Objections raised by the Ancient Islands Group of Florida Sierra led to changes and the eventual defeat of a proposal to turn some local land-use and zoning cases over to a hearing officer instead of the Polk County Planning Commission.\n<\/p>\n
Sierra’s objections, presented by Chair Tom Palmer, involved turning a legislative function into an administrative one, erecting unnecessary barriers to appeals and removing discretion on how any denials of the hearing officer’s recommendation would be handled by the County Commission.\n<\/p>\n
County Commissioner George Lindsey, who was on the losing side of the 3-2 vote, argued this was something that would make the hearing decisions more predictable and consistent for he and his colleagues in the development community. He argued that this is simply a maturation of the growth management process that dates from the 1985 growth management law.\n<\/p>\n
Sierra argued that heading in this direction may create a system in which public hearings may simply be a formality.\n<\/p>\n
In response to Sierra’s comments at the first public hearing, county staff revised the section on appeals to make it more appellant-friendly.\n<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, the commission’s majority remained uncomfortable with the overall concept.\n<\/p>\n
Additionally, since there is no longer any strong state oversight over local land-use decisions\u2014state officials can raise objection, but no longer have any enforcement power\u2014further erosion of local planning oversight reduces public confidence in the system.\n<\/p>\n
That’s because there is already a public perception that the way the regulations are written, applied and interpreted already gives an unfair advantage to the development community. Stripping some decision-making from the Planning Commission would reinforce that perception.\n<\/p>\n
Voting to reject the proposal were Commissioners Bill Braswell, Martha Santiago and Rick Wislon. Voting to approve the change were Lindsey and Commissioner Neil Combee.\n<\/p>\n
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Objections raised by the Ancient Islands Group of Florida Sierra led to changes and the eventual defeat of a proposal to turn some local land-use and zoning cases over to a hearing officer instead of the Polk County Planning Commission. Sierra’s objections, presented by Chair Tom Palmer, involved turning a legislative function into an administrative […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gci"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1733"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1734,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1733\/revisions\/1734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}