South Florida's Gloomy Present, Gloomier Future Part 2 — EATING THE EVERGLADES

          Since past and present are prologue to the future, let’s pause for a moment and take a look at what started in the early 2000s in Palm Beach County and continues as you read this page. Urban growth and associated development are rapidly marching westward from the metropolitan edge of the County toward the 20-Mile Bend area on U.S. Route 98. One reason is that existing home prices in the County soared an incredible 171 percent from 2000 to early 2006 and owners of supposedly under-used and easily developable property (meaning farmers and citrus growers) became desperate to milk that cash cow. A specific and very disturbing sign of what is on the horizon was the proposed development of the Scripps Research Institute in the City of Palm Beach Gardens. What was planned to be a major biotech research center would focus on cutting edge bio-medical research, technology development, and drug design. Trouble is, the Institute was to be located in a remote site known as Mecca Farms, which before 2005 was pasture land, citrus groves, and wetlands carved out of what before that been the pristine Loxahatchee Slough on the western fringe of the Palm Beach County metropolitan area.

          Author’s Note: You Gentle Readers can’t allow yourself to be seduced into making the enormous mistake of thinking that simply because various agricultural uses (including grazing, citrus farms, and vegetable and other field crops) are found on the land today that those areas are no longer wetlands and their conversion to urban uses is either inevitable or an appropriate progression. The powerbrokers and their trained politicians want you to believe that they’re no longer wetlands simply because of the various drainage “improvements” that are in place. Shut down those water management improvements and the lands will be inundated within a few months and will revert to functioning wetlands. That’s a lesson all Florida powerbrokers and gutless politicians are determined that citizens never learn.

          Not surprisingly, to lure Scripps to Florida the State initially ponied up $310 million in financial support and the County tossed in another $200 million. Those State and County government funds were intended to provide the land, infrastructure, buildings, equipment, and other physical assets for a state-of-the-art research laboratory and administrative complex. Scripps would supply the intellectual capital and of course the world-class prestige attached to one of the largest, private, non-profit research organizations in the country. Over a 20-year period, royalties on technology developed at the new Scripps Research lab may generate well over a hundred million dollars that will be used to repay part of the State’s contributions.

          Naturally, the collective goal of the State and the County was straightforward. They wanted to attract a world-class life-science related research concentration of firms that would chew up thousands of additional acres of what had been wetlands, bringing in thousands of well-paid, high-tech workers, and hundreds of support businesses. More money, jobs, urban development, transportation arteries, and more political campaign contributions, of course. It’s starting to sound like Florida.

          Governor Bush was ecstatic over Scripps moving to Palm Beach because his staff projected that, overall, the Research Institute’s economic effect would boost the State’s gross domestic product by more than $3 billion over the next 15 years. No joke. And create 6,500 local jobs directly from spin-offs generated by Scripps Florida. How could any reasonable person turn that down? Hey, we’re only talking about sacrificing a couple thousand acres of lousy wetlands. Nothing to get upset about. Take a good look at the choices. Keep the wetlands or bring in thousands of jobs? High paying, high-tech jobs. Or be happy with what we got, which is a bunch of worthless wading birds and mosquitoes that are as thick as the thieves in Tallahassee? Man, get real and start them ‘dozers.

          The State also projected an additional 44,000 jobs would be created by related biotech firms that would be hot to locate near the Institute. Synergy, man, think of all that dynamite synergy. Talk about wading through pools of drool in the Governor’s mansion. Job creation translated into more campaign contributions, which translated into re-election and maybe, if the planets were aligned just right, even into election at the national level. Whoa, it made perfect political sense. But only if you closed your eyes and pretended those facilities were not being dropped into a sensitive wetland environment that is still a functioning part of the Loxahatchee Slough and the nearby Loxahatchee River. Too bad it’s Florida’s only remaining wild and scenic waterway. But not for long if Scripps and the Gov had their way.

          The 1,900 acre Mecca Farms site in question is now mostly an orange grove but in its recent previous life was a wetland. The property immediately to the east is Vavrus Ranch, now a 4,700 acre cattle ranch that also was part of the same wetland eco-system and still contains numerous lakes and high quality wetland habitats. It shouldn’t come as a shock that the property immediately east of Vavrus Ranch is the Loxahatchee Slough, an existing wetland that is an essential part of the Loxahatchee River drainage system. And the land immediately west of and abutting Mecca Farms is the J. W. Corbett Wildlife Management Area, an existing wetland under the jurisdiction of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. And that’s the area into which the State and the County wanted to drop Scripps and all that related development. Makes perfect urban and environmental planning sense, not to mention being logical in terms of transportation planning, especially when you think about all the new roads (and drainage improvements) that would have to be constructed through wetlands to provide the necessary access.

          To no one's surprise, maybe with the exception of executives at Scripps who were probably not informed by Florida or County officials of the trenchant environmental opposition to their venture, dozens of anti-sprawl and environmental activists rose up and screamed bloody murder at the State’s plan to plunk a major research-business park complex smack in the middle of a wetland in the middle of nowhere. A proposal that would require huge expenditures in new roads and highways, drainage systems, sanitary sewers, and other utilities, much of which would be constructed through and in presently undeveloped environmentally sensitive areas. It was sprawl, baby, sprawl at its ugliest.

          Even developer-friendly Treasure Coast Regional Planning Council complained that the County’s Scripps-Mecca Farms plan didn’t go nearly far enough in protecting wetlands and addressing water quality issues. As an aside, a major road leading to the Scripps Research Institute campus would had to have cut across part of the Loxahatchee Slough Natural Area, through property purchased by means of a $100 million voter initiative to conserve sensitive wetlands in northwest Palm Beach County. Right, and chew up more parks and conservation areas to develop a mega-business park. Another wonderful solution to Florida’s many land development problems. But why is it that most of those “solutions” come at the direct expense of the environment? Here’s another simple answer that hits the bulls eye. Wetlands don’t vote or shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions. Period.

          In mid-2004 the putative developer of next door Vavrus Ranch, Tech Village Partners, a joint venture of national homebuilding giants Lennar Corporation and Centex Homes, had the well-known and respected design firm Looney Ricks Kiss (LRK) draw up plans for the ranch’s northern 2,000 acres. They initially wanted to build two million square feet of laboratory space, several schools, and 7,500 homes arranged around a town center with a hotel, multi-screen movie theater, and retail stores up the wahzoo. In mid-September of 2004, Tech Village added 2,700 more acres to the area planned for development, which constituted the remainder of the Ranch. By the fall of 2004, Tech Village was bedeviling Palm Beach County and other interested groups to get them to work together to plan urban uses for the 6,700-acre swath of ranchlands and orange groves that constituted the combined area of Mecca Farms and Vavrus Ranch, slightly more than ten square miles that had previously been highly functioning wetlands. But remember, once wetlands are converted into orange groves, agricultural fields, or grazing land, they cease being wetlands, at least in the eyes of developers and their pet politicians.

          In late 2004, LRK told various news media that they would design a project that mixes high-tech living with wildlife and pockets of “natural” landscape. As if that dollop of icing made a putrescent cake palatable. As Jeffery Pifer, the firm’s project manager told the Palm Beach Post,[1] “It’s got to be genuine. It’s got to be like it was meant to be here. Like it grew from the ground up.” Right. Buildings that grow in a natural wetland just like the baldcypress. That bullshit scenario perfectly illustrates the dangerous mindset of all too many members of the design and planning community, whose primary function seems to be whoring for the powerbrokers. In that same story, Beach Gardens Councilwoman Annie Delgado was quoted as saying: “It [LRK’s design] will improve the make-up of the environmentally sensitive areas. I see it as a win-win situation for everyone.” Of course, everyone knows that environmentally sensitive areas desperately need human intervention to “improve” their make-up. That makes you wonder whether Delgado is a Corps’ water manager at heart or has crawled into bed with the powerbrokers. Figuratively, that is.

          Also late in 2004, the State and Palm Beach County raised the ante to the Big League level by committing a combined total of $1 billion to Scripps Research Institute and related development in the immediate area. That’s $1 billion, not $1 million. It was full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes, which in that context meant they were going to ignore all the bad press and trenchant criticism from everyone with a functioning brain and integrity.

          In April 2005, lawyers for the Florida Wildlife Federation and the Sierra Club filed suit against Palm Beach County’s biotech venture in federal court, accusing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers of violating federal law by issuing a partial permit for the planned headquarters of the Scripps Research Institute’s Florida operations. The partial permit, which the County calls a Phase 1A permit, would have allowed ground work on just 535 acres of what was to become the 1,920-acre scientific village at Mecca Farms that included office complexes, residences, and recreational uses. Attorneys for the environmental groups argued that under federal law such partial permits are illegal. That suit was the fifth or sixth filed in State or Federal Court against the proposed bio-tech development. The other shoe dropped in late November 2005 when the federal judge hearing the Sierra Club’s case revoked the Corps’ wetlands permits and ordered construction to stop, an action that finally forced Scripps to look elsewhere in the County.

          In mid-August 2005, the Palm Beach County Commission backtracked and voted to ask the Scripps Board of Directors to consider building the Institute’s headquarters on another site in the County. After taking a beating in the press and being trashed by harsh criticism from concerned urban planners, biologists, environmental groups, and even traffic engineers, the Commission belatedly reached the conclusion that the Mecca Farms site may not have been the best place for intensive urban development. However, that move was almost certainly pure political smoke screen since the Commission also let it be known that if the Scripps Board insisted on going through with the Mecca Farms property they (the Commission) would move forward with that site.

          In February 2006, the Palm Beach County Commission officially abandoned the Mecca Farm site as the new home for Scripps’s Florida headquarters and research labs and selected the Florida Atlantic University’s north campus/Briger tract in Jupiter's Abacoa development, a site that is located in the eastern urbanized area of the County. With that decision the only problem became what the County would do with the land it owns at Mecca Farms. In 2006, the smart money was betting the land would be sold to a developer for one-acre single-family home sites. That way the County would come out smelling like a rose financially and like a skunk environmentally.

          But, as of mid-2011, things have worked out differently. The County still owns Mecca Farms and the costs to taxpayers are mounting. So far, the County has laid out about $150 million for the failed "biotech village." Those costs include:

$5.6 million annual debt service

$287,000 for annual mowing, canal cleaning, and road maintenance

$116,000 annually for the County Sheriff's Office to provide security

$60 million the County paid for the land during South Florida's housing boom, which was $10 million more than the then appraised value

$40 million Palm Beach County spent for planning, permitting, and initial construction

$51 million for a water pipeline the County installed to serve Mecca Farms and surrounding land for planned development that has yet to materialize

           The move to grab land that was formerly part of the Everglades is now in full swing in Miami-Dade. Greed-obsessed developers are buying up thousands of acres of farmlands outside the County’s official Urban Development Boundary (UDB), which had been established as part of a 1975 Dade County comprehensive growth plan to prevent sprawl and to buffer the Everglades National Park from urban residential densities and all the concomitant problems of pollution and habitat destruction. The developers’ goal is simple: acquire relatively cheap farmland and convert it into industrial/business parks and small residential lots and ugly tract houses that extend as far into the Everglades as possible.

          Of course, precedence for such a move abounds; remember, we talking about Florida where trees and wetlands do not vote or shove money into the deep pockets of bend-over politicians. In late May 2002, in an 11-2 vote the Miami-Dade County Commission approved a massive, 436-acre industrial park project called Beacon Lakes on a degraded wetland west of Doral near the Florida Turnpike. That Commission action effectively pushed the western limit for urban development toward the Everglades for the first time in nearly a decade. The developer who had the clout and the muscle to get a successful vote was political heavyweight Armando Codina, who was none other than Jeb Bush’s former business partner. We’re talking major league access.

          In 2002, environmentalists claimed that making an exception for Codina would open Pandora’s Box and cause a flurry of assaults on the UDB. That prediction finally struck pay dirt in 2005 as developers started snatching up rural properties outside the boundary and directing their lobbyists to slither up to key politicians and whisper sweet promises in their always receptive ears [More on Beacon Lakes in the next post].

          But hey, what’s a lousy 6.6 million square feet of warehouse space and 225,000 square feet of office and retail space in the Beacon Lakes office park? Not much, at least not until you realize what’s really at stake. Which is exactly what many developers and home builders have realized and what prompted them to snap up options on thousands of acres outside the UDB or purchase similarly located land outright. They can read the handwriting on the wall even if the average Joe Six-Pack can’t. Or won’t.

          Readers should realize that all that is happening despite Miami-Dade’s own planners maintaining that enough developable land is in the County to last until about 2020 at current and projected rates of growth. What’s more, a 2003 report by the County Department of Planning and Zoning maintained that the UDB line shouldn’t be moved. But surely our society and the greater Miami-Dade area are in desperate need of more tasteless development and less Everglades. Pass the wetlands, please. Burrrrp. The developers need to get fatter and they know the best and easiest way to do it is by eating the Everglades.

          The only thing for certain is that a battle royal looms on the horizon between the environmental organizations and the powerbrokers. But does anyone out there really believe that the grease hasn’t already been applied? And that deals haven’t already been reached in back-rooms across Dade County? Hey, we’re talking Miami and Miamians know the power of grease overcomes all obstacles.

          Maybe this is the time to recall those prescient words of mega-developer Al Hoffman, Chairman of the home builder MCI Communities, Inc., when he said that growth in southwest Florida was . . . “an inevitable tidal wave! There’s no power on earth that can stop it!”[2] Hey! Let’s all get fat by eating Florida! There’s plenty of room at the trough if you move quickly enough, even in these challenging times.

          Even if far less consumptive land development scenarios were selected and implemented due to the financial debacle of 2007-2009, the resulting growth would still eat up thousands of acres in south Florida alone. That means it will take the Loxahatchee Slough and the Everglades-Big Cypress Basin a couple decades longer to dry up and die. Longer is thought to be better by all the fat politicians and fatter businessmen responsible for blowing smoke up our collective skirts since by that time they and their fat children will have made their money and will have been dead or retired for many years. And thus beyond our collective reach.

          Unrestrained population growth equals unrestrained land consumption. That’s the nature of the tidal wave headed directly toward south Florida. When that population wave hits all the politicians in the State will be carried with it. In terms of public outcry it will be an irresistible political force. Can’t you hear the people screaming:

We want more land for homes and

goddammit to hell we’re gonna get it!

          If you, Gentle Readers, are confused by the slogan above, another way to understand what I getting to is to realize that when push comes to shove, people who are demanding land for new homes are effectively saying:

We want houses and we don't care how we get them.

Fuck the environment, including the Everglades.

          And when that happens, won’t the developers swoon with delight at the prospect of getting even fatter? As the natural environments of the Everglades-Big Cypress Basin, the Green Swamp, and other sensitive wetlands shrink towards non-existence. But that’s how Florida has always worked.

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[1] Jennifer Sorentrue, “Vavrus Land Designers Vow Sensitivity to Environment, But Activists Dispute It,” Palm Beach Post, December 20, 2004.

[2] Quoted in Michael Grunwald, “Growing Pains in Southwest Fla. – More Development Pushes Everglades to the Edge,” Washington Post, June 25, 2002.