While a volunteer committee spends hours reviewing Polk’s growth plan as part of a required periodic review, it is unclear whether any of their suggestions will go anywhere.
That’s because last year the Florida Legislature passed, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill (SB 180) that included provisions that prohibits local officials from enacting tougher growth regulations or growth plans and made the ban retroactive to last year.
The Polk County Commission has already shelved proposed changes that dealt with development in perennially flood-prone areas because of this change.
During a recent work session with the county’s lobbyists. commissioners learned this is a statewide concern because some of the areas affected were poorly defined (within 100 miles of the storm track) and appears to be having perhaps unintended consequences.
As a result, the lobbyists said there is some feeling legislators may be forced to walk back or clarify the provisions.
That is because it would nullify years of work by local officials, which does not seem fair.
Nevertheless, whether legislators will relent on this pro-developer further erosion of growth management is hard to say because this is the same folks who voted to require all votes to increase impact fees, which many developers oppose, to be unanimous and not simply by a super majority.
Elections matter and what happened last year is another reminder of the need for the public who regularly complains about overdevelopment to support candidates that share their views.
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While a volunteer committee spends hours reviewing Polk’s growth plan as part of a required periodic review, it is unclear whether any of their suggestions will go anywhere. That’s because last year the Florida Legislature passed, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill (SB 180) that included provisions that prohibits local officials from enacting tougher […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"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-2988","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\/2988","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\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2988"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2991,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2988\/revisions\/2991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}