Lee County Approves Plan Reshaping 82,000 Acres in the Southeast, Despite Environmental Pleas

Lee County commissioners have unanimously approved Comprehensive Plan changes that will change how the southeast part of the county develops. The board voted 4-0 — Commissioner Kevin Ruane was absent — to adopt the amendment covering the area known as the Density Reduction/Groundwater Resource area, or DR/GR, a more-than-700-page rewrite that began when 11 different private landowners applied for Comp Plan amendments in the area and commissioners directed their planners to look at the entire area in one amendment rather than handling the proposals independently, the News-Press reported.

The county's case is that the new plan is more protective than what it replaces. The changes reduce the number of potential residential units by almost 5,000, and they call for preserving some 61,000 of the 82,000 acres, according to the reporting. Chairman Cecil Pendergrass said the county has been criticized in the past for looking at privately proposed amendments in a vacuum, and that handling the entire area instead of doing it piecemeal is an improvement.

Environmental groups pleaded for more time and were not persuaded. Audubon Florida, Audubon of the Western Everglades, the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation and the Conservancy of Southwest Florida all deemed the changes a rush to development, and residents told commissioners that a three-minute opportunity to address over 700 pages of changes in an environmentally important area is hardly meaningful public participation. The county planner said the amendment was changed based on letters from state agencies after commissioners voted to transmit it: the South Florida Water Management District called for heightened hydrological modelling prior to development, as well as locating any new communities on major roadways.