Environmental Protection
Incentives Strategies
Incentives to landowners can be enacted to protect the environment and preserve native habitats. They can include tax relief or increased flexibility in site development, clustered subdivisions, planned development techniques, variable lot size, and the ability to transfer development rights. There are also numerous cost-share and certification programs that the County endorses and will promote in order to achieve conservation objectives.
Tax breaks
The most common form of tax relief is the reduced ad valorem taxation of land devoted to agricultural use. This relieves some of the development pressures faced by landowners who own properties on the urban fringe and who wish to retain their land in agricultural use. The retention of land in agricultural use offers the potential of preserving open space. However, agricultural operations do not always preserve environmentally sensitive areas or native habitats to the same degree as other development techniques. Therefore, other incentives are needed to encourage continued agricultural operations in the County and to preserve environmentally sensitive areas.
Innovative planning & zoning
Some of the ways in which protection and preservation can be provided to environmentally sensitive areas include incentive mechanisms such as density bonuses, development flexibility to concentrate development away from sensitive areas, height relief, tax credits, conservation easements, and provision for common natural areas (open space). Policies encourage innovative planning and zoning such as flexible lot sizes, clustering, onsite density transfer, and planned developments to design in harmony with the natural features of each site.
Flexibility: Clustering and planned developments
Clustering and planned developments are two development options that preserve environmental areas and open space. Under these options, no minimum lot sizes are required and the property owner can cluster the development away from environmentally sensitive areas. The permitted density, and thus the property rights, for the overall tract of land is retained. These development options require a certain percentage of the land to be set aside as open space.
Transfer of Development Rights
Landowners, by law, have certain rights that are associated with their land. For example, a person has development rights, mineral rights, fishing and hunting rights. These rights can be sold in total or conveyed in part to someone else. Natural resource and farmland protection may be achieved by conveying a portion of a development property right, while retaining others, through a process called the Transfer of Development Rights (TDR).
For example, a farmer can sell the right to develop his land to a developer. The developer then is authorized to transfer the development rights to another more suitable property closer to county and municipal services. Usually the newly purchased development rights allow the developer to increase developable density in an area more suitable for such development. The person farming the original land is paid a sum of money for their development rights, thereby foregoing the ability to develop their land in the future. The county and community benefit because the program prevents sprawl and it avoids the requirement for costly infrastructure and public service extensions in the rural area. The developer benefits by getting increases in developable density within the defined receiving area. Receiving areas are made more marketable offering by urban services.
TDRs tend to work better when large tracts of agricultural lands are available and farmers are willing to sell their development rights. Equally important, the receiving area must be a place where developers can build and attract potential homebuyers. Residents of these areas must also be willing to accept the increased densities. For the TDR approach to work effectively, it must also be coupled with appropriate zoning. For instance, if too much density is allowed in counties as a whole, it diminishes the value and impact of the TDR program. At present, TDRs have not been shown to be a viable alternative in Alachua County.
As a Florida example, Palm Beach County established a TDR program in 1992 to help preserve agricultural lands. 1000 Friends of Florida has assisted the county with its mandatory TDR program, as contained in the local comprehensive plan. Under the program, to increase density in urbanized areas, developers will "buy" development rights from environmentally sensitive land and farmlands in the Agricultural Reserve, thereby precluding its future intensive development. The TDR program can reduce costs to developers in certain instances, allowing them to obtain density increases without having to seek an amendment to the comprehensive plan.
Rural Land Stewardship Areas
In 1995, the Legislature created a section of state law dealing with "innovative planning and development strategies" (S. 163.3177, F.S.). That law was expanded in the 2001 Legislative Session to provide for the designation of Rural Land Stewardship Areas. Under this program, the Florida Department of Community Affairs is authorized to test a new concept involving clustering development in rural areas and using the purchase of development and density rights to preserve the land around the development. The method referred to in the legislation involves the use of transferable rural land use credits. These credits can only exist inside a designated Rural Land Stewardship Area.
A local government may apply to the Department of Community Affairs for the establishment of Rural Land Stewardship Areas. Five such areas are authorized to be designated under this pilot program. Those approved will be subject to a joint agreement between the DCA and the local government. According to the law, a stewardship area shall not be less than 50,000 acres and shall not exceed 250,000 acres in size. Designation of the receiving areas will take place by way of Local Comprehensive Plan amendments which will also be reviewed by the Department of Community Affairs.
Transferable rural land use credits may be assigned different ratios of credits per acre, with the highest number of credits being given to preserve environmentally valuable land. Each receiving area will buy credits from the designated preservation areas. If the price is too high for the credits, then developers may be reluctant to buy them. Developers will also need to sell the property in the receiving area in order to justify buying more credits.
Agencies are being asked to encourage land stewardship agreements by offering incentives such as landowners being allowed to accumulate extended permit agreements, recreational leases, payment for land management services on public land and options to sell land to government if certain conservation objectives are achieved.
One of the stated purposes of this legislation is to acknowledge the problem inherent with scattered development by attempting to use both innovative planning tools and transferable development rights to stop sprawl or spot development. The pilot is further aimed at exploring the potential for protecting environmentally sensitive lands and better preserving agricultural areas through this approach. The market will in large measure determine how successful it may be from a land preservation standpoint.
Among the unknowns of this new concept is what effect existing federal or state land conservation programs will have on the stewardship areas. No county has requested such a designation at this time.
Cost-Shares and Certification Programs
In the 1980s, federal and state agencies began to focus on voluntary participation programs to address water quality problems, particularly with agriculture. Cost-share programs became the policy institution of choice and continue to dominate today. Cost-share programs essentially transfer funds from public agencies to agricultural practitioners who install conservation practices or new waste management structures on their farms. As with the best available control technologies, payments are tied to the installation of specific practices or structures that are expected to reduce the offsite effects of land management. In recent years, these practices have been termed BMPs.
The financial scale of cost-share programs is quite large. Between 1996 and 2002, the USDA will have distributed over $1.6 billion to farmers through the Environmental Quality Incentive Program and the Wildlife Habitat Incentive Program. While cost-share programs provide important financial resources for land based conservation, it is not clear that they alone will be sufficient to meet the goals of the Clean Water Act. Instead of requiring specific levels of pollution reduction associated with installation of new practices, cost-share payments require only the installation of BMPs. Programmatic success is determined by the number of different practices that were installed rather than actual gains in water quality or resource protection. For this reason, cost-share programs cannot be relied upon in isolation, but may provide one of several important means of achieving Alachua County�s conservation objectives.
There are numerous forest certification programs that have developed over many years in an effort to promote BMPs and various management concepts that address natural resource concerns. The principles and criteria advanced by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) as advancing the most encompassing ecosystem management approach and the highest protective standard for biodiversity across species, ecosystem, and landscape scales. The County is also fortunate to have many small family operations certified by the long-standing American Tree Farm System, as well as key industrial operations that subscribe to the emerging Sustainable Forestry Initiative. The County encourages all foresters to become acquainted with the principles and criteria of these programs and will attempt to incentivize and facilitate certification of public as well as private lands in Alachua County. FSC principles may be used in conjunction with other certification standards to ensure ecosystem and landscape level natural resource protections that may not be addressed in other programs.
