Should a developer be allowed to destroy 30 acres of mangroves to build houses near Sanibel?

Wait, what?

That's the reaction many have when they learn a developer plans to wipe out more than 30 acres of mangroves near Sanibel to build some 55 homes about a quarter mile south of the Shell Point Retirement Community

On its face, the Eden Oak project seems to have several strikes against it.

Mangroves provide countless benefits to natural systems and the humans who depend on them, from nurseries for baby fish to wind and storm buffers.

The project’s property shelters a number of vulnerable species including bonneted bats, wood storks, manatee and the critically endangered smalltooth sawfish.

Building on it would put more people in the coastal high hazard zone and increase their hurricane risk as well as strain the sole emergency access route: Shell Point Boulevard.

But though neighbors and conservation nonprofits have opposed it for years, the project is moving ahead, with the first part of a multi-day rezoning hearing with Lee County on Wednesday.

Last year, county staff recommended denying the developer’s request to rezone some 306 acres from agricultural to residential planned development. The denial letter said the project would “adversely affect environmentally critical and environmentally sensitive areas and natural resources (and is) inconsistent with the goals, objectives, and policies related to the protection and enhancement of wetlands, the protection of wildlife habitat, the protection of life and property, the limitation of public expenditures within Coastal High Hazard Areas and development within coastal planning areas established by the Lee Plan.”

For those who’ve been paying attention to regional environmental history, a crowning irony is that the proposed project is on the site of a landmark conservation victory: Robert Troutman’s The Estuaries, a would-be city of some 70,000 along Estero Bay. Troutman was a prominent Atlanta developer with ties to the Kennedys and Rockefellers who battled Lee County’s opposition all the way to the Florida Supreme Court. He lost, Lee County won, and Florida got its first mangrove protection law.

The battle also led to Lee County’s own mangrove and wetland ordinances.

So, after all that, how can a developer just rip out mangroves? A concept that started to catch hold around the same time Troutman was dreaming of his new city, called mitigation banking.

Essentially, it allows a developer to destroy wetlands as long as they buy credits that pay for restoring them somewhere else. In the case of Eden Oak, the mitigation credits would go to Little Pine Island, which was once overrun with invasive exotic plants and is being restored. Little Pine Island lies just east of much larger Pine Island.

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“When you step back and look at this as a whole, the concept and the process work very well,” said Shelton Weeks, who chairs FGCU’s department of economics and finance and is an affiliate faculty member of the Water School. “It allows development to take place while simultaneously maintaining the store of land that is environmentally sensitive in as close to a natural state as possible.”

Eden Oak’s developer, Romas Kartavicius, will likely have to buy credits with the 1,500-acre mitigation bank on Little Pine Island to compensate for the on-site destruction.

For neighbor Jerry Stopper, who lives in nearby Palm Acres, that doesn’t pass the smell test. “Once the mangroves are destroyed, they’re gone,” he said. “I don’t understand how doing restoration somewhere else helps. Explain that to the species that live there … it’s an abomination.”

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The Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation is working with the Conservancy of Southwest Florida and neighbors like Stopper to oppose the project, which has been in the works almost a decade.

The foundation’s Rae Ann Wessel said there’s been progress, but more remains to be done.

"Earlier on, they had a 171-slip marina, 252 multi-family units, a clubhouse, all of that kind of stuff that have been pulled back," Wessel said, "but they’ve still got a flushing canal, which would have a couple of 90-degree turns, (and) those don't work well,” she said. “The question is, this is 2019. How can we at this point, with all the education and knowledge that we've gained in four decades about the value of wetlands, still be proposing to put housing developments in wetlands?”

Property rights, said Eden Oak’s attorney Robert Pritt.

“I know there are a lot of issues with the federal government and state government, (opponents) might not like it, but there are limitations on their power, too,” he said. “They can't just tell people, ‘Hey, you can't develop your property' … and the mangroves that we're going to be displacing will be mitigated onsite and offsite.”

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Pritt said Kartavicius' plans are much more moderate than they have to be; instead of reaching for the 700 or so units the property might have accommodated, he’s limiting it to the 55.

“It's not the typical situation where you're out to maximize whatever you can, and the proof of that is that anybody else would have pushed for 700 units on the other side of the road. Your normal developers would do that. And the fact is he did not,” Pritt said. “It's just absolutely stunning to me that somebody would look at that and say that this is something that they should fight World War III about.”

One more thing,  Pritt said: If the current developer throws in the towel and sells to another, “I can almost assure you that they will be pushing for major development that will really impact the area,” he said. “Developers are very, very hungry for something in an area like that … They're very fortunate to have him because he's not pushing for major, major, major stuff.”

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