The Marsh Rabbit Run Trail at Circle B Bar Reserve is temporarily closed until further notice. The recent closing of the trail is necessary for the safety of our visitors and resident wildlife. Signs will be posted. All visitors should comply with any trail closure sign.

Typically the signs are posted because of the presence of nesting alligator near the trail or damage to the trail.

There are many more opportunities for hiking, nature study and other outdoor activities at Polk’s network of environmental preserves. For a location map and additional information on Polk County Environmental lands, visit www.polknature.com.

It is still way too early to celebrate, but last week Polk’s County Commission—at two of them anyway—said they were willing to review the long-standing let’s-make-a-deal aspect of Polk’s development regulations.

How this works is regardless of what the land-use map says regarding how many homes per acre should be allowed on a particular piece of land, there’s a big loophole.

That is something called the planned development concept, formerly known as planned-unit developments. The idea has been around in some form for decades. It relies on a system of so-called density bonus points that allow two or three or more times the normally allowed density if the developer agrees to do stuff that the regulations don’t require.

In some cases the trade-off is easy to defend, such as setting aside an acre or two of developable land for a new school or a fire station.

But the justification of other density bonus points being awarded either for doing things such as installing sidewalks or street lights or planting more trees that simply make the subdivision more marketable or agreeing to some token “preservation” measures such as setting aside a probably useless fragment of native habitat after bulldozing the rest are debatable.

The possible changes are an outgrowth of the discussions at recent public hearings in which the density bonus point system was used to justify cramming more homes into rural areas.

There are other questionable giveaways in the development code that should be part of this discussion.

There’s the so-called transit-supported development overlay that allows more density in areas that have no access to transit and may never have it. The most egregious case in recent memory involved a proposed development in southwest Polk that was next to an area so rural people had horses.

In one of the so-called “special area plans” that increasingly dot unincorporated Polk County, developers can get density bonus points for installing a transit stop even if there is no transit available or planned. That seems hard to justify.

Then there’s the wetlands giveaway that allows increased density on uplands on property that also contain wetlands that the developer couldn’t develop in the first place.

How soon any of this will occur—if it ever does—is unknown.

County planners are scheduled to brief commissioners on some proposed changes at a work session in August.

Depending on how that goes, the next steps would be to draft amendments to the current development regulations, set public hearings and decide when they would take effect because of the expected pleas for allowing a lot of proposed developments to slip in under the wire.

Stay tuned on whether this occurs this year or next year and how far commissioners are willing to go to change the rules. This is a good time for the public to get more involved before they’re affected rather than complaining after the damage is done.

If you thought the worst toll road damage in Polk would involve work planned in a couple of years on a toll road that would slice off a piece of Marshall Hampton Reserve’s oak-shaded trails, think again.

That project called the western leg of the Central Polk Parkway will connect the area around the Winter Haven industrial park and freight rail terminal with the Polk Parkway.

The impact on the Marshall Hampton Reserve also involves the relocation of the parking area and trailheads and some alteration of some of the lands east of Lake Hancock purchased by the Southwest Florida Water Management District as part of the Lake Hancock reservoir project that are now owned by the Florida Department of Transportation. Swiftmud also owns the Marshall Hampton Reserve, but Polk County manages it.

This western leg was one of two toll road projects shelved by state transportation officials in 2015 after they concluded there wasn’t enough projected traffic to make them financially feasible. At the time that especially applied to a section that would travel in a large arc through sections of rural eastern Polk County between State Road 60 and Interstate 4.

There have been stealthy attempts to revive the eastern leg in recent years.

For instance, a plan to replicate part of the route from the south end of Powerline Road to Scenic Highway was contained in a list of unfunded transportation needs announced at recent County Commission retreats.

There are hints that it popped up again in the discussion of seemingly unrelated effort called the Northeast Polk U.S. 27 Mobility Study. That study was begun in 2019 purportedly to figure out ways to improve traffic flow on the section of U.S. 27 between State Road 60 and U.S. 192 at the Polk-Lake county line.

But if you dig deeper into the very preliminary comments and other local transportation planning reports, it becomes clear that this also became a vehicle to revive previously abandoned road projects such as the eastern leg of the Central Polk Parkway.

This project, which was pushed largely be economic development officials in Haines City, is more troubling than the western leg because it would go through or near environmental preservation areas and rural homesteads in the Marion Creek and Reedy Creek basins.

The area is home to a number of rare and endangered species and is part of a statewide wildlife corridor and may include some land that could be considered for acquisition if Polk County voters approve a measure in November to restart funding of the Polk County Environmental Lands land-acquisition program by renewing funding for it.

The revival of the eastern leg popped up again in a May 6 notice published by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection seeking written public comments on the environmental impacts of this proposal.

The notice refers to the same phony claims about emergency evacuation, congestion management and more efficient freight movement that is part of all of the road-building lobby’s reports of this sort back in the pre-2015 presentations.

More recent analyses somehow want to make it an alternative corridor to U.S. 27, which is questionable because most of the traffic on U.S. 27 is likely headed to a destination along U.S. 27 or trying to reach Interstate 4 and not interested in a lengthy rural detour. All this road will cause is more urban sprawl.

Anyway, written comments are due by June 1:

Send them to:

Chris Stahl, Coordinator

Florida State Clearinghouse

Florida Department of Environmental Protection

3900 Commonwealth Blvd. M.S. 47

Tallahassee FL 32399-2400

Polk County officials are planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in coming years to develop so-called alternative water sources. These projects involve tapping the upper nether regions of the Floridan aquifer in rural areas of the county and building an extensive pipeline system to deliver the treated water to faraway cities.

The rationale for this is to continue development as usual because the traditional historic freshwater aquifer has been overexploited and would become salty instead of fresh if the overpumping continued unabated.

One issue that utility officials have been struggling with to avoid this type of expenditure is to persuade customers to use less water, which relates to how residential subdivisions are developed .

Water conservation is a concept that has been slow to catch on in many parts of Florida, where residents are used to being able to water their lawns as much and as often as they felt was necessary to maintain this green monoculture.

Ironically, newer subdivisions use more water than older ones because most of the new homes come equipped with automated irrigation systems.

This is important because lawn irrigation makes up the largest portion of residential water use and the rules for when and how often people can irrigate don’t appear to be aggressively enforced. Last month was Water Irrigation Month in Florida and elsewhere, but driving through one town along the Lake Wales Ridge the other day the sprinklers were running at midday in a section of the main street medians.

The Lake Wales Ridge is an apt place to talk about the folly of lawn irrigation because before heavy development and agriculture arrived, the landscape didn’t resemble anything lush.

This ridge that runs from northern Lake County to southern Highlands County is really a series of prehistoric desert islands.

The late Henry Swanson, who served as agriculture extension agent in Orange County decades ago, aptly pointed out that every other place at about this latitude on the planet is a desert. He warned about the coming water shortages that have become more obvious to more people in recent times and are what spurred the water projects mentioned above.

The thing that makes Florida less desert-like is when the prehistoric seas receded a peninsula that’s often able to benefit from rainfall from crossing sea breezes, but there’s speculation how long that will last as climate change has more of an effect on regional weather patterns.

In other parts of the United States that don’t have the benefit of sea breezes are wall-to-wall deserts, officials have taken a radical approach to save water.

In Nevada, for instance, legislators voted last year to mandate that residential lawns had to go because they could only be maintained with irrigation, which they ruled wastes declining water supplies for merely esthetic purposes.

Officials in southern California are also reportedly trying to crack down on unnecessary lawn irrigation too.

If this were proposed in Florida, it would result in a lot of pushback from the lawn industry—sod has become by some accounts Florida’s largest agricultural crop—and the lawn-care industry that previously resisted the idea that fertilizer use during the rainy season should somehow be limited because the stormwater runoff from these hyper-enriched lawns contributed to the pollution of lakes and streams and the estuaries where the water ultimately reaches.

Homeowners who have been persuaded that lush lawns are the best thing in the world would rebel, too because they don’t know any better.

Nevertheless as the pressure on water supplies increases, it may be worth considering whether current practices are a good idea.

Keep in mind that the current water plans under consideration are only designed to deal with the predicted shortages that will occur over the next couple of decades.

The planet is expected to exist much longer than that.

Maybe it’s time to start thinking much farther out.

When local business and government officials gathered recently to hear the official version of the “State of the County,” they got only part of the story.

The presentation as all built around the mathematical mirage that Polk is the fastest-growing county in Florida, based on some recent data. That of course ignores the fact that percentages are based on the difference between the starting point and the ending point, not on absolute numbers.

Between the 2010 and 2020 census, Polk ranked seventh in overall population growth.

Nevertheless, Polk is certainly a lot more crowded place than it was a few decades ago.

This is an environmental issue and one of the reasons for the current campaign to persuade voters to tax themselves again to buy and protect some of the county’s remaining green spaces while they’re still available.

That is why it was disappointing that the environment was barely mentioned in this program. And when it was mentioned, it was in terms of the need to develop more water supplies to keep conducting business as usual.

The fact that the reason water is an issue is because the resource was overexploited for years when it wasn’t being overpolluted and maybe the challenge of the future is to do better didn’t come up.

There was talk of crowded roads, but not the reality of the fact that living in a fast-growing area and expecting no traffic congestion seems to be delusional.

A close look at the 20 so-called priority road projects for which fortunately for the environment there is no money at the moment would illustrate where the priorities lie. Hint: It doesn’t involve protection of green spaces from more urban sprawl.

The provision for adequate parks and open spaces also seemed to have escaped mention.

And so it goes.