Mayor’s veto will protect green space

Calusa Country Club golf course has been a source of conflict and shady deals for more than 10 years. All the while, it was reclaimed by nature and has become important habitat for the threatened tricolored heron, federally endangered bonneted bat and numerous other birds, wildlife and our dwindling tree canopy.

Open green space in Miami-Dade County is targeted by developers to supply an insatiable demand for single-family home s

The county’s overarchingdevelopment master plan is fatally flawed, as it stipulates the county must provide enough land to develop single-family homes 10 years into the future.

Even our development boundary, if moved, would not create an infinite amount of land.

Demand will never subside until the seas submerge us. A new vision for housing that doesn’t sacrifice the last vestiges of nature must emerge.

We desperately need nature to help cool rising surface temperatures, absorb flood waters, recharge our aquifer and provide a place of solace.

Have we grown so detached that providing habitat for creation is no longer a priority?

When is the heavy hand and wealth that have bought and silenced stakeholders and skewed the vote of leaders charged with knowing better going to be challenged?

Daniella Levine Cava, as a commissioner, knew better. Now as county mayor, she has created a vision and a budget to protect and expand our canopy and green space.

She has the needed power we have entrusted in her. A better vision for continued growth exists.

A mayoral veto of development run amok is appropriate and an assertion of sanity.

– Steve Leidner, conservation chair, Miami Sierra Club,

Miami