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WILL VAN SANTChairwoman Sandra Nicholson apologizes in an effort to settle matters with the county, which says the 38-acre site for a new school in Spring Hill was bulldozed illegally.
SPRING HILL - The chairwoman of the Hernando County School Board has apologized for what in the past two weeks has blossomed into a public quarrel over the clearing of land for a new school.
"We screwed up," Chairwoman Sandra Nicholson said Friday. "I'm sorry. We are just people. We are human."
Nicholson's contrition is part of a two-pronged School Board response to charges that earlier this month its contractor illegally bulldozed 38 acres on the south side of Elgin Boulevard, about a mile west of Barclay Avenue.
In the process, county development and landscaping rules were ignored. Protected trees were uprooted. A 50-foot buffer area meant to give neighbors some relief from activities at the K-8 school, which is to house 1,400 students and is expected to open in August 2005, was razed.
The second response is the contention of Karen Gaffney, the School Board's attorney, that her client is not subject to county ordinances and development regulations. Gaffney made that argument Thursday at a meeting of School Board and county officials.
Gaffney bases her case on a Florida statute that allows school boards to forego the building permit process. Under the law, school boards are, in effect, their own building permit authority and are not subject to impact fees and other assessments that counties normally charge developers.
The law contains a passage that also explicitly states that school boards are exempt from county ordinances. If the statute is binding in this case, as Gaffney argues, then the School Board does not have to heed county land development regulations and landscaping rules.
And as a result, it did no wrong when it leveled the school site and downed the protected trees.
Assistant County Attorney Kent Weissinger argues that Gaffney interprets the statute too broadly. The passage that exempts school boards from county ordinances, he said, must be understood in context and is meant to apply only to impact fees, assessments and the securing of building permits.
The law was not meant to protect school boards from land development and landscaping rules, Weissinger said.
To bolster his case, the assistant county attorney points to a state attorney general's opinion issued in 1989 that says all development undertaken by school boards must be consistent with county comprehensive plans, which are meant to serve as a blueprint for managing growth.
And a comprehensive plan is nothing, Weissinger said, without the regulations used to enforce it.
"It would be an absurd conclusion," he said, "to say the School Board is subject to the comprehensive plan but not to the land development regulations that implement that plan."
Both Gaffney and Weissinger said they have agreed to disagree on the legal question and don't wish to waste taxpayer money by having the issue resolved in the courts. Instead, county and school board administrators will bring the matter to a close, they said.
Given her attorney's position, the apology Nicholson offered was not related to whether development regulations were violated.
Nicholson said that she was frankly unsure whether rules were broken. What most certainly should have happened, she said, was for the School Board to have submitted site plans to the county before it began work, as it agreed to after getting zoning approval for the project last August.
"We should have done that," Nicholson said. "Somebody screwed up, either our staff or the architect. Had that been done, I don't think any of this would have happened."
While there was initial focus by county officials on the clearing of the 50-foot buffer, school officials have pointed out that the zoning approval only stated that such a buffer would be "provided," not that the area would be left intact.
It was impossible to leave the vegetation in the buffer untouched, they say, because the area needs to be landscaped to deal with drainage problems. A vegetative buffer consistent with the zoning approval will be created, they say.
According to county development services director Grant Tolbert, most of the protected trees that were uprooted were in the buffer area. Tolbert said he feels the development and landscape regulations do apply to the School Board, and he is insistent that the trees be replanted.
He said there were at least 10 so-called specimen trees, which due to their size cannot be removed without a permit. It will cost about $160,000 to replace the trees, Tolbert said.
The development director said he had given school officials a copy of the county land development regulations so "they could figure out how to do this" and come back to him with a workable site plan.
Gaffney and Nicholson said the School Board intends to cooperate with the county and comply with the landscaping rules. Plans had always called for replacing the trees, they said, so the cost of replanting will not be an additional burden to taxpayers.
To avoid such controversy in the future, Nicholson said, county officials will be informed when the School Board starts building at a new location and will have the opportunity to review site plans.
"We are going to make sure that everybody is on the same page from day one," Nicholson said. "We don't want to be bad neighbors and make people upset. We just want to build schools for kids."
- Will Van Sant can be reached at 352 754-6127. Send e-mail to vansant@sptimes.com