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Court next stop for Halls River condo project
By BRIDGET HALL GRUMET, Times Staff Writer HOMOSASSA -- The debate has played out in county hearings and newspaper editorial pages. Now it is headed for the courts. Opponents plan to file four appeals this week challenging the County Commission's 3-2 approval of the Halls River Retreat condominium project last month. The 30-day window for appealing the decision closes Thursday. The arguments will range from procedural problems at the Feb. 12 hearing to charges that the condo project violates the Comprehensive Plan. Ultimately, however, the opponents will ask one judge to do what three commissioners would not: deny the four-story time share project. "We believe there was competent, substantial evidence on the record supporting denial, and the commissioners did not correctly follow the law, which would be their Comprehensive Plan," said Denise Lyn, the attorney representing Save the Homosassa River Alliance. The opponents can take two appellate routes. Lyn and Carl Bertoch, the attorney for the Protect Our Waterways ad hoc group fighting the condo project, each plan to take both. The first route: Ask the circuit court to order a new commission hearing on the Halls River Retreat project. Opponents would have to show that the Feb. 12 hearing had procedural flaws or that the evidence did not support approval of the project. Lyn will argue that she should have been allowed to cross-examine other members of county staff during the quasijudicial hearing. After she finished questioning a county planner and allowed other attorneys to cross-examine him, the commission chairman would not let Lyn return to the lectern to question other county officials. Nor was Lyn able to question the developer's consultants, who testified during the public comment portion instead of the evidentiary portion of the hearing. "Staff relied heavily on the representations of these experts, and I didn't have the opportunity to cross-examine them," she said. Lyn and Bertoch both believe the developer, F. Blake Longacre, failed to provide evidence that his project met the county's development standards, a point the developer disputes. While Longacre says he did everything county planners asked to bring his project into compliance, critics say the buildings will sit closer to the wetlands than the Land Development Code allows. The developer also had no documented assurance that the Homosassa Special Water District could serve the condos with central water. In fact, the water district would need to improve its system to serve Halls River Retreat and maintain adequate flows to fight a potential fire, system superintendent David Purnell wrote in a letter sent to the county after the project was approved. In addition, Bertoch will argue that Commissioners Roger Batchelor, Jim Fowler and Josh Wooten made up their minds in favor of the project months before the Feb. 12 hearing. When the developer offered revisions to his project at the Nov. 13 meeting, those three commissioners sent the project back to staff for further review. "My feeling is that there was almost a prejudgment of the final result by virtue of their direction to staff, which was almost, 'Hey, tell us how we can approve this project,' " Bertoch said. "It may make the hearing Feb. 12 more of a charade than the objective tribunal they're supposed to be at that time." At the same time Lyn and Bertoch argue this case, they will also pursue the second appellate route: Sue the county for allegedly failing to follow its Comprehensive Plan. If the opponents won that case, a circuit court judge could issue an injunction barring the county from acting on the Halls River Retreat development order, essentially killing the project. The arguments here revolve around the 11-acre property's zoning for mixed use, which allows up to 20 residential units per acre. That density made the Halls River Retreat project possible. The county's decision in 1990 to zone the property as mixed use was a mistake, Bertoch said. Contrary to a real estate map on file with the county, he said, the 11-acre homestead was not part of Nature's Campground, and its zoning should have reflected its residential use. "If you made a mistake, stand up and say you made a mistake," Bertoch said. But county officials say the debate over a 1990 zoning decision is irrelevant. "The bottom line is when the Land Development Code was adopted in 1990, Nature's Campground was a single entity, or for whatever reason it was recognized as that," said Gary Maidhof, the county's director of Development Services. "Those concerns and objections (from Bertoch) needed to be raised then. You can't show up 12 years later and say the facts based on this and this are different so you can go back and change (the zoning)." The next wrinkle came in 1997, when the county eliminated mixed use from the Comprehensive Plan and its Generalized Future Land Use Map, but kept mixed use on the zoning maps and the Land Development Code. The result: The zoning maps allowed much more intense development on mixed use property than the Comprehensive Plan. The plan's Future Land Use Map shows the Halls River Retreat property as low intensity coastal lakes, where one home per 40 acres is allowed in the flood plain. The question becomes: Which map prevails? County planners followed the zoning map, which allows the more intense use of the property, because they said the zoning maps are the regulatory documents. "You can't ignore the fact that it is mixed use," said Chuck Dixon, the county's Community Development director. "You can question how it got there, but that's a separate issue. The fact is it had been mixed use for an extended period of time, and no one had ever challenged that. We as staff honored that designation." Opponents say the more stringent standards of the Comprehensive Plan should rule. The plan strictly limits growth in the coastal high hazard area, the hurricane evacuation area west of U.S. 19. It prohibits planned developments and says population concentrations should be steered elsewhere. It also says water and sewer lines can only go into the coastal high hazard area to serve existing residences, not new development. "New subdivisions greater than one unit per 5 gross acres should be prohibited," Chapter 4 states. "The government can't subsidize growth in that area," Bertoch said. "They can't go ahead where they have a government sponsored (sewer) project to serve people other than existing residences. It's pretty darn clear." -- Bridget Hall Grumet can be reached at 860-7303 or bhall@sptimes.com. Learn moreTo view the developer's plans for Halls River Retreat, visit www.hallsriverretreat.com. To check out the opposition, Save the Homosassa River Alliance, visit www.homosassariveralliance.org.
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