Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies

Biotech or real estate?

The proposed location of the Scripps Research Institute is raising questions about which industry the state spent $369-million courting.

The promising marriage between Scripps Research Institute and Florida is beginning to feel more like a shotgun wedding, except that the barrel is aimed at the Everglades.

Some 19 months after Gov. Jeb Bush and the Legislature approved $369-million to entice the biotech research institute to Palm Beach County, the county commission there is headed for a showdown today. Enough deadlines have been missed that Scripps says it is prepared to leave if the county doesn't grant permission to start construction. The commission, by all accounts, will do precisely that.

The upshot is that Scripps can soon fire up bulldozers on a piece of land that borders the Everglades, sits in federally protected headwaters of the Loxahatchee River and is so remote from urban services that county development rules previously deemed it rural. Hobe Sound conservationist Nathaniel Reed, a former assistant U.S. Interior secretary under two Republican presidents, calls it "the worst abuse I have ever seen of Florida's 1985 Growth Management Act."

Worse, this is a conflict that could have been avoided. The county commission explored two other sites, either of which would have been preferable to the rural Mecca Farms location. One, near the Florida Atlantic University Jupiter campus, was recommended by a county real estate analyst and has broad support among a coalition of environmental and growth management groups that have fought Mecca Farms.

"I'm convinced this has nothing to do with getting the biotech industry," says environmental attorney Richard Grosso. "This has everything to do with opening up an area where the market has wanted to go but the (county development) plan has said it couldn't. This is a real estate deal."

Given the developers who are lined up to build on thousands of acres surrounding the remote Mecca site, Grosso may well be right. State growth management laws were designed to stop county commissions from playing to such development profiteering, but Scripps is also the governor's project. The state Department of Community Affairs, which is supposed to enforce growth laws on urban sprawl, is waving a green flag.

Though construction may soon begin, the course ahead is far from certain. Several lawsuits have yet to be resolved, including one that accuses Palm Beach of violating the same zoning and planning laws that were used to defeat an apartment complex in Martin County. The developer in that case was similarly brazen, starting and completing construction while a lawsuit was in progress. In 2002, the $3.3-million complex was razed under court order. No one should want that fate for Scripps.

The Scripps groundbreaking was to be a source of celebration. Now it looks like the kind of unseemly land deal that is all too familiar in the Sunshine State.