Editorial | Kudos to Council
With its second meeting now under its belt since the General Election, Cape Coral City Council is 2-0 on a hit-to-your-wallet issue brought to the board.
According to discussion brought forward at Wednesday’s voting meeting, Council took issue — unanimous issue — with a policy the city’s administration piggybacked on a previous Council decision designed to allow commercial developers to contribute into a general tree fund instead of planting all of the required landscaping on a particular property.
Beginning in January, city staff also began imposing mandatory tree fund contributions on residential property owners looking to vacate narrow strips of land that, due to the way plats were recorded back in the city’s development days, didn’t quite match up to the legal description of the site.
The most common recording errors were along the city’s 400 miles of man-made canals where “unexcavated” strips a few feet wide weren’t canal, but solid ground between the recorded plat and the water.
The city at first provided quit-claim deeds for the strips as it required seawalls along the banks and the property owners needed to own that bit of land to make the required improvement.
Flash forward and the process became more cumbersome as government processes often do. The city began requiring applications, staff approvals, hearing officer reviews, Council approval, meaning various fees and legal advertising costs.
In January, city staff implemented a new nuance: They implemented a “policy” the administration maintains aligned with Council’s creation of the tree fund. City staff began applying that policy to not only these waterfront properties where home and lot owners were looking to build or otherwise improve their sites, but to all residential properties in the Cape, including the so-called “hammerhead lots” where platted rights-of-way can impact buildability.
Council on Wednesday questioned the policy — politely, but pointedly — agreeing that the plight of one property owner, who told Council he was informed that the city-imposed $2,800 cost to vacate the strip along his canal-front would now be more than $24,000 under the new staff policy for his and his fiancee’s mandatory “contribution” to the tree fund.
Councilmember Bill Steinke and Mayor John Gunter took particular issue with the policy, which they said did not reflect Council’s intent when it established the tree fund.
Mr. Steinke also bluntly pointed out that staff’s $2,000 cost-based illustrative example — computed for a 1,000-square-foot vacation on 10,000-square-foot, $40,000 lot — was far, far from market reality, meaning the mandatory “contributions” would be substantially higher than two grand.
The two also led the argument that there is no “public benefit” inherent to the strips, as staff contends, as there was neither public access nor potential for any public use or development.
Council unanimously nixed the residential component of the ordinance, essentially directing staff to stop the residential “contributions” immediately.
Staff will come back with numbers for Council consideration of rebates to those who paid and the elected board will consider a modified ordinance sans residential component on Jan. 22, leaving the commercial aspects intact.
It was the right thing to do and staff’s attempt to capitalize — excuse us, monetize — platting problems from the city’s development days by selling bits and strips to the people who thought they bought waterfront or their dream lot was wrong.
Give the money back.
And to Council, thank you.
Your diligence is appreciated.
Breeze editorial