Cut Bait

Time has arrived for the Board of County Commissioners to smell the coffee and stop using public money to carry the water for a local developer.

On Jan. 22 the First District Court of Appeals denied a rehearing on an appellate decision regarding county enforcement of its own rules concerning wetlands jurisdiction and protection.

That pretty much casts in stone the decision handed down in December that took the county and developer Jay Rish to task for a series of actions.

The case involves a development on Hibiscus Drive which has been the subject of litigation for more than five years, the case bouncing between the 14^th Judicial Circuit, where the county consistently has won, to the First District Court of Appeals, where the county has lost with equal consistency.

At issue is the county’s rules governing wetlands jurisdiction and the county’s subdivision ordinance, both of which the appellate court found had not been properly enforced as written in the county’s comprehensive plan and land development regulations.

The case, however, has a significant subplot running through it, and that is how the county “serves” the taxpayers of the county.

That the county is even in the case at all is confounding given that the case revolves around enforcement of its own land use rules and regulations.

Enforce those rules and the county isn’t in court, isn’t involved in lengthy litigation that the taxpayers have paid for to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.

Put this in perspective – Fred Johnson, a neighbor of Rish’s development on Hibiscus Drive and a practicing attorney, is submitting to the county a bill for some $13,000 he paid for court costs, bringing in expert witnesses and filing fees.

Not any attorney’s fees, just ancillary costs of over $13,000 that now that the county has lost, which Johnson is pursuing reimbursement for.

That should provide a baseline of what the county has spent fighting the enforcement of its rules. Illogical doesn’t begin to capture such action.

The larger picture though is that the county has been in court for five years because at the bottom line, Mr. Johnson was an outsider and Mr. Rish was not.

Even though Johnson has a homesteaded property in Gulf County he has owned for over 15 years, has paid his rising property taxes, his name is not Rish and thus he was treated as a nuisance, one that would not go away no matter how many times he was forced to amend his complaint, no matter the losses in circuit court.

When he and his fellow property owners along Hibiscus Drive came before county commissioners to protest what was going on with the Rish development, they were turned away by deaf ears.

And while the case was ongoing, litigation bouncing back and forth but still alive, the county allowed Rish to fill wetlands on his property, wetlands less than 200 feet from St. Joseph Bay, in violation of the county’s rules and, the court hinted, the potential jurisdiction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

Now, as with many homeowners up and down the cape, the property owners on Hibiscus Drive are being impacted by the filling of those wetlands as any heavy rain brings water over the road.

All this because the county lacked the spine to properly enforce its rules when it came to a favored name. This is a familiar pattern that has played out in the case of the St. Joe Company, WindMark Beach and the impacts at St. Joseph Shores and the lack of proper stormwater management along parts of the cape and the flooding of numerous properties along C-30E.

Now the property owners along Hibiscus Drive are requesting that the county, as suggested in the appellate court opinion as an option, demand the restoration of the wetlands filled by Rish.

The county should mandate that to occur.

St. Joseph Bay is one of the true treasures of this area and if this county is to continue to be a tourist destination the bay must be protected.

As the appellate court detailed, there are questions as to whether the FDEP and the Army Corps shirked their responsibility when they determined those wetlands did not fall within their jurisdiction.

The county, however, can not afford to follow a similar path.

Yes, there are personal property rights involved but those were eclipsed when 1) the filling of the wetlands put the bay at risk and 2) when the filling and other actions on Rish’s property impacted his neighbors.

The case has been adjudicated where it properly should have been, the courts. The county and Mr. Rish have come out on the losing side.

The county has to step up and adhere to the decision and should request the wetlands be restored and remain in that state for at least five years to allow full habitat restoration.

And the county should stop using public dollars to, in essence, carry the water of a developer who does wish to adhere to what the appellate court labeled the “clear and unambiguous” language in the county’s land-use rules and regulations.

Rules and regulations, it should be added, that are the product of considerable county time and expense.

At the bottom line, the real losers in this little brouhaha are the taxpayers in the county, who have still another example of the skewed priorities county commissioners place on spending public dollars.