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Florida Watershed Plan Steadies Growth Boundary

Posted by: Nate Berg

3 January 2007 - 5:00am

A broad and controversial watershed protection plan for Florida's Miami-Dade County was released recently. It calls for a time extension on the county's urban development boundary to 2025 to help protect the area's water quality.

Steadying the county's urban development boundary has been a controversial decision, especially to developers. The county faces a large increase in population and a diminishing amount of land on which to build housing. The county's watershed is heavily affected by the area's many farms and housing developments.

"The study, more than five years and almost $4 million in the making, is supposed to find room for a population projected to double to 1.5 million over the next 50 years while also protecting water quality for Biscayne Bay."

"Recently, 21 members of a watershed advisory committee took final votes on 68 proposals to start putting the ideas in force. Nearly every vote split down a familiar dividing line in South Miami-Dade -- environmentalists and rural residents on one side, agricultural and building interests on the other."

Full Story: Growth plan holds line in S. Dade
Source: The Miami Herald, December 23, 2006
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“
All of that only scratches the surface of what's wrong with this study. The idea that complex urban development patterns and human behavior can be meaningfully studied according to one primary criteria — density — is wrong from the start.
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