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BCC Minutes 09/26/2001 W (Rural and Agricultural Area Assessment & Immokalee Area Study)September 26, 2001 TRANSCRIPT OF THE MEETING OF THE BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS WORKSHOP Naples, Florida, September 26, 2001 LET IT BE REMEMBERED, that the Board of County Commissioners, in and for the County of Collier, having conducted business herein, and also acting as the Board of Zoning Appeals and as the governing board(s) of such special districts as have been created according to law and having conducted business herein, met on this date at 9:15 a.m. In WORKSHOP SESSION in Building "F" of the Government Complex, Naples, Florida, with the following members present: CHAIRMAN: James D. Carter, Ph.D. Pamela S. Mac'Kie Jim Coletta Donna Fiala Tom Henning ALSO PRESENT: Thomas Olliff, County Manager Page 1 NOTICE OF BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS INFORMATIONAL WORKSHOP Wednesday, September 26, 2001 9:00 A.M. Notice is hereby given that the Collier County Board of County Commissioners will hold an informational workshop on WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2001, at 9:00 A.M., in the Board Meeting Room, Third Floor, Harmon Turner Building (Administration), at the Collier County Government Complex, 3301 East Tamiami Trail, Naples, Florida. The Board's informational topic(s) will include, but may not be limited to, an overview of the following subjects: · · · · · · Rural Area Assessment (Immokalee Area Study) Overview of the Study Agriculture - Past, Present, and Future Environmental Assets of the Area Committee Report Horizon Framework/Scenario Outline The meeting is open to the public. Any person who decides to appeal a decision of this Board will need a record of the proceedings pertaining thereto, and therefore may need to ensure that a verbatim record of the proceedings is made, which record includes the testimony and evidence upon which the appeal is to be based. BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS COLLIER COUNTY, FLORIDA James D. Carter, Ph.D., Chairman DWIGHT E. BROCK, CLERK By:/s/Maureen Kenyon Deputy Clerk September 26, 2001 CHAIRMAN CARTER: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Collier County Board of County Commissioner workshop on rural and agricultural area assessment, Immokalee area study. As we begin the program this morning, would you please make sure that all your cell phones are off, please. We know how important you are and everybody wants to talk to you, but it does become distracting. So, as we begin all meetings, will you join me in standing for the pledge of allegiance. (The pledge of allegiance was recited in unison.) CHAIRMAN CARTER: I understand we had a new little rendition that was going on behind me. I'll take a pass on that. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Yes. CHAIRMAN CARTER: What you have to understand is your Board of County Commissioners do have a sense of humor, and we do truly enjoy being together for these meetings and working together. We really are -- in my experience -- and this is my third year on the board. I don't have the experience that Commissioner Mac'Kie has, but this group -- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: God bless you. CHAIRMAN CARTER: I'm not going there. This group, I can say, is just a lot of fun to work with. Now, sometimes we do get in some pretty interesting discussions among ourselves, but I will tell you when we walk up to this dais, there's not one moment of animosity between us at all. We just are not cut that way. We can debate it out with each other up here and have differences, but if we all thought the same, as one former commissioner said, all you'd need is one of us. So with that, thank you all for being here and to our listeners at home. I think this is probably one of the finest, again, workshops that you will have an opportunity to participate and listen to because this Page 2 September 26, 2001 is a continuing process for Collier County. This one deals with the eastern lands in which we are going to devote specifically this time this morning for us to get an update on what's taking place, where we are, and our overall efforts in our Growth Management Plan which ties into everything. Growth management for there, for the rural fringe, for the urban areas, for community character studies. All of the pieces will come together, but we take individual workshops to focus so that we can get the most information and deal with these in an expedient way and effective way and not try to lump a lot of things together on one agenda. That's why you see us in a lot of workshops, and then every other week you'll see us meeting in a general assembly here to deal with all kinds of county business that comes in front of us. So with that, Mr. Olliff, I'll turn the meeting over to you. MR. OLLIFF: Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. Good morning, Commissioners. Welcome to another workshop. We're getting started a little bit late, so I'm going to try to cut my comments as short as I possibly can. This workshop needs to appreciate how lucky they are. We made the group yesterday sing God Bless America. As patriotic as we are, we've learned not to try to do that in our meetings anymore. CHAIRMAN CARTER: We are not going to be known as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, I'll tell you that. MR. OLLIFF: This workshop is one that I think is an exceptionally important workshop for us. Most of the commissioners are fully aware of the issues surrounding the rural lands issue. The eastern portions of this county and the development and land-use patterns that we will try and put together for our future as we move out to the east in Collier County are going to be exceptionally important for us. I think it's very important for the board to understand fully all of Page 3 September 26, 2001 the details about how we got here, why we are where we are, and what the future is going to be, and hopefully you will get that from today's workshop. For some housekeeping items, one, there are on the table at the front of the room some speaker slips, and if anyone is interested in speaking, there is an opportunity at the end of the workshop for any public comment. If you'll fill one of those out and hand it to Mr. Dunnuck, who's got his hand up in the air, we'll make sure that we call you at the appropriate time. The only other thing I would add, Mr. Chairman, is this is a workshop, and for those of you who are wearing coats, by all means feel relaxed, take them off. This is where we roll up our sleeves and hopefully -- CHAIRMAN CARTER: Okay. If you feel uncomfortable, I'll take mine off. MR. OLLIFF: -- get a little work done. The agenda starts with Marti Chumbler who is Nancy Lananne's partner, and I think appropriately so she's going to kick off our workshop by sort of going through the "how we got here" chronology. And with that I'll just turn that over to Marti. MS. CHUMBLER: Good morning, Mr. Chairman, members of the Commission. As Mr. Olliff indicated, I'm Marti Chumbler with Carlton Fields law firm, and I've been asked to come today to kind of run over with you all, again, how we got to where we are today. For some of you, I'm sure this is something you probably could recite yourselves as well or better than I can. Back in 1997 the Collier County Board of County Commissioners adopted amendments to the local Comprehensive Plan which ultimately were found by an administrative law judge not to be in compliance with state law. Specifically, those amendments were deemed not to adequately protect natural resources like wildlife, listed species, and habitat. Page 4 September 26, 2001 As a result of that recommendation by the judge, the Governor and Cabinet sitting as the administration commission issued some remedial orders. Some of those were very specific amendments which have since been adopted by the commission. Some were interim amendments which have also been adopted by the commission. But the big piece, the piece that we're here talking about today, is the assessment. Through that assessment the Governor and Cabinet ordered Collier County with public participation to look into steps that would be taken to adequately protect these natural resources and the way that the Comprehensive Plan should be amended for those protections. Now, there was a deadline put on the assessment. The Governor and Cabinet indicated that by June 22nd, 2002, any amendments that came out of that assessment should actually be adopted. It appears that we are going to meet that deadline for the rural fringe assessment. The Governor and Cabinet had indicated that with the agricultural rural lands it would be appropriate for the assessment to be split into two parts; one part dealing with the rural fringe upon which there was already a lot of data available and not a need for collection of a lot of new data, and a separate phase assessment for the rural area because there the data set was not as good. As I said, it looks like the June 22nd, 2002, deadline will be met for the rural fringe; however, we think that it would be really rushing things to try to meet that deadline for the rural area. Therefore, we've talked to all the other parties that were involved in the litigation before, and we reached a consensus that it would be appropriate to ask the Governor and Cabinet to move that deadline to October of 2002. We've also made contacts with the staff and the administration commission, and it appears that that motion will probably be granted. The schedule, as I say, is moving forward with that adjustment, and Page 5 September 26, 2001 that sort of brings you up to where we are today. I would be glad to take any questions that you may have. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Commissioners, any questions on that aspect? COMMISSIONER FIALA: It's very clear. CHAIRMAN CARTER: It's very clear to me. MS. CHUMBLER: Thank you. MR. OLLIFF: Mr. Chairman, next on your agenda is Ron Hamel who's going to provide you an overview of the Immokalee area study. MR. HAMEL: Thank you, Tom and Marti. Good morning, Commissioners. For the record, my name is Ron Hamel. I am one of the volunteer citizens that have been appointed to serve on the oversight committee, and I was appointed by Commissioner Berry at the time. I am honored to be here today to represent the committee as the chairperson. I think I missed one committee meeting of the committee, and the next thing I know I was chairman of the commissioner-- of the committee. So I'm not going to miss anymore. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: That will teach you. MR. HAMEL: As indicated by Chairman Carter and Mr. Olliff, we are here to give you a status report of the progress of the rural assessment. Our presentation today consists of a video and a PowerPoint, and the presentation covers seven different topics and is being presented by nine different individuals. The presenters include members of the committee, staff, consultants, and agricultural experts. We have prepared an introductory video to kind of put this effort into focus and to frame our discussion this morning. So without any further delay, I would like to go ahead and roll the video and call your attention to the screen. Page 6 September 26, 2001 (The video was played.) COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Wow. Great job. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Excellent. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Who put that together? That was just wonderful. Does anybody know? Is anybody going to take credit? That was fabulous. So well done. Thank you. CHAIRMAN CARTER: That would be great for community meetings, I think, that every organization, if you're not tuned in, homeowners' associations, if you want to educate your groups coming back, let them know what the rural land study is all about, this is the best that I have seen. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: I agree with you, Jim. I would suggest that we make that available to Channel 54. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Absolutely. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Run that all the time. Okay. Thank you. What do you do for an encore here? COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: No pressure, Mr. Townsend. MR. OLLIFF: Mr. Chairman, I think we're next on the agenda to agriculture past, present, and future, and you've got Dallas Townsend and Tom Spreen on the agenda. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: And who could do a better job of telling us that. MR. TOWNSEND: You're very generous. Thank you, Tom. Mr. Chairman, members of the board, I do indeed think it's an honor to have an opportunity to visit with you and talk a little bit about the agricultural development of Collier County. Just to give you a little background on myself, I served here in Collier County as a livestock 4-H Club agent from 1965 to 1979 and then had an opportunity to move north nine miles. I went up to Hendry County. Page 7 September 26, 2001 · I think one of the things that is very important is to recognize how old the agricultural industry here is in Collier County. So let's get started by looking at a little bit here. Historically the first major agricultural industry in Southwest Florida was the county -- excuse me -- I'm on the wrong line -- was the cattle industry. It was started well before 1900. And we have a beautiful graphic there of a painting, but I want to give you a little bit more of a personal note on that painting. That is an actual painting of a photograph. That's the Red Cattle Company cattle crew driving a bunch of steers into the railroad loading pens in Immokalee in 1948. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Oh, how neat. Wow. MR. TOWNSEND: However, the cattle industry did no land development. Basically all they did was try to manage their pastures through some controlled burnings in those days. There was almost no intentive agricultural production in the area until after 1928. The exception was a few fields of vegetable along the coastal areas, and there was a little sugarcane in the area of Marco Island and Everglades City. They transported those by boat to wherever they wanted to market them. Citrus production prior to 1920 was limited to a small citrus grove at Deep Lake, if you know where that's at. There was the Roberts Ranch Grove in Immokalee, which this county has purchased part of; my grandfather's grove in Felda, just north of Immokalee; and a number of small groves along the coast in the Fort Myers area and along the Caloosahatchee River. So you can see that commercial ag was quite small. It wasn't until 1928 when the Tamiami Trail was opened and the Atlantic coastline came from Immokalee to Everglades City along with State Road 29 that commercial vegetable production began. Prior to that time, there just was no road infrastructure by which you could get your produce marketed. Page 8 September 26, 2001 The first major production or commercial production of vegetables occurred in Collier County during the 1930s and '40s in the Ochopee area. The growers utilized the native Ochopee marl prairies. There was a lot of prairies along U.S. 41 and Highway 29 going up towards Immokalee where there was minimal or no land clearing required. So these farmers would move onto those prairies and do what we call wildcat farming. They just moved out there, made a few beds, planted their produce, and grew the crops. This area stretched all the way from Ochopee, if you know where Ochopee used to be, all the way to Monroe Station. This area also extended north along 29 almost to Alligator Alley. Alligator Alley, of course, did not exist at that time. The reason they grew the vegetables in that area is those soils have a naturally high pH. They run around 7 1/2 to 8 1/2 pH. Tomatoes were tolerant of that condition. In addition, the winter temperatures were quite warm there. However, the crops were only produced in the late winter and spring months because the area was too wet for fall production. Also, there was no irrigation and almost no water control. These soils have a very dense layer of Tamiami limestone underlying the limited depth of usable soil there, and it just wasn't economically feasible to blast the rock and create ditches in other water-controlled facilities. Commercial vegetable production occurred in the Ochopee area on into the mid '50s. However, the vegetable production was very nomadic because of the weeds and disease buildup that would occur after a field was farmed. As a result of this nomadic movement, over time nearly 35,000 acres of land in the Ochopee area had been farmed for vegetables at one time or another. It wasn't until just before and during World War II that the pine and palmetto flatwoods were utilized for vegetable production. The reason for this is that the pine and palmetto woods have a naturally Page 9 September 26, 2001 low pH of about 4.0 to 4.5 -- sometimes below that level but most generally in that range -- and vegetables could not be produced on soils with a pH that low due to the aluminum toxicity that does occur. Many of these pine and palmetto flatwood areas had features that made them very useful. They were elevated above the swamp lands, sloughs, and ponds, and didn't have rock under them except at the deeper zones, and this would allow the farmers to dig rim ditches and dikes around their farms so they could keep water from running into the field, and by installing a throw-out pump they could throw the excess water over the dike out into the swamps. So basically you had a moat around your place, so to speak. Many of these soils had a natural feature that made them very useful. They had what we call a hard pan or a spodic zone. It's a layer of organic material down around 35 or 48 inches, and you could perch your water on top of this zone, and it made it easy to irrigate these fields through seepage irrigation. During the 1930s research by the University of Florida showed that by applying finely Hi-Calcic limestone or Dolomitic limestones to these soils, the pH could be raised to 6.0, and vegetable production could be done on these soils. So during the late '30s and during World War II, some limited production on the pine and palmetto flatwoods did occur. But it wasn't until after World War II that farmers began to make massive use of the pine and flatwood soils. After World War II the farmers began to rapidly utilize these pine and palmetto woods due to the advantage of the better water control and the opportunity to produce fall, winter, and spring crops. As a result the vegetables on the calcareous soils of the Ochopee area began to decline in the late '40s and was pretty well gone by the 1950s. The old farm fields were abandoned, and hardly a trace of those fields can be seen today due to the revegetation that's occurred. If you had an opportunity to look at the 1950 aerials of that area, they Page 10 September 26, 2001 were quite visible. But you probably would be hard-pressed to find them today. In the late 1940s, it was recognized by the Collier Board of Commissioners here that the agricultural industry was an important component of the area economy, so it created the County Agricultural Cooperative Extension Department in 1950. The first county agent was on board a few months, and he got the Immokalee State Farmers Market started, but he died of a heart attack shortly after coming on board. Mr. Don Lander was appointed the county agent in 1951. One of the first things he did was initiate the development of a soil survey map. It was a joint effort between the University of Florida Experimental Station and the United States Department of Soil Conservation Service. As a result Collier County was a leader in this field. It had the first soils map in Southwest Florida by 1951. There wasn't another soils map created in Southwest Florida until the '70s. The vegetable growers used this map extensively to pick out the best flatwood soils because it still had to move around on a frequent interval due to the buildup of weeds and diseases. It was very rare that vegetables would be produced on the same field for more than two years. After a vegetable farmer cleared and farmed the land for one or two years, the field would be abandoned, and the cattle industry would then move in and plant an improved grass on these fields. In many cases it would be just left as an old farm field, and we would revegetate mostly with common Bermuda grass. We have an aerial photograph showing south of Immokalee. That's Camp Keais Strand. Let's see if this reaches. That's Camp Keais Strand right there. This is 2000. This is 1963. You'll see that the active farm fields are a lighter color, and all of that open area has been farmed at one time or another, and they were still rotating around at that time to a large extent. Page 11 September 26, 2001 COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: And Camp Keais Strand is in the second one, in the '96 photo? MR. TOWNSEND: It's there. I think Camp Keais has been largely cut out of the second photo. I can't spot it. That's probably the very edge of it right there. But that's supposed to be a cutaway of the same area. I think if you follow the dotted line there and match it with this line right here, and I'm not holding this thing too steady. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: That's all right. MR. TOWNSEND: Anyway, Camp Keais is to the left, and it's still there. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Yeah. MR. TOWNSEND: Beginning in the late '50s farmers would sometimes go back on old farm fields after it had been out of production for at least five years, and that was what was happening right there on that one photograph. By the early '60s, though, it was apparent that usable undeveloped pine palmetto flatwoods were becoming scarce. Although there was still a large acreage of these, they were confronted with some problems. The undeveloped flatwood areas, a lot of them were situated on very rocky soils that were near the surface. Another one, they were not very accessible, and it was going to be very expensive for the farmers to construct the road back into those areas. The size and shape of these remaining flatwoods was not conducive to the development of an efficient farm field. They would be horribly shaped along the curved peninsulas, and they just couldn't make use of them. Another thing that began to take its place or come into play was the cost of clearing got to be very expensive. As a result Don Lander, the extension director of Collier County, initiated a new program down here, and that was the soil fumigation and plastic mulch culture which we're all familiar with today. That was to control the weeds and diseases in the early to mid Page 12 September 26, 2001 '60s. In addition, this alleviated the cost of clearing land and moving around so much. It cost quite a bit of money to a farmer to pack up and leave and move somewhere else. By the late '60s, the farmers had almost universally adopted the soil fumigation and plastic mulch culture, and very little clearing of flatwoods in Collier and Hendry Counties occurred after 1970. According to the data that I had developed when I was a livestock agent here, I found from 1940 to 1979 the vegetable industry had cleared and developed over 175,000 acres of flatwoods and slough areas in Collier County. The vast majority of this land clearing did occur before 1970. In Hendry County the vegetable and sugarcane cleared and developed over 250,000 acres in that same span of time. It should be noted that the total vegetable acreage in Collier and Hendry Counties has remained somewhat stable during the last 20 years varying from 25,000 to 35,000 annually. However, due to the double-cropping system that has evolved -- for example, following a fall crop of tomatoes with a crop of watermelons on that same acre in the same crop year, there is probably not over eighteen to twenty-five thousand actual acres of land being used for vegetables in any one year. The citrus industry did not move into Collier County until about 1960. That's another painting of an actual photograph. That's a harvesting crew in Alva, Florida, which is one of the English family's citrus groups there. We had a few small groves that were planted in the Immokalee area there along 82, right there at the comer of 29 and 82, and one just south of town. Then also in that period of time in the late '60s the Collier Company -- which has now been divided into Collier Enterprises and Barron Collier Partnership, I think, and Turner Corporation both each planted about a thousand acres of citrus groves, and that was two of the largest early plantings of citrus in Collier County. Page 13 September 26, 2001 In '61 several large citrus developments began in northern Hendry County. A. Duda and Sons and a group of Verry, Paul, and Lawless took in about 25,000 acres up there. They didn't get it all developed at one time. This was a process that went on over a period of years. The citrus grove development was given a boost by the freeze of 1962 which destroyed a large acreage of citrus in Central Florida. In addition, the University of Florida research had shown that flatwood soils could produce good citrus groves if adequate water control was achieved. According to the Florida Department of Ag statistics, Collier County had 6,706 acres -- and we've got that graphic on the board there -- of in 1980, and by the year 2000 they had 35,302. Hendry County had a little over 30,000 in 1980, and by the year 2000, we had just under 100,000 acres of citrus. According to the data compiled by myself and others, the vast majority -- and I'm going to estimate over 98 percent -- of the expansion of the citrus industry in Collier and Hendry County from 1980 until 2000 occurred on the improved pastures and old farm fields that had already been cleared and developed by the vegetable industry. This expansion occurred as a result of the devastating freezes that occurred in the 1980s that destroyed over 150,000 acres of citrus in Central Florida. In closing, the data clearly shows there's been a massive increase in intensive agricultural production in Collier and Hendry Counties during the last 20 years. However, the following points should be remembered: Over 98 percent of the intensification has occurred on lands that had already been developed by the vegetable industry and were still being used by the vegetable industry for farming or by the cattle industry as improved or semi-improved pastures. The next point, the cattle industry took the full brunt of this land-use intensification when huge areas of improved pastures and Page 14 September 26, 2001 old farm fields were converted permanently to citrus or vegetable production. This conversion amounted to 28,596 acres in Collier County and 69,351 acres in Hendry County for a total of about 97,947 acres. This conversion caused a vast reduction of the cattle industry in both counties. It can be seen by the fact in 1980 there were 40,000 head-of-brood cows in Collier County, and in 2000 there was 13,000 heads. Hendry County had 110,000 heads, the largest beef cattle county in the state at that time. Today it has about 55,000 heads. So this stocking rate had to be reduced tremendously when you took the best land out of the cattle operation. I'll be very happy to try to answer any questions you might have. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Commissioner Henning. COMMISSIONER HENNING: Mr. Townsend, if I understand right, what you're saying is it's not viable for the farmer to farm on wetlands or they haven't farmed converted wetlands into farming because of the economics, or am I mistaken? MR. TOWNSEND: Vegetable farmers have used some of what I call the higher-level sloughs for farming. Those had already been developed many years ago, and they were the cheapest to use. But as far as rooting up a cypress tree, almost none of that occurred. Sometimes a farmer may have a few fringe trees around a swamp that he might take out to square up a walkway or something like that, but farmers generally did not attempt to go into wetlands because the water-control issues were so costly to deal with. COMMISSIONER HENNING: Thank you. MR. TOWNSEND: You're welcome. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Before you leave I just -- I guess, in quick summary for me, what it verifies -- even though I'm a city boy and my families both came from farming backgrounds, we've now put together what my grandfather said, "There's only a certain amount Page 15 September 26, 2001 of acreage that ever can be used well for farm production," whether it's what you have related -- whether it's cattle, whether it's vegetables, or citrus or however you rotate it, there's a limited capacity in which you can farm because of the economics. MR. TOWNSEND: Exactly. CHAIRMAN CARTER: What you have provided for me is an excellent history lesson that people knowing nothing about any of these things just intuitively knew by what they could get from the soils where to go and how to do it and over time whether to rotate it or use something else. We ended up with this block of land that we continue to use. MR. TOWNSEND: Exactly. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Thank you, sir. MR. TOWNSEND: If you look at some of the old aerial photographs, you'll find that some of these farmers did make some mistakes. They formed an area that couldn't be irrigated. After learning that lesson, they never came back to it. COMMISSIONER FIALA: One other question. We used to be -- years ago I have been told that we were about second in cattle production in the U.S. Where do we stand now? MR. TOWNSEND: Florida is still 9th. It varies between 9th and 10th from year to year. We're second east of the Mississippi River. So we're still a major cattle-producing state. We have about 2 million heads in this state. COMMISSIONER FIALA: Oh, okay. Thank you. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Thank you for that little Immokalee history there -- · CHAIRMAN CARTER: Thank you. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: -- that needs to be preserved somehow, too, and I'm sure it will be as part of all of this process. Thank you for that. Page 16 September 26, 2001 MR. TOWNSEND: My pleasure, Commissioners, and I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: It was very interesting. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: Commissioner Mac'Kie, if you have interest in the history of Immokalee-- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: I've read them. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: -- The Ox Cart Trail. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: The Ox Cart Trail. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: I would highly recommend it. It's by Maria Stone. It's an excellent book. I have a copy I'll lend to any commissioner that would like to read it. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: I recommend it to everybody too. I have read it. It's a fascinating story. CHAIRMAN CARTER: We're ready for the next one, Mr. Olliff. I know there's another great publication. It was -- the characters were fictional. I can't remember the name of the book, but it does take you through the whole history of Florida on the same thing. They used to call them drovers, the cattle cowboys. It's fascinating. It goes all the way prior to the Civil War. Anybody that wants to go back and read some of that, you'll find Florida is and was a great cattle state. MR. OLLIFF: We'll finish up on No. 5, Mr. Chairman, with Tom Spreen. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Thank you. No. 5, Agriculture past, present, and future, Tom Spreen will continue our history lesson. MR. SPREEN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My name is Tom Spreen. I'm from the University of Florida in Gainesville. It's a pleasure to be here this morning in front of the County Commission. I can say this is the first time I've ever spoke in front of the County Commission, so it's a new experience for me. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Welcome. Page 17 September 26, 2001 CHAIRMAN CARTER: Welcome. MR. SPREEN: Thank you. I wish I could tell you that we had a good football team this year, but since we haven't played anybody yet, we'll find out this weekend. Hopefully we have a good football team. I've been asked to speak, I think, more about the position of Collier County not only in Florida agriculture, but in world agriculture. As Mr. Townsend already mentioned this morning, the most important agricultural crops in Collier County are citrus, vegetables, and beef cattle. However, Collier County is what economists would call a price-taker for all of these crops. Its production is not sufficient to influence the price. Therefore, cost increases cannot be passed on through price increases. Beef cattle are produced throughout Florida, but in this area in particular I would characterize beef cattle as low input, low return. In other words, ranchers do not invest a lot of money in pasture land and, as a result, there's not a high return realized from that enterprise. All right. Let's put together a proposal and let's say that you were given an opportunity to be given one section or 640 acres of fully producing citrus grove, and you're even guaranteed that you were going to receive $1.5 million a year in revenue. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: You wish. MR. SPREEN: It appears to be a nice deal. Would you accept? Well, before we decide whether that's a good deal or not, let's consider the cost of producing citrus in South Florida. The fixed investment -- that's for the equipment as well as the land as well as property taxes to help pay for the operations of Collier County -- run about $2,900 an acre per year for tomatoes and about $600 an acre per year for citrus, most of which is oranges. Then in addition to that, there are growing costs for fertilizer, for Page 18 September 26, 2001 labor, for new plants in the case of tomatoes, plus the crop has to be harvested. That's all done by hand for both vegetables and for citrus. Growing costs for tomatoes run approximately $4,500 per acre, and then in addition to that there's another $5,000 per acre for harvesting and packing. For citrus the grove care -- just for the care of the trees; not planting new trees, but just the care of the trees -- runs about $800 an acre, and harvesting is an additional $1,000 an acre. Of course, that depends somewhat on the size of the crop. So, therefore, just to cover those costs, which total approximately $12,400 a year for tomatoes and about $2,400 a year for citrus, 1,400 cartons is a pretty good average for the State of Florida for tomato production, and actually 400 to 500 boxes in this part of Florida is actually probably a little on the high side. We also measure citrus in terms of the juice content, and so that "p.s." refers to what's called pound solid or basically the gallons of orange juice in a box of oranges. So growers are paid on a pound-solid basis, so a break-even price for citrus is about 80 to 85 cents per pound solid or approximately per gallon, single strength, which equates to about $5 to $6 a box delivered to the processing plant. For tomatoes a similar number was just under $9 a cart. Therefore, citrus requires an annual financial commitment of about $2,400 per acre. Thus, to cover costs for 640 acres of citrus would require an annual revenue of not 1.5 million, but $1,536,000 per year. Therefore, even though we were to give you this citrus grove and guarantee you revenues of 1.5 million per year, you would, in fact, lose on average $36,000 per year thereafter. So, therefore, agricultural production is a business. People are not in agriculture because necessarily they like the lifestyle or because they want to spend money. They're trying to, in fact, secure their financial well- Page 19 September 26, 2001 being. And for crops such as citrus and vegetables, the investment needed is substantial. I mean, it's even much greater than a corn or soybean farmer in the Midwest. And, again, local growers have no influence over market demands so, therefore, as price -- excuse me -- as cost increases are passed upon them through environmental controls, labor costs, increases in minimum wage, they can't necessarily pass those costs along as I'll say Intel can with the dominance that it has in the marked-chip market. Therefore, this statement goes without saying. Agriculture can really only remain viable as long as growers receive a reasonable return on their investment. Okay. Let's talk just a little bit about the citrus industry, because Florida is an important citrus-producing state. In fact, it's the second largest citrus-producing region in the world. The state of Sao Paulo in Brazil, as you probably know, is the largest. Florida was the largest region until the freezes of the 1980s. That spurred a major expansion of citrus in Brazil. Recently with the growth of production here in South Florida, Florida's production has recovered and, in fact, exceeds levels that were realized before the freezes of the '80s, but it still ranks second as a citrus-producing area. Citrus is, of course, produced throughout central and south Florida. Polk County, the Lakeland area, and Hendry are the two largest citrus producing counties in the state. Actually, I was just looking at it. Now the 2000-2001 numbers are out. Collier County produced, I think, 12.6 million boxes of citrus in 1999-2000, but I still think they will maintain their ranking as the 9th most important citrus-producing county in Florida. The main varieties produced in Florida are oranges, grapefruit, and tangerines; however, almost all of the orange crop is processed into orange juice. California, of course, is the dominant supplier of fresh oranges into the U.S. Market; however, tangerines and certain Page 20 September 26, 2001 varieties such as navels and tangelos, in particular, are produced for the fresh market, but their production is relatively small and especially in this area. Grapefruit production is pretty well split between fresh and processed. Grapefruit prices have been very depressed for a number of years. A considerable amount of grapefruit production is also sent overseas to Japan as well as to Europe. The main import suppliers of orange juice -- the most important citrus product of Florida-- are Brazil and also Mexico, which benefits to some extent from NAFTA, Costa Rica and Belize, which benefit from what was known as the Caribbean Basin Initiative that was passed in the late 1980s. As Mr. Townsend noted, the citrus industry here is relatively young. Citrus was grown here, but the freezes of the '80s were the impetus that caused a southward move of citrus. Really, we even had citrus in Alachua County up by Gainesville. That citrus is all gone. Marion County, Ocala, Leesburg, most of that has now moved down in this area, and Mr. Townsend mentioned a rapid conversion of what had been cattle pasture into citrus groves. Here to kind of just give you a feel for the relative growth of this area, you can see that Collier County has now, in fact, 4 1/2 times the area in citrus than it had in 1982; whereas, the total production area in Florida is basically the same. It basically has the same acreage today that we had before the freezes visited us. The Southwest Florida area, in general, is about three times as large as it was before the freezes. The production of citrus in Collier County is just under 4 percent of the citrus produced in Florida. So even though there's a lot of citrus trees out there around Immokalee, there's a lot of other citrus trees throughout the state. We've mentioned this before, so I don't think I'll beat on this again, but because of its relatively small position they're not able to Page 21 September 26, 2001 establish the price that they're going to charge for their crop. There are also no processing plants down in this area, and that's a concern for a couple of reasons. There's a small processing plant, of course, in LaBelle. There's the Southern Garden plant over by Clewiston. But there's been a tremendous consolidation in the citrus processing industry, especially just in the last few years. I believe this next season we will only have 11 different companies processing oranges in Florida. That number was 27 different companies in 1989-1990. So there are now fewer buyers out there for citrus and especially for oranges. Orange producers will have to work harder to find people to buy their fruit. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Excuse me, sir. Didn't one of the major processors expand operations here recently in Florida? Did I read that correctly in the U.S. Today or the Wall Street Journal? MR. SPREEN: Yes, there has. As there's been a consolidation, a number of the companies have, in turn, expanded their plants. The Tropicana plant over in Fort Pierce is much bigger than it had been before. When the Brazilian entity, Cutrale, bought the old Minute Maid plant up by Lakeland, that plant was in somewhat of disrepair. They came in and made investments and expanded the capacity of that plant. So the overall capacity to process citrus probably isn't much different today than it was before. There's simply fewer individual buyers than there were before. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Thank you. MR. SPREEN: Okay. I wanted to mention the disease threats because canker, in particular, has been in the news, especially over on the east coast. There's another disease called diaprapes. It's actually a weevil that attacks the roots of the plant. Tristeza is another disease that is killing citrus fruits here in Florida. The fruit fly -- cross our fingers -- is not a problem at the present time, but it has been known to visit us from time to time in the past. Page 22 September 26, 2001 Canker, in particular, is a dangerous disease because, as you well know, once canker is found, all trees, under policy, within a 1900-foot radius are destroyed. That's about a 260 block of land where all the trees are pushed to and burned. Let's hope that it doesn't happen, but if canker were to become established and the state could no longer pursue its irradication policy, it most certainly would impose a quarantine on producers that had canker in their region, which limits the ability to move that citrus any distances. Freezes, of course, are what stimulated the move of citrus into this area, and it's important to note that another random weather event -- we had a mini version of that, of course, here just a week ago -- could spell its demise throughout the state. In fact, in this part of the state, really too much rainfall is the weather problem that the growers face instead of freezes. Labor costs in Florida are also substantially higher than its competitors. We identified the competitors as Brazil, Mexico, Belize, and Costa Rica. Growers here must pay the federal minimum wage. However, they are developing a mechanical harvester. In fact, it's a very interesting device. If that, in fact, is able to be implemented successfully -- and it appears it might well be -- that certainly would offer some relief for the labor-cost disadvantage, but it would also mean there would be fewer pickers that would be employed, and it would reduce the employment of the citrus industry. I'll throw up Cuba. Even though Cuba is a minor citrus producer -- I should say a moderate citrus producer, about 25 million boxes of production, they are an important producer of grapefruit. The grapefruit groves in Florida have had extensive difficulties the last six or eight years anyway. In some ways the last thing they need is to have to compete directly with the Cubans. CHAIRMAN CARTER: I think an interesting fact is if you tie a couple pieces together, the Far East is a very big market for fresh. Page 23 September 26, 2001 Japanese -- MR. SPREEN: Japan is, yes, sir. CHAIRMAN CARTER: The Chinese have a very big presence in Cuba. So you have to let your mind work a little bit. They're a lot closer to Japan than we are, so if they can develop a network to develop that quicker than we can, it presents an economic challenge to us. So that's one I think we always have to keep our minds on. MR. SPREEN: That's a good point. Let's mm our interest here to vegetables very quickly. I'm more of a citrus expert than I am a vegetable expert, so I'll be less long-winded. Florida is the primary domestic supplier of fresh vegetables to the U.S. Market in what's known as the winter period, but it actually extends from November to May. The Mexicans are the main competitors. And as you well know, the Mexicans have been competing very successfully with Florida. However, we've also seen hothouse tomatoes from Canada of all places. We can't successfully grow hothouse tomatoes in the midwestern United States, but we can grow them in Canada for some reason not currently known. I've just put a map up here of vegetable summary to give you a feel for where vegetables are grown in Florida, and then the Collier/Lee County area has been highlighted there in the box. You can see vegetables are up and down the state, but really the most important areas are over on the east coast in Palm Beach and Dade County in this area and then up in the Manatee County area and what's known as the Ruskin area. Here's the shares of the different -- of course, fruit and vegetables. Because of the importance of citrus, things like watermelons and strawberries get lumped in with vegetables. But you can see that tomatoes are the driver of the vegetable industry in Florida. It still accounts for nearly 30 percent of the revenues. Bell peppers are No. 2 at about 15 percent. So if you're in the vegetable Page 24 September 26, 2001 business, in all likelihood you're in the tomato and bell pepper business. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: This is Florida, though; right? MR. SPREEN: This is Florida, yes, ma'am. But that would also be true in the grocery store in general. Tomatoes are, I believe, the highest revenue product in the grocery store. Here's a graph of tomato acreage in Collier County and Southwest Florida. Actually, as Mr. Townsend has alluded to, it's recovered somewhat after being hit very strongly after the peso devalued and the Mexicans came in with large quantities of tomatoes in the mid 1990s. Bell pepper production looks similar. It's smaller in this area even though this is an important window for bell peppers in this area. With Mexico, Canada, and now, of course, we get those little on-the- vine tomatoes from Holland that are, in fact, flown in here, Florida now not only has to keep the Mexicans on the radar screen, but also other regions as well. While it's clear that Mexico likely has a lower cost structure due to lower labor costs, our best guess is the producers in Canada and Holland probably receive some kind of subsidies from their governments. There really is no subsidy. There's no price support. There's no subsidized capital. They have to cover their full cost of production of vegetables in this country. Florida produces also use methyl bromide. Mr. Townsend referred to the use of the plastic mulch in fumigation. Methyl bromide, I expect it to be an ozone depleter, and under the provisions of the Clean Air Act it is being phased from use, and I believe it's to be eliminated by 2010. To date there has not yet been a good alternative identified for methyl bromide, even though people in Gainesville and elsewhere are working hard on that. Labor costs are very important in vegetables, and we've seen continuing increases in Page 25 September 26, 2001 the minimum wage. Another problem that's affected both citrus and vegetables has been this so-called registration of minor-use chemicals. I call them "minor use" because it's used on crops with smaller acreages such as tomatoes or peppers or watermelons. Some chemical companies are simply refusing to go through the process of doing a registration because the market is not big enough to justify the cost of the registration. Cuba was, in fact, the main supplier of vegetables to the eastern United States before the embargo was imposed in 1959. So in a post- embargo environment it's possible that Cuba, in fact, could reestablish itself. I know for a fact, for example, that Florida strawberry growers are looking to identify places potentially to grow strawberries in Cuba. It's very possible that in a post-embargo environment you would see Cuba and Mexico become the ones fighting over the U.S. Market in the wintertime and Florida might, in fact, find itself on the sidelines. Beef cattle, Mr. Townsend had a different number. My number was 7,000 beef cows, but it's down considerably. Collier County really kind of ranks in the middle of the 67 counties. There's about a million brood cows in Florida which, I think, still does rank it second of the states east of the Mississippi. The main output from the beef cattle operations, of course, are feeder calves. Calves are weaned at about six months of age. Typically, then, they're put on a truck and sent somewhere in the Midwest-- Kansas, Oklahoma, the panhandle of Texas -- where they're put into a feedlot and fattened. And then, of course, some of that beef then comes back as meat that we consume. As we noted before, beef cattle production is low input, low return. There are some challenges from imports to Mexico. The cattle produced here in South Florida have a certain amount of brum and Page 26 September 26, 2001 breeding in them because they tolerate heat. Mexico produces a similar kind of beef cow. So, therefore, there is some competition, although it has not become a strong competition as of yet. Of course, we know there's been a stagnant demand for beef. Marginal producing areas such as Florida tend to be adversely affected. Of course, we're in a period today of good cattle prices. Cattle producers are receiving good prices, but cattle production, of course, does tend to follow these cycles. The financial risks borne by cattle producers compared to citrus and vegetable producers is quite small. We talked about thousands of dollars required to produce vegetables -- $2,500 an acre, $2,400 an acre in citrus. In a cattle operation, it would be more in the hundreds of dollars or even less. I'm not that familiar with the proposed stormwater fees, but when I first came down here six months ago I heard a lot about the stormwater fees that was being proposed. Even a cost of 20 or 30 dollars an acre might be enough to tilt cattle production from being a viable operation to a nonviable economic operation. I don't want to scare anybody, but we certainly have seen Europe's cattle industry suffer tremendous problems in the last few years. Mad cow disease has devastated not only England, but the continent. Of course, they've also discovered hoof-and-mouth disease. Those cows are all being slaughtered as a way to irradicate that disease. We wer now coming down the stretch. Collier County, of course, has experienced a boom. Florida does compete with low-labor-cost countries like Brazil, Mexico, Belize, and Costa Rica. In fact, Florida is really able to survive in citrus because the United States is still the world's largest market for citrus, and it sits on the doorstep of that market. Cuba could potentially become a player in citrus or vegetables if Page 27 September 26, 2001 the embargo were removed. The vegetable industry has suffered through a very tough decade in the '90s -- it has recovered somewhat -- due to weather problems. With Mexico it also faces new challenges and from Canada and Holland. Beef cattle production has been a standby for this area, although its cattle numbers are down substantially as land has been converted into higher-value crops. Beef cattle production is low input, low return. We just completed a study at the University that estimated that the total economic impact of citrus industry on Florida was in excess of $9 billion. That's not only in direct employment and indirect employment in terms of input, harvesting, processing, and packaging. Because it's a low input and low return, cattle producers are highly vulnerable to small increases in costs, even on the order of 20 to 30 dollars an acre. I'm going to philosophize for just a second. We're having the same discussion in Alachua County. Alachua County has not grown anywhere near the rate that Collier County has, but we're having exactly the same discussion that you're having here. There's a lot of controversy over these kinds of issues. I think the point of my presentation is that agricultural does face a tenuous future. It's not assured -- there are many changes going on around it. I haven't even mentioned the free trade areas of the Americas which would create a free-trade zone in the western hemisphere and have the effect of removing the tariff on orange juice imported from Brazil increasing regulation, labor costs, and so forth. Without profit there will be no agriculture. I'm sure we'll figure out some way to work this out, because we all want to eat, and we want to eat not only safe food that we know was produced in a safe way, but also food that's reasonably priced. If I could answer any questions ... CHAIRMAN CARTER: Questions by members of the board. Page 28 September 26, 2001 COMMISSIONER HENNING: Mr. Spreen, if I'm understanding you right, the citrus farmers are losing $36,000 per section per year? MR. SPREEN: No, that's not what I said. COMMISSIONER HENNING: Okay. MR. SPREEN: That's not what I said. I said even if they realized revenues of 1.5 million, which one of your fellow commissioners, I think, said is a pretty good deal, that even revenues of that size or that magnitude would not be sufficient to cover all their costs. Obviously in the late '80s and early '90s citrus producers were making a very good return, and that's why they planted all this land here in this area. This last season was a very bad season. Prices were quite low last season. I'm a small citrus grower myself up in Lee County and, in fact, I lost many -- I started growing citrus. I don't know why I bought it, but I did. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: You hadn't seen that example there about -- MR. SPREEN: You're obviously right. I bought it before I saw the example. That's absolutely correct. I think what the point is, even though Florida is a large producer and second largest producer in the world, what goes on in other regions, notably Brazil, has very much of an impact on the profitability of the citrus industry here. Last year Brazil was simply giving its orange juice away in Europe, and that spilled over and created very low prices here. Now, the good news is that this year Brazil's profit appears to be much smaller. In fact, prices have begun to recover. But, no, they have not lost that $36,000 on a year-after-year basis, no, sir. CHAIRMAN CARTER: And another dimension is, if you're big you do not make your money on the production side; you make it on the packing side. That's the only way you can possibly recoup Page 29 September 26, 2001 anything to stay in business. But you have to be big to be in a diversified operation where you can pick and have an interest in the packing side where sometimes you can recoup your losses. But it's not for everybody. Somebody like you may not have that culpability. MR. SPREEN: Actually, most of the producers in this county would not be in the packing business. They do not own packing and processing facilities. Collier Enterprises, for example, is not in the packing business. Of course, Consolidated, which bought up the Turner properties, is not in the packing business. So citrus is somewhat peculiar in that way in that most of the processing plants are owned by entities that are separated from the entities that own the groves. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: What do you see as the future for agriculture here in Collier County judging by the economic conditions out there that we have little control over? MR. SPREEN: I would suggest that when methyl bromide is eventually eliminated, vegetable producers will have a difficult time in Florida. As Mr. Townsend mentioned in his talk -- and he described it very well -- the nomadic style of agriculture that was used here in vegetable production in the 1960s is not viable anymore. There's too many people here. There's not enough good agricultural land out there to grow vegetables on. So vegetables are in a very difficult situation, I believe. Citrus on the other hand -- I think certainly as long as the orange juice tariff is maintained, as we said, Florida still sits on the doorstep of the largest market in the world. The United States still consumes more orange juice than any other place in the world, and so it gives it a major advantage and access into the market. The big marketing operations are here, Tropicana, Florida's Natural, and even Minute Maid still bases its operations here. So it has a tremendous advantage, although it creates strong challenges from other regions. Page 30 September 26, 2001 The university also plays an important role, because a lot of the diseases that tend to attack these high-value crops, there's a tremendous amount of research that goes on that finds ways to combat these diseases. So citrus is a very different kind of entity. Beef cattle will tend to be an operation that operates more in the fringes because it is such a low return, but also low cost. It would be wrong to say that beef cattle will disappear from this area unless you simply make it so costly for cattle producers that it makes no sense to go ahead and maintain that land and cattle. The cattle will probably always exist here in Florida because we have land that tends to be marginal land. The weather is somewhat erratic and so, therefore, you don't want to invest a lot of money into that land. Cattle can kind of scrounge around and make due on marginal land. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Okay. Thank you. COMMISSIONER HENNING: One more question. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Go ahead. COMMISSIONER HENNING: Would you say it's a fair statement that the ag industry would be more sustainable here in Collier County if government would not put so much regulation on the ag lands or the farmer? MR. SPREEN: Well, there's no question that regulation, I think -- and I'll say in the large -- so we're not talking regulation from Collier County or regulations from the State of Florida or even regulations from the federal government. But the regulatory environment in the United States, although it may not on the books be all that much stronger than the regulatory environment in Mexico or Brazil or other competitors, it's simply enforced much more vigorously here. So, for example, I can go and find teenagers harvesting citrus in Brazil. I mean, I've seen it with my own eyes. It, in fact, happens. In fact, I've had conversations through a translator with teenagers Page 31 September 26, 2001 harvesting citrus in Mexico. If you're caught with teenagers harvesting citrus in Florida, you would be fined and may well face a prison term. So the enforcement process here is much stronger. These other countries have environmental and labor laws that are quite similar to ours, but they simply don't yet have the apparatus developed to be able to enforce them or maybe, for that matter, the political will to enforce them vigorously. COMMISSIONER HENNING: Thank you. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Thank you very much, sir. I think it's a good time -- because we're going to move over and look at the environmental assets of the area and our magic fingers down there is probably going crazy, so we will break for 15, and then we'll come back and continue the workshop. Thank you. (A break was held from 10:20 a.m. To 10:30 a.m.) CHAIRMAN CARTER: All right. Ladies and gentlemen, members of our listening audience, we are back in session. We are now on Item 6, which is the environmental assets of the area. If you're just tuning in, we've had a very good overview of the history of this and the economic impacts, and now we're going to the environmental assets of the area. Mr. Tim Durham and Bill Lorenz will take us through that. MR. DURHAM: Good morning. My name is Tim Durham. Bill and I have coordinated a little bit, and I think we've agreed that I'll do most of the presentation here, and Bill's available for questions if you have any. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Thank you. MR. DURHAM: Primarily I'll be doing an overview of the Stage 1 report that came out for the study area and the environmental assets within that. The primary goals we have from the environmental perspective is to inventory and accurately map Page 32 September 26, 2001 existing environmental resources. That effort has been completed and is the subject of the Stage 1 report. I encourage everybody to take a look at it if you haven't already. As we move forward, we'll be looking for ways to protect listed animal and plant species and establishing long-term strategies to protect critical resources in the study area. Those are our goals. This is a 1980s aerial of the study area, and I just want to point out some general features of the area, and I'll talk about them in a little more detail. Again, you have Lake Trafford here. Camp Keais Strand's running southward and flowing towards the south. The Okaloacoochee Slough works its way down south through here and down to the Fakahatchee Strand and south. The Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge is down in this area. All right. Then the lighter tones you see are the agricultural land cover which are extensive in the study area. It's important for us to recognize that whatever study we do in a regional context is something we must always be aware of. From here you can see the various public acquisition programs or conservation programs are in place. The study area being located here, this is some public lands that have been purchased for the Okaloacoochee Slough system. This is some of the Corkscrew system which is owned actually, not publicly, but by the Audubon. Some of the public lands in the CREW system are over here, and then Camp Keais Strand, one of the targeted areas, is there. Again, zooming in a little closer you can see a little more detail on that. As we did the study, it was very important to generate some accurate maps to inventory and identify the natural resources that were out there. Previous studies have been done on kind of a gross basis. We thought it was very important to be more finite in the way we looked at things. 1995 aerials were used as the base. They were analyzed in some Page 33 September 26, 2001 considerable detail, remapped. There was some shifting done to the mapping. And field reconnaissance was then done on a scientific basis. The amount of field reconnaissance and correction to the mapping exceeded national mapping standards. It has been very well received by the technical advisory committee which was mentioned in the video before. So we feel we're starting with a very accurate base set of information and data. Within the study area -- I'm sorry, Ken, if you would please go back. What you have mapped here is the existing wetland vegetation communities out there. You will hear for the balance of today some discussion about land cover and land use. Those are two slightly different things. Land cover deals with what is the physical vegetation or physical structure on the piece of property. Land use may be a little bit different. You may have some areas that are vegetated which actually have some agricultural use, for example. So there are some slight differences in the numbers depending on if you're speaking of land cover or land use. Within the study area, basically 75,000 acres are wetland communities as shown here in the green. Also, within the study area are approximately 20,000 acres of uplands. Again, from the agricultural presentation you heard earlier, this shouldn't be too surprising. Again, if an area had some upland characteristic to it, it has been converted to agricultural land use for the most part. So combining the two, this is what we have out there in terms of native vegetation. The gray color represents agricultural cover. So about 48 percent of the study area is native community at this point. One of the other important considerations in dealing with any kind of ecological system is the water, the water involved. Lake Trafford is kind of the head of the host for a lot of different systems in Southwest Florida. Some of the water flows to the west from this area, but also in certain conditions a lot of the water flows to the Page 34 September 26, 2001 south down through Camp Keais Strand. Likewise, the Okaloacoochee Slough provides water flowing from the north all the way to Lehigh Acres at times down through the system and ultimately the Fakahatachee Strand and Ten Thousand Islands. They're all connected. These cross-hatched areas here are permitted water retention areas that are part of the agricultural activity. It's important to recognize those systems because they are part of the infrastructure of agriculture. They are an important part of the operation. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: And if you overlayed those maps on those wetland ground-cover maps, I mean, that's essentially where the wetlands remain. MR. DURHAM: Excellent point. get you pretty close to that. that. My next slide, I think, will COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Sorry. MR. DURHAM: Thanks for setting that up so well. I appreciate COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: You're welcome. MR. DURHAM: Exactly. If you take a lot of the things that showed up on the wetland map and put the retention areas on top of them, what you'll find is a lot of those are the same. What you have is these areas discharging into some of these backbone wetland systems that are out there. Just kind of a few general pictures for you, but moving, if you will, from west to east across our study area, the Camp Keais Strand has some very defined deeper parts of it which are absolutely gorgeous. They have lots of water and good healthy systems that are in there. As you move a little bit towards the east from there, you start getting into areas that are very expansive agriculture, you know, section upon section, mile upon mile, of monolithic agriculture with some mixes in there. We're on the edge of one of those systems now. Page 3 5 September 26, 2001 Some mix of natural habitat's in here, but these are fairly well surrounded by some agricultural activity. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Would that be an example of, like, a cypress dome or something that had to be preserved? MR. DURHAM: Most likely at the time this was done it didn't have to be preserved, but because it was lower with the soil types in it, it was easier to farm around it than to go into it. Sometimes these kind of areas are used to pump water into. That one's a bit small in this case but, yeah, that is an example of a cypress dome included in an ag area. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Interesting. MR. DURHAM: As you go over towards the Okaloacoochee Slough, you start picking up much more open pasture lands with native communities mixed in there. When you hear about the Okaloacoochee Slough being a major conduit of water from north to south, you kind of picture this cypress kind of system. This is actually the main flow or the center portion of the Okaloacoochee Slough flow area just east of 29. This is a local bridge that's used by the agricultural activity as you get over this lower point here. At the Okaloacoochee Slough, the water works its way down to a series of wetlands and through pastures and through ditches. It's really kind of an interesting system as opposed to Camp Keais Strand which is more defined. Wildlife species, one of the charges we have is to be considering the habitat and protection of wildlife species. There's a real mixture of species that occur out in the study area. A few of them here are identified. These are current points that are compiled by the Florida Natural Areas Inventory and Fish & Wildlife Commission in using their current data points updating those as they come online. An important point to note here is that the different points or current points you see primarily occur in the existing natural areas Page 36 September 26, 2001 and predominantly in some of the healthier systems. They do occur in some of the stormwater management systems and even do occur occasionally in some of the agricultural fields. There may be some pumping going on, some water elevation changes in the agricultural fields, and some of the wading birds do come in and use those areas. So depending on where you are and what species you're talking about, there's a real mixture of uses out here. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Those dots indicate a particular -- MR. DURHAM: They do, and there's a legend that goes with this. It just gets so hard to see when it's reproduced up here. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: I understand. MR. DURHAM: But, yeah, several of these species as well as a few others are what we're indicating here. The Florida panther, that's always a popular topic. This shows the telemetry points -- or basically Southwest Florida are the little red dots. They're history points forever. What you end up seeing here is a real concentration of points in an area down here, and that's been historically called the core of the panther population. There are a fair number of points that move up this way, a few up this way, and some scattered down here in the different lands. There's a few points up in here in the Corkscrew/Alico Road area as well. There's an article in today's paper about that. An interesting thing to note is what we're finding out with the current science of the panther is that to have a sustainable panther population in perpetuity we're going to need about 250 panthers. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: And we have now 80? MR. DURHAM: He have roughly 88 -- let's say 80 south of the Caloosahatchee River, and that number goes up and down depending on a few things. But what that really tells us, we cannot save the Florida panther population in Southwest Florida. We can be a big Page 37 September 26, 2001 part of that solution, but we, ourselves, cannot be that solution. Historically it was believed that the Caloosahatchee River formed a barrier to panthers moving north and south. It's kind of a genetic divide, if you will. The last few years it actually turned out that several male panthers have swam across the Caloosahatchee River and moved north, which is encouraging. But the bottom line is, the resolution for the panther issue is not just a South Florida problem. There's going to be a discussion over the next year about reintroducing panthers to other parts of Florida, including the panhandle, etc., so there's evolving thoughts on that. It's very interesting. COMMISSIONER FIALA: How many acres do you need per panther? MR. DURHAM: Twenty-two to twenty-seven thousand is one of the numbers that's been thrown around. I think that's debatable to some degree, but it gives you an idea of the magnitude we're talking about. COMMISSIONER FIALA: That's per panther? MR. DURHAM: Correct, with some overlap between different panthers. It's a fairly complex issue. My main point here is it ranges beyond just what we're doing here in Southwest Florida. MR. OLLIFF: I hope they're overlapping. Otherwise, we wouldn't have little baby panthers. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Good point. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: He's a newlywed. CHAIRMAN CARTER: His mind travels quickly in that direction. MR. DURHAM: I thought it was a very upbeat, happy comment. This is zooming in a little bit more, and you can kind of get an idea. Since the beginning of recording panther telemetry points, Page 38 September 26, 2001 here's what a distribution of those dots means. Recognize sometimes when you see a whole bunch of dots in an area it doesn't mean that there's 50 panthers there. It's only that over time different ones have moved through that area. Some of the other things to recognize is some of the panther movement here, actually, you would think, is like this. Some of these dots are actually connecting to movements that occurred like this. Some other things that gets interesting when you analyze individual panthers rather than just a collection of dots is that -- you would think from this exhibit that Camp Keais Strand is a major north/south connection for them. It's actually not. The panther is actually moving up and out here, and there's been some movement like this before, but not up-and-down movements. So that's just some interesting things you get from analyzing some of those things. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: I made that assumption. MR. DURHAM: It's a little hard to see the dots here, but I did want a slide to show you just panther telemetry in the last five years. One of the main points I want to make here is some wildlife underpasses have been installed on 29. You may have heard about those. Those have been very successful. There have not been any panther roadkills in the area there since the underpasses have gone in, and that's true for other areas where underpasses have gone in. They've been very effective in reducing panther-road mortality. COMMISSIONER FIALA: How do they know to go under them? COMMISSIONER COLETTA: Little signs. CHAIRMAN CARTER: They're smarter than people. MR. DURHAM: Fencing. Yeah, little signs. No, there's some fencing along the road. Also these are placed in locations that they tend to use. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE.' It's the only choice they have. Page 39 September 26, 2001 COMMISSIONER FIALA: Oh, I see. MR. DURHAM: So in closing I just want to point out a few things. Within the study area, the predominant land use and land cover is agriculture. There are extensive natural areas out there. There are some key components of those, the Camp Keais Strand and Okaloacoochee Slough. There are some naturally vegetated water retention areas which have ecological value. This is a very big area we're talking about studying. I can take you out there and stand you in a place where you see nothing but native vegetation, and you think you are just in some wonderful eden. Ten minutes later I can take you somewhere in the helicopter and drop you off somewhere, and you can stand in the middle of an agricultural area and see nothing but ag as far as the eye can see. So when we talk about characterizing a study area, it's very important to know where you are and what resources we're talking about. That's why we feel very good about the mapping effort we've done to date. That's a critical component of this study. If we can all agree on where things are and what they are, we're off to a good start. Thank you. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: I have to just say, too, that having been here when we were deciding whether or not we were going to, you know, enter into this effort, the improvement of' information data over what we had then versus what we have now in this very short amount of time -- and it's basically what's being reported to us today. For example, the very best maps that we had before these -- I got driven out and said, "Okay. See this giant wetland it says you're in the middle of," and you're in the middle of a giant farm field. I mean, they were completely inaccurate. It was really, really poor, but it was the very best data that we had. If nothing else came out of this whole exercise, we're already just so successful in having obtained this Page 40 September 26, 2001 information and mapped out the existing conditions of this area. It's a big accomplishment. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Well, I think it's been an outstanding accomplishment. As Commissioner Mac'Kie has said so well, it was through our efforts. We were relentless at that critical decision- making point on the part of the board at that time. That's why we pushed for the three-year study. We said, "We don't have enough information here. We don't have the right information." There was some thinking and philosophy at that time of, "Well, let's hurry up and do it and get it done." Thankfully we prevailed, and today we've got the results. Commissioner Fiala, you had a comment or question? COMMISSIONER FIALA: Huh-uh. No. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: No. I've been following this for some time. No questions. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Okay. Thank you. MR. DURHAM: Thank you. MR. OLLIFF: Mr. Chairman, I think we are on to No. 7 on your agenda which would be the report from the committee with Ron Hamel and Ann Olesky. MR. HAMEL: Again, Commissioners, for the record, my name is Ron Hamel. I'm chair of this oversight committee. After seeing the video and looking at the presentation on agricultural and natural resources, it's pretty apparent that our committee has a real challenge and opportunity to do something very positive for this county. And because of the uniqueness and importance of the work of the committee, what we'd like to do is give you a little background on this group and tell you what we've been doing for the past two years. The oversight committee, again, is a group of volunteer citizens appointed by you, the Collier County Commission, to collect and review data, to gather public input, and to recommend amendments to Page 41 September 26, 2001 the comprehensive growth management plan. The committee was established, again, in October of'99 and held its first meeting in November of '99, and that's been about two years ago. The committee has been tasked with addressing the major issues identified by the final order within the 195,000-acre Immokalee study area. And those were the protection of viable agriculture, protection of natural resources, and the economic prosperity and diversification of the rural community. In this effort the committee is also considering impacts to adjacent public lands, private-property rights, and economic impacts. It is currently working to identify techniques which will provide for the appropriate conversion of ag lands to other land uses for the future. As mentioned in the video, to assist in this effort, the board appointed a committee of 15 members, and I would like to take a few minutes at this time to introduce them, the ones that are here to you. In addition to myself, we have Floyd Crews of Southwest Florida Service & Supply Company who's the owner of that company. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Wave or stand or something. MR. HAMEL: If anybody's here would you please stand. Rodney Harvey is a realtor with Naples Realty. He's representing the Naples Area Board of Realtors. We have Dawn Jantsch of the Naples Area Chamber of Commerce. He's the president and CEO. Andrew Mackie's representing the Corkscrew Sanctuary, National Audubon Society. He's the assistant manager and president of the Collier chapter of the Audubon Society. There's Ann Olesky, a business owner, Lake Trafford Marina & Airboat Rides. You know Ann. You're going to hear a little bit from Ann in a minute. David Santee, Farm Bureau Insurance. He's the agency manager. Dr. Neno Spagna, planning consultant. We have Fred Thomas, executive director of the Collier County Housing Authority. I know Fred is here or he was here. Sonya Tuten, Page 42 September 26, 2001 business owner, Ag-Tronix Irrigation, computer technician. James Howard, First Union National Bank, project manager. Grady Miars with the Bonita Bay Group, project manager. Kathy Prosser with The Conservancy of Southwest Florida; she's the President and CEO. Joseph Boggs, professional surveyor and mapper. And Mr. James Homer, who is our recent addition to the committee. I would publicly like to thank and commend these individuals who have literally invested hundreds of hours of meetings beginning since November of 1999. Since the Board of County Commissioners established the committee in '99, we have met 19 times with each meeting being fully publicized and open to the public. Our meetings have typically been held at about 5:30 on Monday evenings and last for about two hours. The location has been rotated around the county, but predominantly lately we've been meeting at the Corkscrew Middle School. During those 19 meetings, our committee has undertaken the following: We've reviewed and recommended approval of the study scope. We've recommended improvements to solicit input in the process. We've monitored and approved results of Stage 1 data collection. We've approved the methodology for the Stage 2 scenario evaluation. We've monitored paralleling efforts of the fringe committee, community character plan, the rural land stewardship legislation, and results of the growth management study commission which recently had been meeting throughout the State of Florida. We participated in a visioning workshop conducted by Dr. Showenfeld (phonetic) with Florida Gulf Coast University to identify some of the potential tools and options for achieving some of the goals that have been put to the committee, and we made preliminary recommendations on scenario criteria at our August 20th and September 17th meetings. In addition, the committee has collected input from several Page 43 September 26, 2001 experts and, again, you've heard from Dr. Spreen here this morning, and he presented before our committee. In addition, we had Dr. Fritz Roka who chairs our agricultural economics program here at the Southwest Florida Research Center in Immokalee. In addition, we had a very informative presentation -- I would say progressive presentation by Craig Evans. Craig couldn't be here today, but we wanted to just kind of go through a few of the highlights of this regarding agriculture in Collier County. Craig's presentation was entitled "Ensuring a Viable Future for Florida's Rural Lands." His presentation had a lot of interesting insights to the subjects that we're trying to address here as part of this assessment, if you could present a few of those. A few key points -- and I think Dr. Spreen brought this out too -- without profit there will be no agriculture and no forestry. Land use tends to follow economics. Changes in land use result primarily from economic decisions. Some attributes of agriculture include economics. Agriculture is Florida's second most important industry producing over 18 billion in economic value each year. It's the foundation of a lot of other segments in the Florida economy and, again, also in the Collier County economy for that matter. It also accounts for more than 500,000 jobs and generates a payroll of more than $10 billion per year to the state's economy. In addition, when carried out in environmental compatibility, agriculture also provides and protects preservation of wetlands, storage, groundwater recharge, water filtration, flood control, purification of air, carbon sequestering, generation of oxygen, forests and woodlands, ambient healthful living conditions. For example, there is a great irony in the way we view our land for its different uses. If you have a wetland on your property, you might be lucky if you get an appraised $250 an acre. So, you know, Page 44 September 26, 2001 the whole issue of how these lands and the values of these lands are not only for their agricultural productivity but for environmental benefits. I think that's certainly one of the things that we're grappling with in this exercise is trying to find the balance there. Other points that Craig brought out when he addressed the group is land is valued on the basis of how many housing units or condos it will accommodate or how effectively it will grow our food, but how important is it for aquifer recharge or its wildlife habitat? These are a lot of the questions that your committee is working to discuss and to bring to the public to discuss. Obviously, the economic value really determines how much a land owner is willing to do and to protect as far as their land is concerned. So it is a very complicated and overriding issue for this county. Here again, Craig brought out that too often the first response by concerned property makers, planners, and environmentalists is to continue to lower densities and devalue the land. Essentially what you're doing is you're expediting the conversion of agriculture if you do those kinds of things. We have prepared for you and we'll leave behind further information here that has been presented this morning by the agricultural folks as well as Craig Evans. You know, we do have a separate handout that explains a little further in detail what we've done in each of our meetings and kind of lays out chronologically some of the activities that have gone through the committee. At this time, I would like to ask Ann Olesky to make a few remarks from her perspective as a member of the committee. As many of you know, Ann has been personally very actively involved in trying to restore and make improvements out there at Lake Trafford, and we felt coming from the committee as a participant that it would be very important to hear from Ann as part of our presentation. So, Ann, if you could make a few remarks. Page 45 September 26, 2001 MS. OLESKY: Good morning. For the record, it's Ann Olesky. What it is is he just wanted somebody with a big mouth who puts her foot in it every time she opens it, and that's me. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: That's usually me, Ann, but we're glad to have company. MS. OLESKY: That's good. Yeah. We do a good job of that. When I was asked to speak out, I thought, "What am I going to do?" So I started reading through everything that I had already been reading through for the past two years, and I said, "Huh-uh, that's not it." What it is is, it's been a wonderful experience. When I started out, I thought, "Uh-huh. They hired this guy A1 Reynolds and this group to bulldoze us." And the county said, "Well, we don't want him to do that because we've already been slapped on the hands by the Governor, so let's stick a few county members in." A guy by the name of Russell Priddy said, "Hey, Annie, you're on this committee." I said, "Oh, I don't think so." He said, "Just go and listen," so I did, and what an education. I thought that it would be rough, hard. It is. We're trying to balance everything out. A1 and his group have put together some wonderful information. Bob Mulhere comes along and throws in more. But then a neat thing happened. Out of the audience a lady by the name of Nancy Payton jumped on board, and most of you know her as an extreme environmentalist, and I use that word "extreme" as a compliment because she makes us all stop and balance it out. So we all go into this room, some of us elected to be on here through your graciousness, and some of us were sitting in the audience. Well, we've all put our hats together. We started a fact- finding mission. A lot of the information you've been given has been updated. A lot of it has been in the books for years. It's just that sometimes when we look at the equipment we had to work with years Page 46 September 26, 2001 ago, it was kind of rough. You know, you did what you could. Now, today we have technology and wonderful things to improvise and make it look better. We also have feet that do walking through these areas. So I said, "Well, that's great." We have taken this fact-finding mission and put everything together in a pot to make a bowl of soup, but we needed some meat in it. Now we started working on the meat. That's where we were doing scenarios. The information that we got through the workshops, through listening to the people, and our own evaluations with such a mixed group on this committee. Now we're starting to put it all together, the fact-finding missions, and putting them into scenarios on what would be the best place and the best way to save Collier County. I think that we have a unique opportunity. Collier County doesn't want to be like the east coast. We're our own entity, and I think we have a chance to shine in the Governor's eyes and also the United States by being the best we can be and putting all of these in. The farmers want to be good stewards, but they also want to be paid for the value of taking care of that land as good stewards. The guy that wants to keep it as environmentally sensitive land, he needs to be rewarded for being a good steward, not being penalized by saying, "Gee, you've got a tree on there you can't kill. We're going to devalue your land." We're coming up with innovative ideas on how to do that. So I'm very pleased to be a part of it. I have no script, because I don't know how to work from a script, but I think that you're going to be pleased with the results you get from this committee. And I think that we're going to be put up there as No. 1. I have some notes that I want to share with you all. Any questions real quick before I wind up and get out of here? CHAIRMAN CARTER: Commissioner Mac'Kie. Page 47 September 26, 2001 COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: I just wanted to ask Ann -- you said you started out thinking, "Okay. This is going to be -- the County's going to sort of railroad through, and they've hired this big company, and they're going to run the show, and they're putting some token Immokaleans on there." MS. OLESKY: Exactly. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Did it turn out that way? MS. OLESKY: No. That's why I'm still on the committee. It didn't turn out that way. What it turned out to be was a fact-finding group, and it's been -- if you want to say -- overseen by or watched over by environmental groups, farmers, landowners both large and small, so it's not just the committee. I mean, I really believe it's a mix of the community, and I think we're working in the right direction. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: That's just the best possible news, because the Governor says the hallmark of this process shall be public participation. Boy, I'm glad that was the answer. MS. OLESKY: Well, let me tell you what: I think he's also got some other things in mind for us that we're not aware of or maybe we are aware of and are afraid to own up to. I think we have a chance to either shine like a new badge or get put in the mud like Lake Trafford. So we're all on our toes, and I think we're working in the right direction. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Commissioner Henning. COMMISSIONER HENNING: Ann, your synopsis or your understanding on the progress of the committee as moving forward, that's what I've seen when I've come out there. MS. OLESKY: Thank you. COMMISSIONER HENNING: You're setting the groundwork for Collier County to be much different than the east coast. MS. OLESKY: I think we will be. We have such strong -- not only environmentists -- but strong people who want to see growth, Page 48 September 26, 2001 and I think those few words I really love, "smart growth." I had the opportunity to go to Apex, North Carolina; tobacco, rolling hills, old homes. A gracious lady took me through the woods up to where they had taken and put houses right in the middle of these tobacco fields, and you never saw them. The land around it was preserved and kept, and I figure if they can do it up there in the hills, we can do it down here in the swamp. It was really a great experience. It renewed my faith in what we're doing. I applaud you for having enough foresight to pick us to do this job. Sometimes I like to bust your chops but, truthfully, I think we've been doing the right thing. COMMISSIONER HENNING: I just want to thank you and the members of the committee for taking time out of your job, your family, and your hobbies to make this happen for the residents of Collier County. MS. OLESKY: Well, I would love to see more of the public show up at these. Again, like I said, there are many that show up, the same ones all the time but, wow, it's great because they might see something that we didn't see. The information that we've been given -- it's a lot of reading, COMMISSIONER COLETTA: Annie, on Channel 54 they're watching it now, and they're going to watch the replay. If I'm not missing the mark here, we're going to be replaying this over and over again. And I kind of hope, Tom, that when we get Channel 54 in Immokalee, which will just be in the next couple of days -- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: (Mr. Olliff shook his head.) COMMISSIONER COLETTA: Yeah. Couple of weeks? Very soon? MS. OLESKY: Put him to the fire, honey. Put him to the fire. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: I shouldn't pin the man down. In any case, I hope this is one of the first things that we bring forward Page 49 September 26, 2001 and we show, and I hope when we get to show it it's not going to be too dated. MS. OLESKY: I do too. I understand what you're saying. If we can get public input -- you know, it's the same people you see day after day, but it's so important because Collier County belongs to all of us. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: That's correct. MS. OLESKY: It's a four-legged stool, you might say. We've got the agriculture, which would be with the citrus and with the vegetables; then you've got your tourism; you've got the heritage; and the environment. There's so much that we have to offer, and don't forget tourism. We have a lot to offer the world, and with the way the world is changing and some of the bad things that are happening, I think that we're going to be one of the strong entities that come out of this. Can I also put in a plug about my lake? COMMISSIONER COLETTA: Sure. I was just going to do it for you, Annie, but go ahead. MS. OLESKY: Thank you. As you know, all of us pulled together with your guidance. Lake Trafford is now a reality. It's called the beginning, the new beginnings of Lake Trafford. It's going to be on November 16th. You all will be getting an announcement. The Army Corps. Of Engineers has given us a task to feed over 300 people. Being Collier County and Immokaleans, we can do it, and we're going to do it. I think that the lake is going to be a step towards helping the greater Everglades, Okeechobee. I think that we're going to be a pilot project as we are now with the land issues that are coming before us. So, again, I applaud you for your taking the leadership in this. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: If I may add, Annie, if people want to enjoy really getting one with nature, go out to Lake Trafford Page 50 September 26, 2001 Marina. It's the best bass fishing in Southwest Florida. You'll find it in the Yellow Pages. The most polite people in this world will direct you to a 9-, 10-, 12-pound bass every time. MS. OLESKY: Boy, that's a polite way of-- boy, is he putting me to the fire. It's a polite way of saying, "Come out to the marina, and we'll show you the swamp." It is beautiful. Thank you. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Ann, what I appreciated most from you this morning is you spoke to us from your heart. I love it when people come up and do that because it tells me more than anything else. And I really thank you for what you said and how you communicated to everyone here, to this commission and to all of our listening audience. This is what makes up a community. These are the people you listen to because they are the real people, and thank you and God bless you for what you're doing for us. MS. OLESKY: Thank you. (Applause.) MR. HAMEL: Thanks, Ann. Again, I'd like to thank you on behalf of the committee for telling it like you see it. As you can see, in the first year of the process -- the first year of the process has been devoted to the organization, the data collection, and research so we would have a solid foundation to get to the heart of our task, and that is to evaluate the scenarios and make recommendations on goals, objectives, and policies. Our next speaker, A1 Reynolds, will provide some of the additional background and results of Stages 1 and 2 studies and also outline directions the committee is taking on the first scenario. Following Al, then Bob Mulhere will speak to you about where the committee is going from here and our schedule to get to the goal and complete the task. I would like to kind ofjump away from the script for a minute myself and from the personal perspective and kind of talk from the Page 51 September 26, 2001 heart as well. You know, Collier County has a unique opportunity here to do some magnificent things, not just for this county, but for the State of Florida. Commissioner Mac'Kie well knows a few years ago there was a group put together called the Governor's Commission for Sustainable South Florida. That group brought together diverse interests from agriculture, from urban cities, from the environmental communities, from all of the various agencies responsible in all of South Florida to talk about how they could put together a program to restore the Everglades. Initially when Governor Chiles put that group together and they first started meeting, there was a little undercurrent with that group feeling that they could never achieve a unified goal to build consensus to get all these divergent interests around the table and make major agreements to move forward with a world-class restoration project. Through, what, five years of meeting-- I think we only have three with our process but -- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: So far. MR. HAMEL: In five years of meetings, this group learned that the only way to make a program work and to make it successful would be to speak with one voice in a unified way and everybody working as a team and building a strong coalition. I would just like to parallel this scenario here for Collier County because I feel -- obviously we're not all of South Florida, but we are part of the same type of process that's put together bringing citizens and stakeholders together to try to grapple with these issues and to move forward. So I would like to echo Ann's comments. From the committee we stand to do the job that we were asked to do and to work with members of this commission and the public to reach success here. This is precedent setting. I think the committee knows that as well as you do, and we want to be successful in planning and being a Page 52 September 26, 2001 participant in setting the curve in Florida of how we can have a sustainable profitable agriculture, prosperity in our rural areas, plus protect our natural resources. So that pretty much concludes my part in this other than any questions that you would like to ask me as part of the committee. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Ron, thank you again for an outstanding effort. You said it so well. It's bringing citizens and stakeholders together for a common purpose to find solutions to complex problems and to be one of those points of light that's so often referred to. You certainly have done it for this community, and we applaud you on the Board of County Commissioners for doing what you're doing. Thank you so much. MR. HAMEL: Thank you. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Mr. Reynolds. MR. REYNOLDS: Thank you. Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the Commission. I would like to thank Stan Litsinger for putting me after Ann Olesky. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Yeah. MR. REYNOLDS: We probably could have stopped there because I think Ann probably summarized this better than any of us could have. And I don't have to be asked twice to take my jacket off. My challenge is that I've got to take in 15 minutes and compress 2 year's worth of good work by this committee, and I will promise you that I will keep it quick, and I will hit the high points. I know that a lot of this information you have seen in the form of reports. Obviously some of this has been covered, so I'm going to go pretty quickly, but feel free if you need to stop me at any point and want to talk about anything in more detail. I'll tell you one thing from the heart, and that is I've been a practicing planner for 22 years in Collier County. This represents probably the greatest professional challenge and professionally the Page 53 September 26, 2001 most rewarding planning experience that I've been involved in, and that's because of what Ann said. When you start a process like this, you may think that you know what it's going to lead to. You may have a scope of work. You have a committee. But, really, it's the interaction of the people at the end of the day that makes it happen. That's what we're having with this process. We are all learning as we go in this. I know a lot more about agriculture than I ever thought I would know. So this has been a learning experience for all of us and, frankly, that's -- I think at the end of the day it was pointed out that maybe the best thing that comes out of this is a higher degree of understanding about a very, very important part of our county. You have heard already what we're focused on. You know that that focus is being driven both by the desire to have a strategic plan for the area and also by a requirement to respond to the Governor's final order. And we keep coming back to the three key points because as these things do get complicated, we have to keep coming back to the focus of what we're all about. This, I think, is interesting because, again, it puts in perspective the Immokalee study area in its context of Collier County. You will see that next to the approximate 66 percent of Collier County that is in conservation, the Immokalee study area is the next largest identifiable piece at 195,000 acres or 14 percent of the county. You can compare that to all of the land that's within urban areas in Collier County. That's 8 percent. The rural fringe study area is just under 7 percent and then Golden Gate Estates. So, again, sometimes we do lose perspective of the size of the area that we're studying here, but suffice it to say, it's enormous. When we appeared before the county commission, I think, almost two and a half years ago now and first proposed a study like this, we knew the basic structure would be in four steps. The first step or Stage 1 is the data collection analysis. The second is the land- Page 54 September 26, 2001 use scenarios and research. The third is looking at the impacts, relative impacts, of choices. And, finally, the fourth step which is the comprehensive plan amendment. The data collection analysis, it's already been pointed out, the need for that was because we just did not have good, reliable, sufficient information to work from to do this study. One of the things we didn't have was any kind of a GIS mapping of Collier County. We now have that as a result of Stage 1. The actual work in this study, which we said would take three years, got a seven-month late start because we spent the first seven months not only setting up the committee but bringing the scope of work to the public and getting input. So until January of 2000, which is when the board finally endorsed the scope of work, that's when the real study began. We went through and created all the mapping. We did field verification. It was identified that we have got through a lot of peer review and technical analysis to make sure that we had good information. And at this point we have produced a report. You've seen the bound book. We have a CD that we produced. The CD is on your website. So there's a good distribution of this information. I think it's been commonly acknowledged by everybody that it is the best and most reliable information we have ever had for the study area. Tim had talked about land cover. I'm just going to show you, again, the composite of the land-cover data that shows that, again, agriculture is the dominant use. We do have significant areas of wetlands and uplands. We do have areas of native vegetation that serve agricultural purposes. Let's go to the next slide. We have also taken and looked at fine details on each of these types of uses. For example, in agriculture we now have mapped all of the areas that are in row crops. That's the Page 55 September 26, 2001 area that's in citrus production. If you add the specialty farms, the pasture areas, and the grazing leases, you can see that virtually all of the private land in the study area has an identified agricultural use. Some of those are very passive, like cattle grazing, and some are very active, like row crops. But they all have identified uses for agriculture even though the cover may, in fact, be natural vegetation. What you can see, then, in summary is what we call the active agriculture plus the area that's in grazing leases. Essentially 91 percent of the study area has an identified agricultural purpose as we sit here today. You saw this exhibit before. It shows the natural water flows. A little bit later I'm going to show you what happens when you superimpose all of the agricultural stormwater management systems into it. But we have done extensive mapping of both natural and manmade features, and we have done inventories of all the permitted Water Management District improvements that have occurred in the area. So the summary of Stage 1 is -- if you want to just make a few points first -- agriculture is the dominant use, that naturally vegetated areas are slightly less than half of the study area, that we do have six federally listed and ten state listed species that we have to deal with and accommodate in the planning for the area. The point was made before that there were some things that we discovered as he went through this process. One, there were some fairly significant errors made in mapping of prior studies. One of those had to do with the discussion about the conversion of land from one agricultural type of use to another. In prior studies there had been an assumption that some of that significant conversion was from natural vegetated lands when, in fact, it was going from one agricultural type to another. That had been pointed to as an example of the need for immediate action that Page 56 September 26, 2001 we were losing vast acres of natural vegetation when, in fact, in 15 years we've had less than 3 percent of the study area converted from natural vegetation. Let's talk just a minute about the Big Cypress area of critical state concern because it overlays one-third of the study area. As I think you know, the area of critical state concern is created by Florida law. It's been in place for approximately 25 years. It is considered to be the most restrictive designation that the state puts on any land, and we're talking about, like I said, in excess of 60,000 acres in that designation. One of the things we're looking at now in the Stage 2 analysis is how those regulations and uses will interact with the other policies that we're putting together. As is the case with all parts of the study, it's important that when we get this information we distribute it so that the public not only has inputs into creating it and looking at it, but they have an opportunity to view it. I mentioned the CD-ROM that is on your website. The county has got a great website that they're keeping up to date for both the fringe study and the eastern land study. Let's go to Stage 2. Stage 2, I think, was referred to as -- we're getting into sort of the meat, if you will, of the policy. The purpose, really, is to do a couple of things. First, it's to kind of do the same research and documentation of the human use, if you will, of the land as opposed to the natural resources and to look out over a long period. We're talking a 25-year horizon that we're looking at. Scenarios have been discussed. What are they? It's an application of a collection of tools and techniques that we think will help us achieve the goal of the study. Continuing to receive broad public input is essential throughout this process. I think this has been covered adequately by prior speakers. Understand, too, that agricultural land as Collier County Page 57 September 26, 2001 identifies it is more than just agricultural use. Your Comprehensive Plan and your Land Development Code has a whole series of uses that are considered to be rural uses that fall into the agricultural designation. This is just a partial listing, actually, from your Land Development Code of some of those uses. Again, we have detailed information on all the subcategories of agricultural activity. Here you can see how we have overlaid the major agricultural irrigation and water management systems on top of the natural flow-ways. You can see that, once again, the natural features of the study area pop out. Camp Keais on the left and then Calloway on the right. I think this has been covered already in some depth. Again, there has been a substantial conversion from predominantly cattle to citrus over the last 15 years, but a relatively small conversion of natural lands to agricultural uses. Contrary to, I think, some popular belief that there were subdivisions and growth occurring in the study area, in the eastern lands that has not occurred. There have been no subdivisions. There have been no significant rezones in the past recent history. It's a very stable area. There's a number of economic influences that we're going to have to accommodate that already exist in the study area-- most of them within the Immokalee urban area but certainly affect the study area. We've got a partial listing of some of those. I think it's important. Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, we're going to be looking at eco-tourism. Lake Trafford, obviously, is a key economic driver for the study area and the airport. We did a little comparison, and we took the urban area of Immokalee to look at growth. You'll see over the past decade that Immokalee has had a reasonable amount of growth in the last decade, about 30 percent, which kind of mirrors most moderately to high- growth areas of the state. Now, if you look at the other area that's Page 58 September 26, 2001 adjoining us, which is the Orangetree/Golden Gate Estates, you're going to see there's been a fourfold increase in population in the last decade. It's tremendous growth, the fastest growing part of Collier County on a percentage basis. They've added 4,000 people in the last decade in just that portion of the estates and Orangetree. Now let's look at the study area. In ten years 38 homes and 106 people have been added to the 195,000 acres. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Wow. MR. REYNOLDS: So you can see certainly there are growth drivers in the estates, the platted subdivisions and the entitled lands, but agriculture has remained the use of the study area. Collier County has done long-range planning for some time and transportation planning. They have a 2025 plan, as you know, that looks at needs. They have done a lot of projections as to an anticipated population that could be accommodated in 25 years. Go to the next slide. They've also created on that basis a 2025 transportation plan. The only significant difference between today's road network and the 2025 network in the study area is the four-laning of Immokalee Road, the improvement of State Road 82, and a loop road proposed around Immokalee. So no new road corridors other than the loop around the urban area. So the summary as far as growth for Immokalee is it's experienced very, you know, diminimus change over the past 15 years. We are having rapid growth in the Golden Gate Estates and Orangetree area. There are very few parcels of land that are smaller than 40 acres, and we use that as a benchmark to determine the potential for uncontrolled growth. The same analysis was done in your fringe, and there are literally thousands of parcels that could be developed, if you will, without going through some kind of rigorous review process. Contrarily, in this area because it's owned primarily by a small group Page 59 September 26, 2001 of large landowners, there are very few parcels that are able to be subdivided and developed without going back through a planning and zoning process. I want to talk a little bit about scenario creation and how we're going to approach this process. It was important for us to work with the committee to develop some definitions, some terms of art that we're going to use in this process, because one of the questions that always gets asked is, "Well, what is the scenario?" There's been a lot of questions and presumptions about what it may or may not be. But it's quite simple, I think, in the way we are defining it. It's a demonstration of the potential application of innovative tools, techniques, and strategies. That's a scenario. Why do we do scenarios? We use it to evaluate which of the tools are going to work for us, what's going to get us to our final objective. There are a number of tools -- if you'll go to the next one -- that we have available to us, and the list is growing. Just out of the committee's visioning process, there's a list of probably 70 or 80 different kinds of tools and techniques we can use. We call that the toolbox. You don't necessarily use every tool in all applications. What you want to have is a full range of things that you can use depending on the need and the situation. So that's how we're going to approach this. We're going to create this toolbox, we're going to test the tool, and then we're going to select the ones that we think work the best, and use those as the basis for your Comprehensive Plan amendments. The horizon framework, I use -- I think an analogy is called for in what the horizon framework is. You can read the definition: It's a set of parameters within which the scenarios are evaluated. If you want to use an analogy to a car, the horizon framework is the chassis. So as we go through these definitions, think about the chassis of the vehicle which may not change dramatically. It's the givens that we're Page 60 September 26, 2001 going to use consistently so that we can benchmark different types of tools and techniques. It's based on a number of things. For example, the area of critical state concern is a known regulatory device that exists. That's part of your horizon framework. The time frame, 25 years, that's a known part. That's part of your horizon framework. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Can I ask you a question, Al? Is it -- are you talking about -- it gets the control in scientific experiment? It's the control feature? MR. REYNOLDS: It's the skeleton. It's the -- there's two pieces of it, and I'll explain the other piece of it in a minute. But the horizon framework, if you think of it-- here's the elements of it: For example, the time frame, the projected road network and population, the interim NRPA boundaries that have already been established, the boundaries of the Immokalee urban area. These are things that are definable as they sit today. It doesn't mean that they may not change as a result of the study, but it means that those are known quantities that we're dealing with. Let's go to the next one, because I think the other part of the control is what we call the baseline reference scenario. Okay. What that is is if you took all of your adopted plan policies and zoning regulations that existed before we started the study and if you projected them forward for 25 years, with that horizon framework you would have a result. Okay. That's the baseline reference. That's the do-nothing plan. That's if we just let things occur by their own course and we don't make any changes. You have a result. So if the horizon framework is the chassis, this is last year's model. The scenario is next year's prototype. So we're always having something that we can compare. The toolbox are the components that we're going to use to build the new prototype from last year's model. Page 61 September 26, 2001 We've actually just at the last meeting had the opportunity to run through an outline of what should be tested in the first scenario, and the committee is still reviewing this, but we'll just walk through some of the key parts of that. First of all, over the summer there were some visioning workshops that were facilitated by a Florida Gulf Coast University professor, and the intent of that was to draw out of the committee and the public their ideas of the tools. We had 16 different questions that came right out of your final order. Basically, it was an open-ended process that they came up with lists, and then they prioritized those lists. What we did, then, is we took the highest-priority items with each question, and we collected them together and created an outline of a scenario from those preferred tools. Then we designed some strategies around it. The basic strategy for Scenario 1 that we're going to test is to use an overlay concept that's going to be called tentatively the Immokalee Area Rural Stewardship Overlay. What that overlay will do is test some of these tools and techniques so that we can see if they accomplish the resource protection needs and accomplish the transfer of rights from areas that should receive protection to areas that may be suitable for conversion of use. Not only was the work of the facilitated workshop an inspiration for this, but I think by now you are familiar with the fact that the state adopted some legislation this past year, the rural stewardship legislation. Well, it just so happened that a lot of what was seen by the committee and the public to be likely solutions for us fits very nicely with the concept under the stewardship legislation. So Scenario 1 really is consistent in concept with the approach that was reflected in the state legislation. Although there are many assumptions that have to go into a scenario, here's three that I think will define this first one. The first is that there's going to be a dynamic balance of uses. What we're saying Page 62 September 26, 2001 is that in 25 years it's not going to be all ag, it's not going to be all conservation, it's not going to be all economic diversification and alternative uses. There's going to be a balance there. Striking the balance, obviously, is the challenge that we have to meet. The second assumption for the first scenario is that we're going to get to where we need to be not through a regulatory program, but through an incentive-based program. Again, you can design a scenario that says we're going to try to get where we need to by regulation. That's how we're going to look at it on the first scenario. Then the third assumption we're making is that there are not going to be sufficient new sources of public revenues to make it all work. We're taking the position that if this is going to work, it's going to have to be done on an incentive basis predominantly through the private sector. It's not to say that there will be none, but what we're saying here is we can't rely upon public funds to get us where we need to be with natural resources protection and agricultural viability. It will be a contributing factor. We talked about the toolbox. Here is the list of what are considered to be the most likely tools to work, and so these are the ones that are tested under that scenario. You can see a lot of them are concepts that have already been examined to some degree in your fringe study. Some of them come out of the legislation. But all of them came out of that facilitated workshop or workshops that we held over the summer. Things like sending and receiving areas, natural resource protection guidelines, clustering, open-space requirements, these are the tools that we're going to be looking at. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: And a lot of that is right out of the stewardship legislation on the state level, I would think. MR. REYNOLDS: Very much so, yes. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Okay. MR. REYNOLDS: And some of these come right out of the Page 63 September 26, 2001 final order. The final order did give some guidance. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Absolutely. MR. REYNOLDS: For example, rural villages, satellite communities was one of the tools that they said have to be looked at. Next, please. I don't really have time to get into the details of it, and it's probably just to give you a taste of it because the committee is still working with this, but the concept of sending and receiving, I thought, would bear a little bit of explanation because there are some assumptions for this first scenario. The first is that when we have sending areas, which are places where we're going to take rights and move them out, if you will, to protect land, those will be designated based on the characteristics of the land underneath. It seems logical, but that needs to be stated because what that means is that you may have different kinds of sending areas. It may not be a one-size-fits-all kind of approach. The area of critical state concern will be a sending area, at least for this first scenario as a test. The NRPAs will be sending areas. And because we're saying that we can't rely on public funding, we're saying that those lands are likely to remain in private ownership through the life of the study for the first scenario. On the other side, anyplace that is designated as a receiving area has certain requirements that it has to meet. First is -- as Tim talked about and others, compatibility of uses needs to be addressed so that you do not have incompatible uses impacting, for example, natural resource protection areas. Receiving areas also have to be designed so that it does not encourage urban sprawl. There's a very detailed definition in state law as to what that means and how it applies. As far as natural resource protection under the first scenario, the techniques that will work the best and need to be looked at are techniques that don't require a fee-simple acquisition of land. Page 64 September 26, 2001 If you make the assumption that there's not enough money to buy the land, you have to come up with a different approach. Well, the approaches that work are things like conservation easements, stewardship agreements, credit systems, things that will work with private property owners to make sure that the goals are achieved and at the same time that property owners are getting some value, if you will, for the protection or elimination of rights that they may have. If you have a balanced approach to do these things, it seems, again, by logic that you get to a result which is that you do have a sustainable program for environmental protection. You will -- to the extent that we can insure agricultural viability, first, it's do no harm and, second, it's do things that may help support agriculture. So if you're getting value as a farmer for doing a good stewardship of your land, maybe that helps you to stay in business as a farmer. Enabling economic diversification, again, is a recurring theme throughout the study. Again, always look at cost-efficient techniques. That's two years in, I think, about 15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes, but I'd be happy to answer any questions. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Thank you, A1 Reynolds. That's an enormous amount of information. It's been well presented and concisely given. Of course, I know we're getting copies of that to study, but it sure says to me we have a lot of great opportunities, a lot of dynamics in the process. I compliment you as a part of what you're doing to bring some sense to where everything is so that we can quickly knock down the assumptions that have prevailed in the past and get down to the GIS mapping which really gives us a much better foundation for decision making in the future. Questions by the board. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: A million of them, but they'll be coming, you know. CHAIRMAN CARTER: They'll be coming. Right. Okay. Page 65 September 26, 2001 Thank you very much, Al. Mr. Mulhere. MR. MULHERE: Let's see. It's still morning. Good morning. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Yes, sir. MR. MULHERE: For the record, Bob Mulhere with RWA, Inc. I also want to reiterate some of the comments that were expressed earlier by a number of individuals in expressing my gratitude for being involved in this process both personally and professionally, personally as a citizen and professionally as a planner. The process has been extremely rewarding thus far, and I am fully confident that we can and will complete the process addressing all of the requirements of the final order and achieving the kind of balance that Allen just referred to. One of the things we have been doing on behalf of the county is meeting with the county staff and with WilsonMiller on a regular basis to coordinate this process from this point out and certainly before this point in time. We began to develop an analysis of the tasks that lay before us, and as we did that, as I'm sure it's no surprise to you at this point in time, we began to realize that in order to adopt Comprehensive Plan amendments prior to the June 22nd date, we would have to really expedite this process considerably. Collectively, none of us felt that that was the best methodology to achieve the results in the long run. If it took a little bit longer or beyond that date in time but the process was better and the end product was better, that would be more desirable. And I think really everyone in the process agrees with that concept. You have on the screen before you a schedule that will bring us to adoption, and it's pretty aggressive as it stands right now. For example -- and we're starting at this point in time with the workshop at the top -- establishing a scenario is estimated to take about 75 days. There will be a minimum of three; however, there could be more. Page 66 September 26, 2001 This will require significant involvement of the staff, myself, WilsonMiller, but also a significant involvement of the committee, and it's a time when we really want to have significant public input as well. So while you see, I think, five meetings scheduled up there between October and December or through December 17th, it's very likely that there will need to be additional meetings built into that time. We don't intend to extend that time frame, but we may need to have some additional meetings, and the committee is aware of this and certainly has agreed to do whatever it takes to get through that process. As we complete Stage 2 and move on to Stage 3, we'll begin to develop a preferred scenario. Allen explain to you what the scenario is, and I would just like to add to that that really this is a process that is able to provide more of a visual understanding of what the result will be if you apply this scenario. I guess what I mean to say by that is that sometimes when you simply read comprehensive plans language, you really don't get an understanding of what the end results are intended to be. Through this process you should have a much better vision of what the intended results will be from one scenario or another. I can cut it fairly short here. The bottom line is that if you get down to the transmittal hearing, that's scheduled for June 1 lth, and the adoption hearing is scheduled for October 30th. So we really will be looking for an extension to -- for argument sake let's just say November 1st to complete this process. I'd be happy to answer any questions you have. You have that information before you, and I don't see any reason to elaborate on that at this point in time. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Questions by the board? COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Just some that I've already Page 67 September 26, 2001 expressed in my meeting with Stan -- and I think you were there and Nancy Lananne -- about being sure that in this public forum-- you know, I see -- besides the official adoption hearings and transmittal hearings, because by then we're down to fine tuning. There's a public forum there it looks like in April, and then the transmittal hearing in May. Prior to that can you show me on here where there are additional opportunities for public participation? MR. MULHERE: Obviously, at any one of the committee meetings there's an opportunity for public participation. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: And there's eight more of those? Is that what I see there? MR. MULHERE: Correct, but that -- I feel strongly that that will be a minimum. There likely will be significantly more than that. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Okay. MR. MULHERE: But what I did want to share with you is the difficulty is -- I mean, obviously we want the public participation, but at the point when we can really provide what the preferred scenario is, that's probably the most critical point for getting full public involvement in that process, because we're certainly going to want to demonstrate to the public that's involved that this is the preferred scenario, these are the results, and provide some public input from it. That's why we scheduled that sort of official or very formal public forum process, and I don't mean "formal" in the way that it may unfold, but listed on the schedule. That's why we put that in April so that we would have all of the information that we had garnered and collected through the scenario development and the development of the preferred scenario process, because we certainly don't want to engage the public to that degree intermittently and then have them feel that they really don't know what the final recommendation is going to be. CHAIRMAN CARTER: I think, Bob, as you go along in that, Page 68 September 26, 2001 you can get those back to the board through Tom Olliff. That helps us as an update at our meetings. Also, we can use 54 and all the other media news outlets to let them know. Now it's getting down to where you're really ready -- MR. MULHERE: Correct. CHAIRMAN CARTER: -- to do this, and when you do those add-ons, we'll do everything we can to get them communicated to the public and, hopefully, they will participate and share with us. MR. MULHERE: Excellent. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: The other thing is -- and I just say this publicly because it sometimes helps get things done, but I really suggest that we engage maybe even at this early point, you know, the editorial board of the Naples Daily News and see if we can get them focusing on a perspective section, for example, on what have we learned about the study area so far so that we -- you know, because that's just a real opportunity to communicate to people because of the volume of information they can deliver there. I just think that would be a really good idea. COMMISSIONER HENNING: It would be a great story. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: But it really ought to be more than -- I know Eric is here, and I know he's writing a story, but my plug is for it to be a whole perspective section on what have we learned so far, what do we know, and then people will be more informed because there will need to be another perspective section or two before we finish this. CHAIRMAN CARTER: I think that's a great suggestion, and if any member of the editorial board are watching the show today, we would encourage you to do that and do it as people begin to come back particularly to participate with us. Take some of the key things here and meet with them and really share some concise data with them that would help them in developing that article so that they Page 69 September 26, 2001 don't have to just rely on hearing it and take notes. The more written information you can provide them in a concise way would be an assistance for them in developing that. MR. MULHERE: As a consensus of the board, I'm sure that myself in working the staff and the consultants of WilsonMiller we can put together, you know, a plan to make sure that we take advantage of that opportunity. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Be sure and take Ann along with you. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: Jim. Commissioner Carter. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Seriously, don't go without her. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Commissioner Coletta. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: Bob, one of the things I hope you keep in mind when we get down to the final planning is that we have land that's continuous to the existing Immokalee boundaries now. I'm really looking forward to that opportunity about a year and a half from now to involve the Immokalee community in a master plan. It will help their community grow for the next 20 to 25 years, everything from government centers to upscale neighborhoods, new opportunities involving such entities as Dover Kohl, parks and schools, whatever we need. But it's not going to help if the land is spread out separate from Immokalee and it can't be a continuous piece. So when you're getting down to the very nitty-gritty at the end, I hope that your committee gives special consideration to the needs of the community of Immokalee itself. MR. MULHERE: Excellent point. intent. CHAIRMAN CARTER: All right. If we can move to the next presentation. and Brad Cornell. Now I have to say "good afternoon, Without question that is the Thank you, Bob Mulhere. It will be by Nancy Payton "Nancy. Page 70 September 26, 2001 MS. PAYTON: And good afternoon to you. My name is Nancy Payton. I represent the Florida Wildlife Federation, and thank you for the opportunity for even having a spot on the agenda today to share some of our comments and concerns and suggestions for the remainder of the rural land study. I want to remind the commissioners and committee members and consultants and the public that the assessment came about as a need to protect Collier County's natural resources. It's an outgrowth of a challenge that was focused on natural resources, and that is the wildlife and wildlife habitat, not just wetland habitat. According to our comprehensive plan, natural resource protection areas, NRPAs, are to protect listed species and their habitats and may include habitats that need to be enhanced or improved or restored, which might be some of those farms fields, quite frankly. If we abandon the term NRPAs, which there's been some suggestion we might, the county is still obligated to protect wildlife and wildlife habitat. We may be calling it something else, we may be doing it in a different manner, but we are obligated to protect wildlife habitat and wildlife. The rural land study area is critically located. It connects water and wildlife to public lands to the north, south, west, and targeted lands to the east. These lands must be viewed-- that is the rural lands -- in relationship to the entire county and the unique western Everglades ecosystem. We got a preview of that from Tim Durham's presentation. Panthers and black bears must be guiding species for resource protection. Woodstorks and scrub jays are also key species. The comment that we need a viable population of 250 panthers and South Florida doesn't meet that, that was just a discussion in the first meeting of the panther recovery team. We don't know yet what the role South Florida is going to play, particularly Southwest Florida, Page 71 September 26, 2001 but we have panthers -- we have Florida panthers, and no place else in Florida has them, so we still have that -- and I use that word again -- obligation to consider them in this planning process. COMMISSIONER FIALA: Did you say no place else in Florida has Florida panthers? MS. PAYTON: That's correct. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: That's right. MS. PAYTON: They're in Southwest Florida. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Period. Oh, heads in the room are shaking. They're a little north of the Caloosahatchee, but not far. MS. PAYTON: Well, some of us consider that Southwest Florida. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: That's what I was thinking. MS. PAYTON: They're not in North Florida. They're not in the panhandle, although those areas are being looked at. I'll gladly provide you with that information. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Nancy, so that people don't suddenly just say it's Collier, what I heard was Southwest -- MS. PAYTON: That's correct. CHAIRMAN CARTER: -- which is a very large footprint. MS. PAYTON: But there's significant populations in Collier County. My point is that we can't dismiss our obligations to the panther under this planning process or even under the Endangered Species Act. Planning scenarios should include receiving areas outside the rural lands area. We suggested that Orangetree be one of those receiving areas that's being looked at. We also are concerned that the remaining uses on the sending areas and the allowable uses on conservation in designated lands must be compatible with the reason that we're sending development rights off there. Page 72 September 26, 2001 To have meaningful protection of wildlife habitat, the intensity and density of agriculture must be regulated. Why designate conservation lands or protect wildlife habitat if destructive land uses are going to be allowed. That doesn't say that agriculture and wildlife are not compatible because we know that we are, but we do need to begin to look at what type of agriculture, what type of conversion is taking place, and what impact that's going to have on wildlife. A mosaic and interaction of different types of agriculture in those natural lands seems to work, but we want to stress that ag needs to be brought into the land-use land-regulating process. It's controversial, but I think we're going to have to wrestle with it if we're going to have meaningful protections. We request an economic study that includes evaluating the tax benefits of agriculture and natural lands without new towns or rural villages in the rural lands area. In 1996 the Florida Stewardship Foundation released a Collier County study that revealed for every dollar generated by agriculturally related activities, the county and school spent only 37 cents in direct services, thereby creating a 63 percent surplus on each dollar. In other words, ag is good for our tax base. For every dollar generated in residential revenues, $1.20 is spent in direct services. We ask that this report be updated, and I brought the summary of it, the key findings, in. If I could pass them that way. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: I just love this, so I want to say it one more time. For every dollar we collect in real estate taxes on a piece of ag land, they require 37 cents worth of services. MS. PAYTON: According to this 1996 study. Maybe we need to update it, but it's the best we have now. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: So they're a contributor. To the extent that we can keep ag functioning in Collier County, they're contributing to the taxes or to the benefits of non-ag lands. We spend Page 73 September 26, 2001 37 cents on them of every dollar they pay. Whereas, for a residential property, we spend $1.20 for every dollar we collect from a house. MS. PAYTON: We also think in that equation there ought to be an evaluation of natural lands because natural lands add value to our tax base. They generate income because people come here for eco- tourism. So those are two issues that we would like to see included in an economic analysis. That it's not just condos and strip malls or other types of creative -- or other creative -- or creative, I guess I want to say, planning techniques, and that we look at them from all perspectives. COMMISSIONER HENNING: The income that's generated from ag land, how does that benefit the State of Florida through taxes? You know, you have food that is not taxed, not sales taxed, but -- MS. PAYTON: I don't know the answer to that. Maybe that's a good one for one of the ag folks. CHAIRMAN CARTER: MS. PAYTON: Also -- CHAIRMAN CARTER: I don't know. I think it's being duly noted by Mr. Olliff, and we'll try and get that information. MS. PAYTON: We're also concerned about the impact to Immokalee's economy, that is, the Immokalee urban area and its economy and growth potential from competing new communities. We've heard reference to new towns, satellite communities, rural villages. Well, we're concerned that those new towns are not going to have a positive impact on Immokalee's attempt to diversify and grow and change. COMMISSIONER HENNING: Doesn't that -- in the Governor's order, isn't that a part of it? Isn't it planned for? MS. PAYTON: It doesn't say "planned for." It says something to the effect of-- Page 74 September 26, 2001 COMMISSIONER HENNING: Includes. MS. PAYTON: -- look at, but it doesn't necessarily say look at in this area. It said the assessment, and it listed them, but it doesn't say we have to do it. We can look at it and say, "No, this is not good for our community at this time." It doesn't say, "You've got to put new villages out there," and "You've got to put satellite communities." When we were involved in negotiating it, that's not what we thought. Now, it's possible that it can be done and it doesn't draw on Immokalee and it still protects those natural resources, but we'd like to see all those different scenarios looked at and optioned so the community can make those choices. COMMISSIONER HENNING: that. Well, thank you for correcting MS. PAYTON: Well, I'm giving you my viewpoint of it that we don't have to do them out there if we don't want to. That's why we're going through this planning process. It's not necessarily to plan new towns but what is best for the community. We urge that the committee and the staff take better advantage of the technical expertise from state and other government agencies. We ask that the committee not be territorial and reach out to other county advisory committees, most notably the Environmental Advisory Council and members of the original community character committee who worked on the rural and natural lands issues. We have an award-winning plan. We saw the award yesterday. And the test of that plan is not that we did the plan, but we implement the plan. Here's an opportunity to implement the plan or walk the talk. We seek clear understanding of how the special study areas -- and we didn't hear about those today. Those are those between -- they're one step below NRPAs -- how those study areas are going to be studied and how they're going to be treated differently during this Page 75 September 26, 2001 process than the other areas. We really haven't quite figured that one out. Lastly, we continue to promote physical planning, lines on a map as opposed to policies. We think this is clear, it's better, and it achieves the goals that we are looking for much more easily than policies. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Thank you, Nancy, for your continued participation in this process. I really appreciate -- I think it was said earlier that people came to the table or got involved in this, you know, pretty guarded. Some people come into the room, and everybody is maybe not very trusting of the other people. But what I'm understanding over time is you've begun to break down those differences so that you're all working in a more cooperative way. You still may have a difference of opinion or direction, but you're being much more -- I want to say productive because you're having a better interchange and understanding of each other. MS. PAYTON: Well, I think that's true for all sides, and we're trying our best to be cooperative and patient in some ways to try and understand the other side and work out our interests and our concerns beforehand. I have resented some of the comments that we're just going to sue anyway, and that isn't true. We prefer not to sue. We did have to sue to get to the table, quite frankly-- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: But you're there. MS. PAYTON: -- under the old commission. We're there now. We're being heard, and we're being treated well, which we weren't in previous times. So we're going to stay there and work the best we can through that forum. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: You know, Nancy, it turns out that those of us who were treated poorly -- MS. PAYTON: We're still here. Page 76 September 26, 2001 COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: We're here, and we wear it as a badge of honor. MS. PAYTON: That's right. We survived. Thank you. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Well, some of us are trying to. Mr. Cornell. MR. CORNELL: Hello, Commissioners. Brad Cornell. I'm speaking on behalf of the Collier County Audubon Society, and I have a brief discussion here about an opportunity that I think that we all sort of have consensus on, and that was referred to by A1 Reynolds in looking at the scenario development process where in Scenario 1 he assumed there would be no public funds. But really what we would prefer to see is that the public pay for public values that are on private lands. In other words, we don't want to only see regulation. I think there's consensus that we want to have financial incentives to do and encourage proper stewardship of private lands, protection of these values in the name of the public as well as in the interest of the private landholders in agriculture. To that end there are several mechanisms that are available. A few of them include the previously mentioned Rural & Family Lands Protection Act and the Rural Land Stewardship Act which comes through this state. One of those is funded, and one of them is not. It's certainly something to be looked at and advocated for in the upcoming legislative session. There is also the Federal Farm Bill which is going to be reauthorized starting in the fall of 2002 for 10 years. It's a huge bill and, obviously, very controversial in many respects. The farm bill by itself does not take care of the needs of Florida. Florida receives very little support from the farm bill, traditionally, but there are efforts now to change that, and I will go into that in just a minute. There is the Working Land Stewardship Act of 2001, which is HR-2375. That is being offered as an amendment to the farm bill by Page 77 September 26, 2001 Representatives Gilcrest, Spellert (phonetic), and Kind, and this is what I'm going to detail for you. Ifs got the most potential. The language of that act as proposed would replace the conservation title of the farm bill, which will be coming to the floor of the House next week. The conservation title would then as proposed in this amendment dramatically increase funding for agricultural conservation programs. This is exactly what Florida needs. Specifically, it would also improve the equity of the distribution of those funds throughout the country so that Florida or places like Florida where land values are high -- we can also benefit from those sort of programs. There's also a bill called the American Farmland Stewardship Act which was submitted by Representative Adam Putnam, and that bill has very valuable concepts in it. It's directed towards predominantly making these programs better available and more easily accessed by farmers. Yesterday Commissioner Carter referred to it as one-stop shopping, and that's, basically, a good assessment of that. These kind of principles need to be incorporated as well. Quickly looking at the programs that we want to see used here is financial incentives for Florida farmers, for Collier County agriculture specifically. We would stand to benefit greatly from the amendment that's going to be proposed. The Wildlife Habitat Incentive Program, these are USDA programs that are funded through the farm bill. The amendment would propose $500 million a year for the Wildlife Habitat Incentive Program. This is directly related to our natural resources issues up there in eastern Collier County. The conservation reserve program offers management contracts and easements to protect 45 million acres of sensitive habitat, including 3 million acres of listed species habitat and a million acres Page 78 September 26, 2001 of isolated wetlands and 9 million acres of buffers and easements. All of these things are critical to the success of protecting our resources. That's 45 million acres only if we get this amendment passed through the House and ultimately through the Senate and the president signs it. The environmental quality incentive program, the proposal is from the Gilcrest Spellert Kind amendment to put $2 billion into management contracts to improve conservation of habitat and protect water resources. The wetlands reserve program provides easements and cost-share programs to restore and preserve wetlands. The increase in this program is to an annual acreage of 300,000. These are national figures. But Florida, again, would be much better represented through this because of better equity. Farm land protection program, this is really a core program for us here in Collier County. It's $500 million a year to purchase development rights of farms in the path of urban sprawl or conversion potential. It's a willing-farmer-only program that would create also a $10 million annual program for market development and technical assistance on agricultural viability. And, finally, the forest stewardship programs with $345 million a year for cost share, technical assistance, and conservation easements on private-land forests. The farm bill, as I said, will be coming to the House floor next Wednesday according to the rules committee, October 3rd. At that time the Spellert Kind Gilcrest amendment will be offered. Hopefully, Putnam's principles will be incorporated into that. If they are not, they need to be worked on and advocated after the fact. This commission has already passed a resolution in support of that, which is to be commended, and I think that all of us as individuals and in our organization can also advocate for these kinds of financial incentives to go toward the betterment and protection of resources Page 79 September 26, 2001 here in Collier County. One final note is that the Bush administration, President Bush's administration, fully supports increased funding for agricultural conservation programs. They recognize it as a key element to viable agriculture in the future. Thank you. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Questions for Brad Cornell. COMMISSIONER HENNING: Just a comment. I truly hope that these tools are going to be put into the rural land study for consideration. I do see this as a win-win for Collier County if we can bring some of those monies back. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Brad, I can't thank you enough for your efforts, your educational update. I know from Porter Goss's office and from Representative Putnam's office I'm going to get a pretty clear early message because that goes to the floor on Wednesday. I'll be tracking it with those offices. I'll be asking for feedback as quickly as possible so that we can get it disseminated into the community so we know what's happening here. Let's keep your fingers crossed. Let's hope they go for it and it doesn't get chewed up on the House floor. All right. MR. OLLIFF: Mr. Chairman, the agenda calls for any questions that the board may have, and I'm sure Nancy or Brad or Allen or Ron are available to answer anything that the board might have, and if there are none, then the next item would be the public speakers. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Commissioner Coletta. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: No questions, but just a couple of comments, if I may. I want to compliment the committee for the openness that it has and for bringing the environmental interests into it at this early point in time rather than wait until we reach a final conclusion and have to duke it out. It never works. Page 80 September 26, 2001 But it's one of the things I -- one more time I want to direct your attention to the community of Immokalee and hope that we give special consideration to the land areas around Immokalee and that we can meet their future needs for growth. The property rights of the owners have to be respected. Even though they may have large holdings, they are landowners, and they do have property rights. Now that I'm looking back on it in retrospect, I'm kind of glad that this initiative came from their direction. It gives them a stakehold in this whole thing early on and makes them part of it. I'm really hoping that under public comments we'll be hearing from some of the landowners. I'd like to hear their thoughts, their fears, their hopes of how this is going and the direction it's going. Thafs what I have at this point in time. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Okay. Thank you, Commissioner Coletta. Any other commissioners have any questions? (No response.) CHAIRMAN CARTER: We'll go to public comment. MR. OLLIFF: Actually, Mr. Chairman, the only public speaker we had just waived. CHAIRMAN CARTER: All right. If there's no other public comment, again, I want to thank the committee. I want to thank everyone in this room and all the heavy-duty lifting that's been done so far on this. Just keep up the good work. Keep coming back to us, and we're going to end up with a really, really great end result. Now do we have someone who wants to speak? Yes, sir. MR. TAYLOR: Thanks, Tom. In the essence of time, I was not -- THE COURT REPORTER: Your name, please. MR. TAYLOR: I'm sorry. I'm Mike Taylor, and I'm here speaking on behalf of the Eastern Collier Property Owners Page 81 September 26, 2001 Association. In light of the time, I was not going to speak, but with Commissioner Coletta I felt like I need to speak. I felt like I should come up and say a few words. Basically, we've done a lot of work in the last year and a half, and everyone spoke about that. Annie did a good job of speaking about that. Ron's talked about it pretty thoroughly, and then A1 Reynolds and his work. At this point I want to take the opportunity to commend, you know, the efforts of the committee, the county staff, A1 Reynolds, and WilsonMiller for what they've done so far with the study. As you can tell, it's a very complex, complicated issue. We've done a lot of work, but we've got a long ways to go. We've got some efforts that we've got to work through. I'm proud to tell you that just as we had promised -- and I'm talking about the Eastern Collier properties when we started this process -- is that we have produced the most accurate and best data available for this area. So we've got the tools to use, and it's going to be the basis for the foundation for planning for the future in that area. We believe that -- and I think Ron had mentioned it and some others -- we believe that it does open up a tremendous opportunity for Collier County to take the leadership role for the rural lands for not only our county, but also as a template for the state. I think the state -- the stakeholders up there are looking at what we're going to do down here in Collier County and, you know, we're poised to be the leaders in that effort. We're on track to do that. We are going to be working with every stakeholder that's involved in this process. You know, we've got some differences, but we're going to work towards those differences, and it's going to be a win for all of us in the rural land areas and Collier County and, hopefully, the state as a whole. A couple of comments on Immokalee. I think what we're going Page 82 September 26, 2001 to do in the rural area will compliment Immokalee. You know, the planning scenario and whatever happens has got to be -- Immokalee is going to be very important to this process, and what happens in this process is going to benefit Immokalee. There's no question about it. Immokalee is key to what we do and how we proceed with our process. That's all I have to say. Any questions or comments? We appreciate your support and the committee's effort and, hopefully, we can move forward. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you, again, board members and audience. God bless America. There being no further business for the good of the County, the workshop was adjourned by order of the Chair at 12:32 p.m. BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS BOARD OF ZONING APPEALS/EX OFFICIO GOVERNING BOARD(S) OF SPECIAL DISTRICTS UNDER ITS CONTROL JAMES D. 'CARTER, Ph.D, CHAIRMAN ,.-ATTEST:: "DW.I,GH2' E. BROCK, CLERK Attest ~s to Ch~tr~n'$ signature on15. Page 83 September 26, 2001 These minutes approved by the Board on presented,/~ or as corrected ////,t/~ / , as TRANSCRIPT PREPARED ON BEHALF OF DONOVAN COURT REPORTING, INC., BY MARGARET A. SMITH, RPR Page 84