Yesterday, Gov. Charlie Crist and the Florida Cabinet today voted unanimously to order Palm Beach County to rescind two comprehensive plan amendments that would have increased density for these two properties. Both cases involved inappropriate conversions of rural lands for urban and suburban development. Sound familiar?
This important order follows on the heels of two other significant Cabinet rulings protecting urban service boundaries in Miami-Dade and Marion Counties. 1000 Friends of Florida writes, "As with the Miami-Dade and Marion County cases, today’s decision reinforces and upholds the importance of urban boundaries as a growth management tool, the need for overall consistency with the goals, objectives and policies of the comprehensive plan, and the necessity of demonstrating fundamental need prior to granting density or intensity increases."
Plaintiffs were represented by the Everglades Law Center’s Richard Grosso on the Palm Beach County cases. Grosso has also been involved in all the recent challenges by developers and the Miami Dade County Commission to the Growth Management Act. In addition to this important Cabinet ruling, these cases are also significant because they overcame the difficult “fairly debatable” legal test to determine that the land development regulations authorizing the increased density were not in compliance with the local comprehensive plan. Are you listening, Pepe?
2 comments:
Richard Grosso is a STAR in my book.
Yes, Mr. Grosso is a star, and has been for awhile now. If he and his team were treated with the respect they deserve they would be able to advance these causes much more easily, and there would be many more environmental lawyers in south Florida and the Keys willing to become educated and trained to fight the good and much needed fight. Time is short and the water is rising.
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