Collier County Planning Commission recommended denying approval of 750 luxury apartments, including 225 affordable housing units, in a recreation and conservation area at Fiddler’s Creek in East Naples.
The recommendation will head to the Board of County Commissioners for a hearing in October.
After three often contentious public hearings in April and May, planning commissioners voted 4-0 July 18 to deny an amendment to the county’s growth management plan that would have allowed apartments in a roughly 50-acre recreation area within a larger 600-acre conservation area parcel, “Section 29.” However, they recommended approving changes to the planned-unit development and development order, which will allow more land-use flexibility. County staff had recommended approving all three petitions.
“Perhaps the most incisive question I’ve heard asked from anybody in this room in the last two, three hearings, was Commissioner (Paul) Shea’s question about if this didn’t have an affordable housing piece, what would staff have done?” Chairman Edwin Fryer asked. “And the record’s pretty clear, not only in the first hearing, but in the second hearing, when I tried to dig a little deeper, that in all probability, staff would not have approved these applications but for the existence of affordable housing.”
Although affordable, workforce housing is important, Fryer and other commissioners agreed it was not a good location for affordable housing because it’s in a coastal high-hazard area and next to environmentally sensitive areas, such as 110,000-acre Rookery Bay Reserve and Collier-Seminole State Park, which spans 7,271 acres. The apartments would be built along Tamiami Trail East and would require widening and extending Auto Ranch Road to access them, but residents there opposed the increased traffic that would bring.
Fiddler’s Creek received development rights from the county in 1998 after years of hearings. Naples-based Gulf Bay Group of Cos. was approved to build 6,000 homes on 3,932 acres, but only 2,000 have been built in nearly 100 neighborhoods. Residents said they believed the 600-acre area in question would forever remain a preserve and recreation area. The vote ensures the maximum stays at 6,000 homes, if passed by county commissioners.
The development is approved for 1.53 dwelling units per acre, which would increase to 1.72 if apartments were built. Both the Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found further development could harm endangered species and reduce panther habitat. But Gulf Bay opted to mitigate that by setting aside 614 acres of conservation land, mostly Section 29, and to buy mitigation credits.
Gary Oldehoff, an attorney from Stuart who represents several residents, contended Gulf Bay should have filed the conservation easement in 1998, but Gulf Bay’s attorney, Rich Yovanovich, said county codes didn’t require that then, and that Gulf Bay was in talks with the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove the 50 acres from the preserved area.
Despite Yovanovich’s contentions that the 50 acres wasn’t part of the conservation area, Planning Commissioners said they could only refer to the 1998 transcript.
“It basically said that the property was to be safeguarded in perpetuity,” Fryer said. “… It seems to me as though the Board of County Commissioners thought it was all of (Section) 29.”
