County, feds work out differences on H value

By Steve Estes

The county’s new Growth Management Director believes that mitigation issues on Big Pine and No Name Key may be finalized in the next few months.

At least concerning how much has been used and how much remains to complete the 20-year planning horizon of the Incidental Take Permit.

The ITP is a development agreement between the county, the State Department of Transportation, the State Department of Community Affairs and the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

The permit allows limited human development over the next 17 years in exchange for mitigation of habitat loss at a three-to-one ratio.

“We were close to the same page, but not entirely,” said Christine Hurley, new growth management director. “The meeting was amicable, not at all adversarial. We have a good team right now that wants to pin down the right information so we can plan where to go from here.”

She and her staff sat down with representatives of the federal agency Monday to iron out discrepancies in the county’s annual mitigation report between USFWS numbers and county numbers.

The impetus for the meeting, said Hurley, was a concern from FDOT that enough mitigation be available for them to complete the three-laning project through Big Pine later this year.

“We are all in agreement that we have more than enough to cover that project,” she said.

The county is allowed to use 1.1 H, or harvest value, of habitat to support Big Pine and No Name Keys’ endangered species over the life of the permit. That amount roughly equates to a total of 200 residential homes, or 10 per year for the life of the permit on the two islands.

That total could change if more building is done on high H-value parcels, or commercial uses with a high traffic intensity move onto Big Pine.

The proposal also covers already planned projects such as the US 1 enhancements, the Overseas Heritage Trail, the new fire station, the Big Pine Community Park and road widenings on Key Deer Blvd.

The former two are yet to take place. The latter two are already completed.

“We agreed that the H loss for the US 1 project wouldn’t be as steep as once thought, and that the H loss for the new fire station wasn’t as steep as had been planned,” said Hurley.

Unable to devise a mitigation fee ordinance that met with the approval of county leaders for more than three years, Monroe County has thus far been supplying all the mitigation for every project on Big Pine, private or governmental, from its H-bank of credits.

The county achieves credits primarily through the purchase, or donation, of environmentally sensitive land equal to three times the H value of the land used for development.

“We seem to agree that the county has a credit of 1.8317 H for development to this point,” said Hurley.

That is about 1.5 H short of the 3.3 the county needs to cover every development forecast on the two islands over the life of the permit.

There has been concern among county leaders that there won’t be enough conservation land available from willing sellers to meet the mitigation load for everything projected under the ITP. All mitigation lands must come from the area encompassed by the ITP, which is Big Pine and No Name Key.

More than 65 percent of those two islands is already in public ownership, and according to reports to the Monroe Board of County Commissioners over the last two years, every vacant parcel owner has received no less than two offers to purchase land from one of the interested agencies, county, state and federal.

All three received new money yearly to purchase environmentally sensitive, which up to this point has been the only way USFWS has allowed it to be used as mitigation because purchase retires all development rights. It also takes the property off the county’s tax rolls if the county or state buys it. The federal government pays a fee in lieu of taxes for lands it owns.

“That’s a valid concern, and one that we just don’t yet know the answer to,” said Hurley.

She said there is also concern among the parties that planned infrastructure extensions might skew the original permit numbers.

“We did talk about potential mitigation requirements for infrastructure,” said Hurley. “But we didn’t come up with any answers yet.”

USFWS has asked the county for more detailed information on where a central sewer system planned for Big Pine Key would be routed so it can assess the impact to habitat.

“One of the unique things about this is that we don’t necessarily issue permits for infrastructure development,” said Hurley. “We don’t permit DOT, so what we did was ask DOT for a written request for the amount of mitigation it needs from our bank. That gives us a paper trail down the road.”

DOT said three years ago that it would not pay mitigation fees to complete the widening project because it had paid a portion of the costs for the original Habitat Conservation Plan that resulted in the ITP, a six-year $600,000 undertaking.

“We may have to do the same thing with Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority, or Keys Energy,” said Hurley. “We wouldn’t normally get a permitting request that would automatically kick off a mitigation calculation.”

The county is allowed to development up to five percent of H over what it has available until more is made available.

How to handle that potential issue is a policy one, said Hurley.

District Two County Commissioner George Neugent, who represents both Big Pine and No Name Keys, has been asking for the mitigation questions surrounding infrastructure development to be ironed out for a little over a year.

“If the sewer system needs more mitigation that we have available, it would be up to the BOCC to figure out a way to address that,” said Neugent.

According to National Key Deer Refuge Manager Anne Morkill, the service is waiting on detailed plans and some wildlife studies to determine the impact on habitat for endangered species before any talk of mitigation numbers can proceed for both sewer lines and a possible extension of commercial power to No Name Key.