New look at business regulations delayed

By Steve Estes

A committee formed earlier this year to discuss the merits of reopening the Big Pine Key master land use plan has met just once thus far, and has agreed to delay any serious work until after the end of 2007.

According to Jim Cameron, planning commission chairman and committee member, the county is slated to send its first compliance report on the Habitat Conservation Plan by then to the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

The county will send its first report on H value to USFWS by November or December, said Cameron. Until then there’s really no way we can look at what could be done. If we don’t know what value remains, we have no information from which to formulate plans.Cameron has been the driving force behind the potential reopening of the master plan. The new look will be aimed at commercial areas on Big Pine Key, which Cameron believes unfairly restrict redevelopment of existing properties.

The issue is the arbitrary city center designation. According to the master plan, commercial square footage can only be transferred into the city center for redevelopment purposes. That center leaves out most of the commercial property on Big Pine, said Cameron.

The planning commission chairman, who is also a resident of Big Pine, says he feels as though the entire business district of Big Pine should be included in that transfer radius.

The commercial properties at both ends of the island have been there for a long time. To leave them out of the commercial district seems unfair. They are also some of the larger commercial tracts where more redevelopment could be done, said Cameron.

The inability to transfer unused commercial footage outside the designated city center was the primary regulation that blocked the development of a Publix store on the site of Big Pine True Value.

Developers for Publix wanted to purchase True Value, Egget’s Plumbing and the old Conch & Stein Restaurant and replace them all with a Publix and strip mall. The deal fell through, however, when the developers discovered they couldn’t transfer enough footage onto the site to build a structure of the necessary size.

Cameron said he believes the restrictive nature of the commercial regulations on Big Pine is one of the reasons the island’s business district is fading.

We have a lot of empty commercial buildings on Big Pine that are ripe for redevelopment. Putting something new in those locations would make the island look better, said Cameron.

He said the committee has decided that there will be public meetings held about the proposal.

We want to talk about it and get the community’s feel for things, but we had to adjust the time frame. We also feel as though we need to have the snowbirds in town for those meetings. They are part of the community, too, and should have a voice in anything we do, Cameron said.

Cameron said his vision would be to expand the master plan’s definition of the commercial district to include everything from Rob’s on the east end to Strike Zone on the west end.

That would give us the flexibility to redevelop anything along the way in a way that’s better for the community, he said.
Cameron said that the proposal is aimed almost exclusively at redevelopment of existing parcels.

Most of the undeveloped land along US 1 is already in public ownership of some type, so the green spaces that are there will never be developed, he said.

Many local residents came out against any proposal to reopen the master plan, claiming that it opened the door for more nationally-affiliated commercial enterprises.

The remaining regulations are strict enough that the types of businesses residents seem to fear most probably wouldn’t be able to locate here anyway. We can’t establish any new high-intensity commercial uses, we can’t establish any new drive-through windows, and we can’t allot new footage that results in a structure over 10,000 square feet. Those regulations would seem to eliminate big-box stores and fast-food franchises, which is what most of the concerns have been about, said Cameron.

He said that once the committee had the HCP report for data analysis, it would advertise public meetings on the subject.
If we don’t know how much H value we have left, it’s hard to formulate any kind of plan, he said.

The HCP is an incidental take permit from the USFWS that allows for limited development on Big Pine over the next 20 years in return for a mitigation ratio of three-to-one.

It also allows for a minimal increase in human-induced Key Deer kills as a result of that development.