Next Tuesday the Polk County Commission will have to deal with a roomful of angry homeowners.\n<\/p>\n
The issue is a plan to use a permissive provision of the county’s development regulations to cram a subdivision with 5,000-square-foot lots in an area where many of the lots are as much as 50 times as large.\n<\/p>\n
Residents appealed the case after even the developer-friendly Polk County Planning Commission split 4-3 in recommending the project’s approval.\n<\/p>\n
At the heart of the dispute is something called density bonus points.\n<\/p>\n
This is an oddity of Polk’s development regs that provides a windfall for property owners with land that is dominated by wetlands or other development limitations.\n<\/p>\n
It reflects the inordinate influence of the development community in drafting Polk’s development regulations.\n<\/p>\n
In the case of this proposed development, it works this way.\n<\/p>\n
The site is 121 acres, about 73 acres of which is covered with wetlands.\n<\/p>\n
This land in the Kathleen area, lies in something called the Suburban Development Area., where development density is normally limited to one home per five acres.\n<\/p>\n
But a loophole in the development regulations allow applicants to cram housing lots on the non-wetlands portions of the property at the rate of one home per wetlands acre if they agree to review as a Suburban Planned Development, which allows additional conditions, such as building sidewalks and putting in street lights.\n<\/p>\n
So instead of about 10 lots on the 48 developable acres, there will be 139 lots.\n<\/p>\n
I predict the application will be approved because it complies with the regulations.\n<\/p>\n
Until the regulations are changed, this will recur and there isn’t much anyone but the County Commission can do about it.\n<\/p>\n
\n\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Next Tuesday the Polk County Commission will have to deal with a roomful of angry homeowners. The issue is a plan to use a permissive provision of the county’s development regulations to cram a subdivision with 5,000-square-foot lots in an area where many of the lots are as much as 50 times as large. Residents […]<\/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-649","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\/649","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=649"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":650,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions\/650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}