Making an Environmental Impact

style='font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt'>By:2'> Susan Holly

It's fortunate Bob Barron is a good-natured guy. Otherwise,

he might not have survived his job as point man for the U.S. Army Corps of

Engineers' Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for Southwest Florida. That

puts him directly in the line of fire from dissatisfied parties on all sides.

But after months and months of drafting and revising the EIS, and fielding

public comments and vitriol, Barron remains positive about the document's

ultimate value.

The

EIS, released August 2, is one of those bureaucratic creations that pleases

virtually no one. It goes either too far or not far enough, depending on your

perspective. Developers see it as an instrument to stop growth.

Environmentalists think it is full of holes that will let growth continue at

full steam, decimating what's left of the area's natural resources.

Who is right? None of the

above, says the Corps. The EIS merely provides guidelines to help Corps project

managers make permitting decisions. Its real effect on Southwest Florida? The

Corps has the perfect political answer: "We will have a more informed

dialog and more consistent terminology on what the issues and problems

are," says Barron. "We are better prepared to solve the issues

raised."

Although

the intent of the EIS may be in dispute, its effect so far has been to turn

Southwest Florida into a vocal battleground between growth and no-growth

forces. The Corps is right on at least one issue: "We have succeeded in

starting a public dialog," says Barron.

One Dense Document

A

great deal of that dialog is devoted simply to figuring out what in the world

the EIS really means. If there is any part of the EIS that people from all

sides agree on, it is that this is one dense, obtuse document. Measuring just

shy of two inches thick, the EIS is heavy with government-speak, a multitude of

maps, and 12 appendices and sub-appendices. The report itself is 163 pages,

followed by 72 pages of public comments, a 107-page report from the

Alternatives Development Group, a 78-page EPA water quality study, 99 pages

devoted to endangered species, and, perhaps the most controversial, the 27-page

permit review criteria.

Asked if they have read it, most people either laugh or

throw up their hands in disbelief. "We are still kind of looking at it and

scratching our heads," says Wayne Falbey, chairman of the Southwest

Florida District Council of the Urban Land Institute (ULI), a worldwide think

tank on land-use issues. "We are trying to discern long-term impact."

Likewise, the National Association of Home Builders

(NAHB) calls the EIS highly complex. The NAHB's assistant staff vice president

for environmental policy, Susan Asmus, whose job it is to read such documents,

says the EIS is full of inconsistencies and uncertainties. For example, she

points out, page 88 of the EIS states, "It is important to note that the

Proposed Action does not significantly change the Corps' program. The Corps

already analyzes its permitting decisions for effects on natural resources,

including cumulative effects." Yet 55 pages later, it says, "However,

the proposed action…represent a potentially marked departure from the

regulatory process currently in place in the study area." Which is it?

Asmus asks. "The Corps has to come up with something that's user friendly.

We need a workable set of standards and criteria that the average guy can understand."

Perhaps realizing the complexity, the Corps extended its

public comment period on the latest version by an extra 30 days to October 2,

and has planned a series of workshops to help explain the EIS.

What's at Stake?

The dialog about the EIS may be heated at times, because

the stakes are very high. Southwest Florida is in the midst of a building boom

and economic growth has been strong. By some developers' estimates, the EIS

could mean some 12,000 housing units might never be built in the affected areas

of the region. "It will mean more money and time at best," says

economist Henry Fishkind. Falbey predicts that

"permits will be slower in coming or won't come where they used to."

For environmentalists the

very survival of some endangered species and the preservation of valuable

natural resources are at stake as growth encroaches farther and farther into

natural habitat. The EIS is far from the perfect solution, but it is

"better than business as usual as we've been seeing it -- where anything

goes and everything gets permitted," notes Michael Simonik, vice president

of environmental policy for the Conservancy of Southwest Florida.

It was the quick pace of

development in Southwest Florida that initiated the EIS. "We had issued a

large number of permits with large acreage and relatively adjacent to each

other, in a relatively small geographic area," says Barron, pointing in

particular to the areas including Florida Gulf Coast University and Southwest

Florida International Airport.

The same arguments and

issues kept coming up with all applicants, so the Corps was looking for a

standardized way to address the issues. It also wanted to look at the

cumulative effects each project was having on the entire area.

"The EIS was an

effort to gain a better understanding of the issues by looking globally rather

than one project at a time," explains Barron. "It was also to help us

figure out where we are going -- what might be happening in the future to help

us with our current decision."

The ULI's Falbey sees the

motivation in a more political light. "Southwest Florida is one of the

last desirable areas that still has a lot of undeveloped land. The Corps

thought it makes sense to turn it into a battleground between environmentalists

and developers," he notes. He also believes the Corps saw the EIS as a

chance to curry favor with the current Administration, particularly Vice

President Al Gore, who has said the Everglades is a major area of concern for

him. With the EIS, Falbey speculates, the Corps hopes to establish policy that

could be taken across the country.

The NAHB also believes the EIS to be a national model and

for that reason has been following its progress since day one. Asmus points out

that the Southwest Florida EIS is the first time such a document has been

attempted for a permitting program. "It puts you on the cutting edge and

makes it scary. Who knows what the final outcome may be," she says.

Barron verifies this is the

first time an EIS of this nature has been done. As far as being a national

model, he says, "I hope the concepts of participation -- the Corps

listening to the community -- would be a model. I also hope that looking at all

different aspects and how they interact and the concept of looking ahead a

little bit becomes a national model."

Whatever the motivation,

in 1997, the Corps set about constructing a document for "improving the

regulatory process in Southwest Florida." From the beginning,

environmental groups pushed the idea, the building industry did not like it,

and county governments were mixed in their support. The Corps' strategy was to

use a group of stakeholders, called the Alternatives Development Group (ADG),

for outlining the issues to be addressed by the EIS. The ADG spent a total of

22 days over two years coming up with a report that the Corps then used in

creating the EIS. "The diverse makeup of the ADG was instituted in part to

minimize the amount of controversy by inviting all aspects of the regulated

community to join the regulatory agencies in the development of the new

process," according to the EIS.

The Corps released the draft EIS in August 1999 and

entered a period of vociferous public comment. "The community went through

a lot of angst over it," says Ron Inge of Harper Brothers and the Horizon

Council, a business advisory board to the Lee County Commission.

Chief among the concerns

was the EIS's similarity to a land-use document, and its perceived infringement

of private property rights. The Corps received about 2,500 letters, including

1,400 from property owners in Lehigh Acres who were particularly vocal about

how the EIS would affect them. The Corps took these comments into account when

releasing its revised EIS a year later on August 2.

The consensus has been that

the revision does address some of the problems of the draft EIS. Inge, who

served on the ADG, says the deletion of the project review map from the

document takes away some of the concern that the Corps was practicing land use

planning. That map had been attacked in particular by developers who saw it as

dictating development. Inge believes the revision also addresses the Lehigh

Acres concerns. "The Corps got the message," he says. "They

listened."

What Does it Mean?

The EIS covers a

1,500-square-mile area from the Caloosahatchee on the north, the coastline on

the west, the Hendry County line on the east to Immokalee, then south along

State Road 29 to the Ten Thousand Islands and Marco Island. The need for the

EIS in the study area, according to the document, is rapid growth and

development that has led to difficulty by the Corps and other federal

regulatory agencies to address, on a case-by-case basis, their

responsibilities. "Permit processing is taking longer and the environment

may be receiving less protection than required by law," the document

points out. "The subject EIS is designed to offer regulatory and

planning-based remedies to these shortcomings, by seeking an effective balance