Your letters and voices for protecting the Ag Reserve are urgently needed at the county commission hearing 9: 30 a.m., Thursday, January 8, 2015. GL Homes is asking to use a 264-acre parcel of land which currently has a Conservation Easement restriction on it to expand one of its gated communities to “a whopping 1,408 homes in the protected Agricultural Reserve,” reports the Friends of Audubon Society of the Everglades. If you are unable to attend and speak, please consider sending an email to Paton White, President, Audubon Society of the Everglades, at [email protected] expressing your thoughts. He will enter these communications into evidence at the hearing. Be sure to include your name and address.
The Society believes this hearing is so critical that it has hired a top land use attorney to represent Audubon Society of the Everglades at the January 8 hearing. They need a strong turnout of speakers who care about preserving the Agricultural Reserve to put the Commissioners on notice that “the public is engaged in this battle and carefully watching who votes yea on the GL Homes application.”
TO ATTEND:
Go to the Governmental Center, 6th floor Commission Chambers, 301 N. Olive Avenue, West Palm Beach. The county commission convenes at 9:30 a.m. Be sure to ask a staff person when you arrive for a card to indicate you want to speak. Write the name “Valencia Cove” at the top of the card where it asks for an ID number.
The Society says, “Typically, the Commissioners only allow the public to have two minutes each to speak. If you can attend, please let them know how you feel about GL Homes being granted the right to take back a duly recorded Conservation Easement on a 264-acre parcel in the Ag Reserve, use it to expand a gated community, while giving the taxpayer back a bunch of inferior slivers of land.”
KEY POINTS FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION:
- Cancelling Conservation Easements sets a dangerous precedent for what could happen to our county parks or natural areas if a developer comes calling;
- Residential development provides a one-time boost to jobs and the economy and a long-term drain on county finances through new roads, new schools, new fire stations, police, etc.
- Once farmland is built on, it’s gone. Its multiple winter plantings and economic value is gone. Its farm to table benefit to local residents and restaurants is gone.
- The thousands of additional homes now planned in this area by GL Homes will bring more traffic, noise, music, lights, fireworks – none of which is compatible with farming or wildlife.
BACKGROUND:
Reprinted here from the Society’s news alert:
One of the most traditional tools across America for conserving private land has been through the use of a Conservation Easement. This is a legal contract between a private landowner and a land trust or government agency which records and holds the easement. The contract limits the use of the land to specified conservation purposes while allowing the owner to continue to use the land, sell it or pass it on to heirs with those conservation restrictions permanently affixed to the land.
Under Florida law, these Conservation Easements are “perpetual” and “travel with the land.” Palm Beach County law agrees with the state statutes, the Conservation Easements are held “in perpetuity.” According to multiple legal dictionaries, “in perpetuity” means “forever; of unlimited duration.” But increasingly in Palm Beach County, a Conservation Easement lasts only until GL Homes wants to turn the property into one of its growing number of gated communities in the Agricultural Reserve.
The Agricultural Reserve consists of 22,000 acres located in southeastern Palm Beach County, bordered to the west by the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge and to the east by the Florida Turnpike. The Ag Reserve Tier has special protections under the County’s Comprehensive Plan and Unified Land Development Code because of the warm, fertile, sandy soils and large winter vegetable operations in this area that contribute mightily to our local economy. (Palm Beach County is the largest agricultural county east of the Mississippi River. It leads the nation in the production of sugarcane, bell peppers and fresh sweet corn.)
These vast farmlands and the Conservation Easement parcels have effectively served as buffer lands to the 145,800 acres of the northern Everglades that make up the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, home to the endangered Snail Kite and Wood Stork. The Refuge is also a refueling stop for hundreds of species of migrating birds, waterfowl and year-round home to the American Alligator, White-Tailed Deer and Bobcat.
To enshrine how critical this area is to our wildlife as well as to agriculture, in 1999 Palm Beach county voters approved a bond referendum for $100 million to purchase and preserve lands in the Ag Reserve. Thus, we all have a vested stake in this matter both as supporters of wildlife, conservationists of land, and taxpayers.