‘FLOOD GATES ARE OPENED’
More projects want approval outside Miami-Dade development zone
A year after Miami-Dade commissioners granted rare approval for a large project beyond the county’s conservation buffer, there’s a batch of proposals eager to give them the chance to do it again.
This year, developers filed seven applications to build beyond the current Urban Development Boundary (UDB), where the suburbs end and construction is limited.
The boundary is designed to create a buffer between large residential and commercial projects and two of Miami-Dade’s most sensitive areas: the rural belt of farmland that forms the heart of the county’s agriculture industry, and the Everglades, well fields and wetlands that support its ecosystem and protect its drinking water.
Environmental groups say they’re concerned about the spike in UDB applications a year after MiamiDade commissioners approved the first UDB change in a decade.
“The flood gates are opened,” said Laura Reynolds, director of the Hold the Line Coalition, an umbrella group of conservation organizations and others that typically leads the charge against proposals to expand the UDB.
While Miami-Dade doesn’t have a yearly tally on applications for construction outside the UDB, the Department of Regulatory and Economic Resources pointed to the 10 applications filed in 2005 as the last time there were this many UDB requests in the pipeline.
Reynolds noted the application push follows passage of state legislation that will make it harder for non-profits to challenge future UDB expansions in court. Senate Bill
540, signed into law in May by Gov. Ron DeSantis, allows developers to collect attorney costs from groups who mount unsuccessful legal challenges of a county’s Comprehensive Development Master Plan. That’s part of county law that contains land-use rules, including the location of the UDB.
Only three of the seven latest Miami-Dade applications request altering the UDB to bring more acreage into the urban area. That was the step that the South Dade
Logistics and Technology commercial complex won with a one-vote margin before the commission in November 2022, followed by a successful override vote after Mayor Daniella Levine Cava vetoed the board’s action. Adding nearly 400 acres to the urban zone was the first UDB move since 2013, and the project is currently tied up in legal challenges.
The projects that don’t need boundary changes still require a commission vote to change the rules governing construction beyond the UDB. Those rules are part of the Comprehensive Development Master Plan, and changing them requires two commission
votes: the first to send the proposed alterations to the state for review, and the second to grant final local approval.
Here’s a look at the 2023 UDB applications moving through the legislative pipeline:
FROM FARMLAND TO WETLANDS
Developer Ecosystem Investment Partners wants county permission to convert into wetlands the farmland on a 240 -acre parcel east of Southwest 227th Avenue and just south of 400th Street. That conversion would allow the owners,