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Manatee County’s Population Is Exploding. Will There Be Room Left for Rural? [1]
['Pat Raia', 'The Daily Yonder']
Date: 2024-02-29
Justin Mathews started cultivating his connection with wildlife when he became a master falconer at the tender age of 16. These days, the Manatee County, Florida, native mostly rescues wildlife, such as birds with plastic bags caught in their beaks or turtles that have collided with motorcars.
Last time he counted them in 2021, Matthews says that he conducted more than 380 wildlife rescues.
“But I expect them to pick up soon,” he says.
That’s because since 2021 Manatee County and the rest of Florida has been experiencing a growth spurt that has turned rural small towns throughout the state into suburbia. From 2010 to 2021, the county’s population grew by 33% to 429,000. In December 2022, the agency declared Florida to be the fastest growing state in the nation.
All that growth has created massive development pressure that has spilled from the county’s population center on the Gulf Coast farther east into the traditionally rural interior of the county. The growth has made millionaires of farmers and others who sold acres of land to developers, who in turn built residential neighborhoods on ground that previously contained the habitat of the native wildlife.
It was also the home of the people who prized the natural environment and elbowroom.
Their habitat is shrinking, too, according to Gail Straight, who with her husband, Ed, founded Wildlife, Inc. a non-profit wildlife rescue and rehabilitation organization located on Anna Maria Island near Bradenton, Florida.
Not only has the growth seen the wholesale development of formerly open spaces, it has also become home to newcomers who have an entirely different attitude about sharing the neighborhood with the local wildlife.
“For example, we’re coming on turtle season, and we put up barriers so that people don’t walk in areas where turtles have laid their eggs,” Straight recalled. “I had one newcomer who complained that ‘’I pay taxes and I should be able to walk where I want.’”
Another recent resident asked Straight to “get rid of the raccoons and the coyotes because he wanted his two little dogs to be safe.”
“Not all the people who come here are like this,” Straight said. “But they keep building and there are no restrictions – there is not one legislator in the state who cares about the environment.”
One lawmaker disagrees.
In January, Florida State Representative Bobby Payne hosted a meeting of representatives of 28 of 31 the state’s rural counties to tap their opinions about what the Legislature could do to protect the environment, wildlife, and the best socioeconomic interests of the human residents there.
He says that the state of Florida has worked to safeguard the Florida Wildlife Corridor, strengthen habitats and allow native wildlife to move easily throughout the state, and to encourage the implementation of conservation easements for farmers and ranchers.
“These are the concerns of those who call rural communities home,” he said.
But that’s not always the case on the local level, said Straight. She and others claim that members of local Boards of County Commissioners are driven mostly by the revenue they might personally realize from by approving large-scale development.
Fraser Shilling, Ph.D., from the Road Ecology Center of the University of California at Davis maintains that it’s not that simple.
According to Shilling, local lawmakers may be in favor of growth not necessarily because developers are paying them to approve their projects, but because of the increase in the tax base or because they may have business interests that will benefit from growth.
“They all have other things that they do – and they may be in favor of what growth brings such as restaurants, shopping and other things,” Shilling said. “On the other side are rural residents who don’t want things to change – it’s an economic roller coaster.”
The trick is to strike a balance between colliding interests, and that is not easy for lawmakers who may not have even been in office when development plans were initially hatched.
“You can look at rural areas in Oregon or Florida or South Dakota — it’s happening everywhere — and the parcel subdivision of land, when owners of larger parcels of land sell them to developers, is the first step,” Shilling said. “It happens superstitiously because it takes time – as many as 20 years – and it’s not a harmless thing to develop land that has not been developed before because you lose things that will never come back such as wildlife habitat and rural life.”
Even so, the need to strike that balance will probably not go away.
Shilling said that while some of those who relocate from cities into largely rural communities are retired or at least approaching it, in the future new residents will probably be members of the millennial generation.
“There is the retirement trend – ‘I want my piece (two to five acres ) of paradise,’” he said. “And right now millennials are moving to urban areas for the employment opportunities, but they will experience a kind of ‘back-to-the-land’ trend like the 1970s [and will] want the cheapest larger land parcels and their own food, their own power, their own water.”
That’s why Grant Fichter, president of Alva Strong which promotes environmentally responsible development in Lee County, Florida, believes it is critical for community residents and lawmakers to discuss land use and preservation right now.
“We need to have the discussions” Fichter said.
According to Fichter, those discussions should include requiring developers to take into account not only the current needs of humans and animal residents but address issues of density, infrastructure and cost that will maintain the area’s rural appeal to future residents whatever generation they represent.
“Right now, there is a very adversarial relationship between the local board and some of the people, but there is an opportunity to do (development) the right way if we would have community leaders come together and do what’s right for now and in the future,” he said. “The question is, ‘how do we maintain quality of life while we have new people joining the community?’”
In the meantime, Matthews teaches members of home-owners associations and even patrons of a landmark restaurant and bar about native wildlife and how to peacefully coexist with it.
“So I tell them that if they live near a pond, they are going to see an alligator, and that someday, they are going to be in their backyard and see a snake,” Matthews says. “Deal with it – they were here first.”
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[1] Url:
https://dailyyonder.com/manatee-countys-population-is-exploding-will-there-be-room-left-for-rural/2024/02/29/
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