GL Homes’ opponents fearful of flooding in a major rainfall
But drainage district chief’s letter to builder bashes flooding fears.
The images from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma are as fraught as they are fresh: wind-whipped waters flooding out neighborhoods; residents using boats and kayaks to reach their homes and businesses.
Opponents of GL Homes’ plan to build more in Palm Beach County’s Agricultural Reserve say agreeing to the developer’s request will take the county a step closer to making those frightening images a reality here. The builder’s promise to preserve 4,900 acres in The Acreage/Loxahatchee area and to donate another acres for the construction of reservoir there doesn’t offset the risks, they say.
Paving over farmland and building homes, opponents of the GL plan argue, eliminates places for water storage and sets the stage for mass flooding.
“I know that GL has a great deal of influence in Palm Beach County,” one woman, Nancy Gilbert, wrote to county commissioners Wednesday. “They are a large profitable corporation. Nevertheless, I feel that this land swap must be voted down. We can expect more frequent and more violent storms and canals do not work the way wetlands or agricultural lands do to filter the excess water down the aquifer. Canals can easily be overwhelmed leading to flooding and deaths.”
GL Homes, however, disputes that argument, and its points are amplified by a voice outside of the growth versus preservation debate — the voice of Robert Brown, executive director of the Lake Worth Drainage District, which provides flood control to large portions of the county.
Befor e Hurricane Harvey swamped Greater Houston and
before Hurricane Irma ripped through Florida, Brown wrote a letter to GL Homes Vice President Larry Portnoy knocking down the flooding fears of the developer’s opponents.
“Conversion of agricultural land to residential development does not have a corresponding negative impact upon flood control within the District,” Brown wrote.
Brown made other points, including:
■ “Future development within the Agricultural Reserve, whether east or west of State Road 7, is not incompatible with the District’s ability to provide residents with effective flood control services.”
■ “Current land development regulatory criteria assure that all development is constructed to meet required flood control standards for protecting property as well as human health and safety.”
■ “Urban development is designed to hold stormwater runoff within the required surface water management lakes, yards and roadways, while storm discharges are regulated within permitted limits through the use of water control structures.”
Brown’s letter, dated July 18 and written on drainage district letterhead, goes to the heart of one of the main arguments against GL’s plan, which will be brought to the Planning Commission in December and to commissioners in early 2018.
GL initially planned to build 3,900 homes on its 4,900-acre Indian Trails Grove tract in The Acreage/ Loxahatchee area. After commissioners approved that plan, the developer changed course, offering instead to preserve those 4,900 acres if the county would change the rules of the Agricultural Reserve to let GL build 3,900 homes there.
Agricultural Reserve rules require developers to preserve 60 acres in the reserve for every 40 that are developed there. Land outside of the reserve — a 22,000acre farming and conservation zone located west of Boynton Beach and Delray Beach — can’t be preserved to facilitate building within the reserve.
GL’s effort to change that rule has touched off a fierce debate over the future of the Ag Reserve, the looming impacts of climate change and whether county rules go far enough to reduce the risk that development will lead to flooding.
Before a plan like GL’s can go forward, the developer would have to check several regulatory boxes, said Bryan Davis, principal planner and urban designer for Palm Beach County.
The first of those boxes center on county rules regarding the development itself.
Davis said the county requires a development to have enough water storage capacity to handle a threeyear, 24-hour rainfall event and that individual structures have to be build to withstand a 100-year, three-day rainfall event.
A three-year, 24-hour rainfall event describes the 33 percent chance in each of three years that a certain amount of rain will fall during a 24-hour period. Davis said it could generally be thought of “the single worst daily rainfall accumulation you’d expect to see in a location over a three-year span.”
A 100-year event is one that has a 1 percent chance of happening in any given year over the course of a century; experts have now determined that Harvey was a 1,000-year event.
Development projects also must deal with what Davis described as subregional improvement districts such as the Lake Worth Drainage District, the Indian Trails Improvement District or the Seminole Improvement District, all of which oversee drainage and flood control in portions of Palm Beach County. The Lake Worth Drainage District handles and regulates drainage in sections of the Agricultural Reserve where GL wants to build.
A developer would have to show that its project would be designed to safely move water from the development and into canals and water basins.
The final regulatory box to check are the standards of the South Florida Water Management District, which Davis said plays “traffic cop” in determining “when and what quantity” of water can be discharged into the system of canals, lakes and rivers under its control.
GL Homes Vice President Larry Portnoy said clearing regulatory hurdles to demonstrate that a proposed project in Palm Beach County won’t lead to flooding is not a snap. “It’s very intense,” Portnoy said.
Opponents of GL’s plan have argued that large tracts of unpaved land, like those used for farming, can absorb water in the event of a flood. Portnoy, however, argues that, because farming operations do not have to clear the same stringent set of anti-flooding hurdles as developers, more development enhances the county’s ability to combat flooding.
Lisa Interlandi, senior attorney for the Everglades Law Center, doesn’t buy that argument. Nor is she convinced current rules and standards are adequate.
“Existing stormwater rules cannot accommodate anywhere near the levels of flooding that are now becoming common with stronger and more frequent storms,” she said. “Preserving green space and natural lands can reduce the impacts of flooding by providing places to store floodwaters, and by recharging the aquifer. It goes without saying that paving over wetlands and agricultural lands which have been set aside for preservation will only worsen the impacts of catastrophic flooding.”