Editorial | City staff tendered ‘condition’ could cost some lot owners plenty
We don’t like surprises.
Especially those that goose taxpayers via a deep grab for their wallets.
That’s why a handful of usually routine requests from private property owners to the city of Cape Coral caught our attention this week.
Three canal-front lot owners are asking for correction of a decades-old anomaly that legally made many of the city’s waterfront properties, well, not quite waterfront.
The city’s developer, who carved 400 miles of man-made canals for the fill to create a city, left linear waterfront strips a few feet wide that aren’t part of the legal description for some parcels.
Lots of them.
The city has spent decades “vacating” these “unexcavated canal” strips — basically deeding them to property owners who need to show ownership to the water to build a seawall, to get a mortgage, to have assured access to the waterfront upon which the taxable valuation of their property is based.
The city retains the easement. The property owner gets what they’re paying for: Waterfront.
It’s a Cape oddity, one that has caused lots of paperwork but little problem.
Until now.
While lot owners who need the otherwise useless strip vacated have long paid the actual cost of application, approval processing and advertising, there is an interesting - and extremely costly — nuance to the three vacation requests to come before a hearing officer next Tuesday.
As a condition of vacation, city staff is recommending that the three property owners contribute to one of two newly created Tree Funds, which were enacted last December as an option for developers looking to reduce the number of required plantings for non-single-family projects.
The Tree Fund “contributions” requested of the lot owners seeking vacations?
For one property owner it’s $2,800 to the General Tree Fund.
For the other two?
Five figures — $32,722.11 and $21,691.94 respectively — also into the General Tree Fund.
Or maybe not.
“The City may use these funds to acquire and plant black (Avicennia germinans) or red (Rhizophora mangle) mangrove trees on property owned or managed by the City of Cape Coral to enhance water quality, or any other appropriate purposes in accordance with the City of Cape Coral Land Development Code.”
Governmentese that include the words “may” or “or” in the context of “or any other appropriate purposes” are also things that make us flinch.
As flinch we did at what appears to be very new, very expensive and very unexpected conditions that flew beneath the radar but have the potential to affect a lot of individuals: Those who own an unknown number of the Cape’s remaining undeveloped single-family waterfront properties as well as, potentially, those who own land that sits on various platted-but-never-developed “invisible” alleys and byways.
These parcels often require “vacations” for full use, especially for commercial development.
There are no specific policy, resolution or ordinance documents among the “backup material” attached to any of the pending vacation cases that cite under what authority city staff is using compute and implement its Tree Fund “contributions.”
If their efforts to get information from the city was anything like ours — neither the city’s Communication Office, the City Manager’s Office nor City Clerk’s Office responded to public records requests — the affected property owners apparently will have to wait until Tuesday for city staff to make its case as to where and how it rain-made its four- and five-figure entitlements.
One more nuance for those keeping count:
If the hearing officer approves the condition for “contributions” as tendered, each of these property owners will have to front the full amount to make any argument to Council, which makes the final determination on vacation requests.
They then will get the money back only if Council goes against the hearing officer’s recommendation and strikes the staff condition.
We urge Cape property owners to keep an eye on this one, and not only those with canal-front lots they wish to develop or improve.
It could be a foreshadowing of similar surprises yet to come.
Breeze editorial