier County perpetuates an insolvent and destructive model of growth, despite the existence of policies that claim to prevent that very problem. Read part four here.
Part 5: Toward an Honest Conversation
Let's step back from talk of development codes and infrastructure budgets. Let's talk about the Florida panther.
Florida panther. Image via Flickr.
The Big Cypress National Preserve and surrounding lands in eastern Collier County make up the core habitat of the endangered Florida panther. These large cats, the only puma population in the Eastern United States, used to roam across a huge area from what is now Arkansas to Florida. Today, they are confined to only 5% of that range, entirely in South Florida. There are an estimated 230 adult panthers left within the species’s breeding range, though this comprises a resurgence from the species's low point of as few as two dozen.
A key purpose of the grand bargain that is the county's Rural Land Stewardship Area (RSLA) is to avoid allowing development to encroach upon panther or other endangered species habitat. To do this, the RLSA uses a complicated system of "index values" in which land is classified for its ecological importance. Land with greater ecological value is capable of generating more stewardship credits, which incentivizes putting it into permanent conservation and transferring its development rights to less ecologically-sensitive land.
In theory. Unfortunately, since the program's creation in 2002, the index values have not been kept current with the best available science, and this is bad news for panthers.
Panther telemetry map showing points where panthers were detected, overlaid on the locations of Bellmar and Longwater villages and the two adjacent SSAs (preserved areas “sending” stewardship credits to the villages). Image courtesy of the Conservancy of Southwest Florida.
For years, studies of panther movements relied on visually tracking the animals from airplanes, which can only be done in daylight. This resulted in the incorrect perception that the panthers, much of whose activity is nocturnal, avoided farm fields and pastures and stuck to forested areas. As a result, many of the dry, upland agricultural areas in Collier County are ascribed zero habitat value in the RLSA program.
However, recent panther studies since 2006 have used radio telemetry to obtain a more nuanced picture of the interconnectedness of the landscape. Telemetry studies find that the panthers actually make significant use of agricultural lands at night. The cats, which need substantial territory to roam (males will fight each other to the death if forced to coexist too close), are clearly present across a wide range of areas... including the lands slated to become Bellmar, Rivergrass, and Longwater.
And so now we have a disconnect. The best available science says that these villages are within essential panther habitat. The index values used by the county say otherwise.
Can We Govern On the Basis of What's True?
Given this, we're back to the question underlying nearly every aspect of the disagreement over these proposals: Can we govern on the basis of what's true, on the basis of the plain meaning of things? Or does our commitment to due process according to the rules we've agreed to operate by require us to pretend obviously false statements are true?
This isn't core habitat, because I have a matrix right here of index values that says it isn't.
There are literally panthers here. We tracked them with GPS collars.
This is walkable, because it has sidewalks, and the walkability section of the code references sidewalks.
Sidewalks alone won't make anyone walk two miles in the Florida heat.
This is compact, because the code says that anything we build out here is compact by definition.
Many of the blocks in these villages are more than half a mile long and have lakes in the middle.
This is fiscally neutral, because water bills aren't technically "taxes."
Someone has to pay for these treatment plants. The amount the villages are being charged doesn't cover their share.
This is fiscally neutral, because the developer shouldn't have to pay for these roads if we've already decided to build them anyway.
Someone has to pay for these roads. There is no funding source right now that will be sufficient to maintain them.
Right here we have the crux of the whole issue in Collier County. It's a clash of two different value systems, two ways of getting at truth. The developer's arguments in almost every contested matter fall back on due process: If it's not in the code in explicit, hyper-specific language, it's not binding.
And government officials and appointees have so far leaned heavily toward the due process arguments. In a 2019 hearing, Planning Commission Chair (at the time) Mark Strain pointedly asked panther conservation advocates:
"I'm not disputing your ability to believe that, but if we have to rely on the code, and we do, where in either one of these codes does it say we are supposed to use the best available science to review these SRAs?"
The county's rules may not require the use of accurate science, but panthers don't know that. Index values mean nothing to them. They don't get to issue bonds, pay for food on credit, collect impact fees.
The Florida panther is subject to physical reality. The panthers need land they can safely traverse, and food they can eat, or they will die.
So, in truth, are we humans subject to physical reality. We just have financial and legal systems capable of burying that fact in enough layers of abstraction that we forget.
South Florida's environment, existentially threatened by sea level rise and by the increasingly severe side effects of the human manipulation of the Everglades ecosystem, is subject to physical reality. The atmosphere doesn't care how your code defines walkability; it cares about the emissions pumped into it by the cars that your residents drive.
Roads and pipes are also subject to physical reality. They fall apart. They don't care about your impact fees: they care about wear and tear, water and sunlight and cracks and potholes. In the end, if they can't all be maintained, they won't be.
In older cities in Florida, the infrastructure is already falling apart. Collier County is young and just might still alter its future. But not on the path it's on.
Insolvency doesn't mean you stop being able to maintain things overnight. You take out debt, you restructure your budget; there are a lot of ways to get creative. What it does mean is that you're accumulating risk. Fragility. That AAA bond rating is going to bail you out, until the day it doesn't.
More Planning Solves Nothing
As a planner, I am sympathetic to the due process arguments in principle. There is good reason to set consistent rules for development in writing and enforce them identically with every proposal (and you open yourself up to a lawsuit if you don’t). Though to be clear, I also think there are fair grounds for legally denying these villages as inconsistent with the clear language of the county's own code, with regard to fiscal neutrality and with regard to design standards.
In the bigger picture, if there's a takeaway from Collier County's experience, it's that technocratic growth management in Florida has failed, and a new conversation is needed.
The rise of convoluted regulatory schemes like the RLSA was a direct backlash to the haphazard growth, throughout the state, of virtually unplanned mega-subdivisions like Golden Gate Estates, where, to this day, residents use septic tanks because to hook them up to sewer service would cost $100,000 per home.
But the pendulum has swung the other way, and to what end? Collier County's planning regime is a full employment program for consultants and lawyers, planners and engineers and ecologists. Thousands, likely tens of thousands, of hours of work over multiple years have gone into preparing these village proposals and evaluating them for consideration.
The end result is to launder business-as-usual suburban development as something forward-thinking and "innovative" and environmentally responsible. Slight tweaks to the formula notwithstanding, the Big Cypress villages are gated bedroom communities, plopped down as disconnected pods flanked by multi-lane roads. They are comprised of primarily single-family homes surrounding artificial lakes, built to a finished state at automobile scale for people who will need to drive long distances to do many things. They're the same product Florida mega-developers have been carpeting the state with for 40 years. And it still doesn't cover its costs.
I know activists in Florida who think the answer to development that despoils habitat and saddles taxpayers with new liabilities is to build more accountability into the planning process: more traffic studies, more environmental assessments, more public hearings, more rigorous fiscal neutrality criteria. The experience in Collier County—where all of those requirements are in the code already, but can be selectively bent or ignored to reach a desired outcome—makes me deeply cynical that more process is the answer. This is not a question of good planning. It’s a question of power and political will.
Who Has the Power?
This is a system that favors connected insiders through and through. Who else could afford to play by the high-stakes rules that have been established? Collier Enterprises is literally the direct descendant of Barron Collier's own real estate empire. And they are in a very real way the only game in town: this one company has its hands in nearly all of the non-rural development in the eastern portion of Collier County.
You get the sense throughout the public hearings that the developer's representatives are offended and exasperated by being challenged on the details of their plans. At times you even get the sense that county staff are irritated at being asked to defend their methodology. (Read from page 93 of this transcript to see the county's transportation planning manager cross-examine expert witness Norm Marshall every bit as aggressively as the developer's own attorney does.)
There was a window of time when it was genuinely supposed to be different. Community advocates who were in Southwest Florida around the year 2000 often talk about the sense of possibility that accompanied the expansive community consultation process around growth management. That process's goal wasn't to litigate a specific development proposal but to establish a whole new set of rules.
It was in those years that Collier County hired pioneering New Urbanist firm Dover Kohl to produce a plan that would lay out standards for development rooted in traditional, timeless design principles. The goals included revitalizing and maturing existing neighborhoods, producing walkable places and great streets, and avoiding the spillover of development into rural areas.
You can read the resulting Community Character Plan here on Collier County's own website, where it's somewhat buried but still online. It was completed but never adopted into law. Had it been, it would have made some of the nebulous standards being litigated through the latest development proposals—walkability, compactness, connectivity—concrete and specific and given them teeth.
One of the images from the plan, showing how neighborhoods could be made more connected, with diversified housing types. Image via Dover Kohl.
What happened instead is that the RLSA was adopted with last-minute changes which nearly tripled the amount of developable land. The Dover Kohl plan was shelved; suburban business-as-usual was too profitable in the near term (albeit while creating long-term deficits) to reevaluate.
In the two decades since that brief window of time, Florida developers have expertly co-opted the language and aesthetics of New Urbanism devoid of nearly any of the substance. They understand that references to "walkability," "town centers," and urban lifestyles sell—and that new development can be peppered with these signifiers without changing anything substantive about it. It's movie-set urbanism: all hat, no cattle.
How Shall We Grow?
This is the question facing Collier County. It’s a persistent focus of local media; it drives local politics; it preoccupies many Floridians. How shall we grow?
Nothing I have written in this series should be construed as an argument against population growth. You'll find people in Florida who make that argument—that the region is full, that outsiders should stop coming. These people are guilty of magical thinking.
The factors that make people want to come to Collier County are mostly outside the control of local leaders. New development doesn't conjure its own residents out of thin air; many of them, rather, are choosing to leave places like Ohio and New York. They're not moving because someone built just the right house in Longwater; they're moving because Collier County is a place that looks like this:
It might be possible to restrict the county's ultimate population by simply clamping down so hard on growth that there aren't many new homes. But the effect would be brutal on the region's poor and working class. Wealthy newcomers would simply become more and more able to outbid locals for a scarce supply of available homes, driving the cost of living out of reach. Nobody who cares about the community should want that outcome.
And so Collier County will, almost certainly, grow. The question is where and how.
There's a discourse of inevitability that underlies so much of the discussion about growth. One argument made repeatedly by Collier Enterprises and county officials alike has been that, regardless of anything about the internal layout or composition of the three Big Cypress villages, their existence is an automatic success story for which conservationists should be grateful, because the transfer of development rights means that other rural land will be conserved, spared from the 1-house-per-5-acre estate-lot development that previously would have been allowed on it.
There's almost an implied threat in that reasoning. "Nice county you got there. Shame if anything happened to it."
In reality, it’s not inevitable that if you don’t build this, you will have 5-acre lots. It’s not inevitable that traffic must increase and more roads must be built. These things are the result of policy choices. It is not inevitable, either, that the coastal portion of the county is "built out" and development must happen in the rural east—that is a policy choice. Redevelopment and infill are possible. Naples is nowhere near “full.”
Nothing is forcing the county to allow a particular development in a particular location. If it doesn't comply with the rules they've set, they can say no. The County Commission can insist on meaningful fiscal neutrality; it's in the code. They can say "Give us compact, walkable, interconnected development that actually pays its own way, or nothing." Those priorities are in the code, if only elected officials are willing to live up to their own written commitments.
And if that doesn't work, they can change the code. Beyond the scope of whether the Town of Big Cypress is approved, the time is clearly ripe for another community-wide set of conversations about whether the process in place is actually serving its goals—fiscal neutrality, protecting wilderness and wildlife habitat, and supporting a less wasteful, more resilient pattern of development.
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Technocratic growth management in Florida has failed, and a new conversation is needed. Let's start that conversation now.