Boo Hoo For the People who have to drive 3 or 4 miles to a Homecenter Store It was sad today, hearing all those poor people that have to drive to get to a home improvement store. The Planning Board listened. Even though the County staff of 35 professional planners recommended against moving the Urban Development Boundary for a Lowes Store, the Planning Board overwhelmingly voted to move the line for the home improvement store. The ridiculous part of the whole thing: the store owns enough acreage inside the line to build a store. Their excuse: "It isn't square enough." So redesign a store to fit your property you morons.
And get this, the store said they would SELL land for a school. Not give, sell! That was a perk "sell". Give me a break. So now not only would we have a stupid store we would also have a school on very expensive land (you know there will be no bargains) in our wetlands near our wellfield. The Developer's lawyer/lobbyist, Juan Mayol, talked more about the school than the store. How magnanimous, we will sell land for a school to ensure that everyone has to drive by our store twice every day at 15 MPH.
Many lobbyists were there -- this was a biggie. I saw Miguel De La Portilla, Susan Fried, Armando Guitterez, Jeffrey Bercow, Rob Curtis, etc.
How many at the meeting spoke against the 4 UDB Line assaults? Hundreds you might assume. Well you would be wrong: there were five.
It appeared Lowes "paid" people to sit in the audience on their behalf. At least that is what a person in the john told me...couldn't get the amount out of them.
This Planning Board meeting is the first step to moving the UDB line and it went swimmingly...bad. This was a done deal before the meeting began. Mayol could have talked about chickens and it would have been passed.
One good thing: Gonzalo Sanabria is off the Planning Board.
7 comments:
Poor Janet McAliley: where is the McAliley Line when and where we need it.
No one even raised the issue in the debate about Lowe's. Long ago, the school board member, who served 16 years on the board, persuaded colleagues to adopt a rule that no new schools would be built within a mile of the Urban Development Boundary, recognizing that new schools create new constituencies who want further development past the line toward the Everglades.
This bit of common sense was jettisoned, and today's packaged performance by Juan Mayol glided past the topic as though it didn't exist: we need more schools, we need more CHARTER schools.
Make no mistake, Lowe's is the corporate prow of the ship trying to keep the UDB breakable. All the assurances of "green" building... it sounded as polished as the sugar industry assuring Florida it's not polluting the Everglades.
Natacha is back from India? Did she bring trinkets to share?
She was wearing pedal pushers and thong shoes no bling from India.
Why would they move the UDB line for a Loew's store. This is just plain ignorance.
Juan was grown up...great.
My favorite part of the public comments was when the people paid by Lowe's insisted that the land "is not wetlands" and that they didn't know what those opposed to the store were talking about when they said the proposal would be located on wetlands. I guess the PAB members believed them.
I also loved the argument that the Lowe's store can't be built in a rectangle (because that would lead to the unthinkable- garage parking!!) and yet the proposed school apparently can be. Last time I checked, schools also need parking lots.
Last UDB fight, Katy Sorenson talked about how a 5 story-high Home Depot was built in Manhattan. You do what you need to do with existing facilities. Does such a massive corporation as Lowes not have skilled enough planners, architects, and engineers to figure out how to build on their 16 acres inside the line (which would make it the largest home improvement store in Miami)?? If not, too bad -- that's the risk you take when you buy wetlands.
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