Polk County’s growing pains show what’s ahead for the rest of Florida

Image via the Southwest Florida Water Management District.

If you ever tire of the monotonous flatness of peninsular Florida, just drive through Polk County. The landscape there is dotted by massive mountains of phosphate waste, the result of companies mining the remnants of prehistoric bones. That’s why it’s known as “Bone Valley.”

I sometimes wonder how so many ancient critters crowded in there before they keeled over. How did they know this was the hot spot to wind up in those days before InstaSnap and FaceGram? Did they trickle in a bit at a time, or all come thundering in at once like the pioneers in the Gold Rush?

These days, lots of humans are crowding into “Imperial Polk,” and it’s causing a messy mountain of problems:

— In Auburndale, the town has run short of sewer capacity and may have to halt 30 new developments until it can fix the problem sometime next year.

— In Dundee, the town expects to declare a one-year moratorium on new housing developments because of a lack of water.

— In Lakeland, the controversial company named BS Ranch has finally been shut down after years of odor and pollution complaints, leaving septic tank service companies nowhere close to dispose of their odorous waste.

— Meanwhile the county has run short on its supply of water and is turning to a risky and expensive new source that may not work.

Is it any wonder that, according to the Lakeland Ledger last week, Polk Commissioners are considering raising impact fees charged for new development by more than our developer-friendly state law allows?

“There will be a raise in impact fees,” Polk County Commissioner George Lindsey told me this week. The only question is how much.

Polk’s rapid development is nothing short of phenomenal.

“Of the five-county region we serve, Polk County is the fastest-growing county in the region and one of the country’s fastest-growing counties,” Marybeth Soderstrom of the Central Florida Regional Planning Council told me. “Polk experienced nearly 28% growth in population between 2010 and 2022.”

Take a wild guess what that’s doing to road congestion in Central Florida. If it were up to me, there’d be billboards over every jammed highway that proclaim: “This gridlock brought to you by ex-Gov. Rick Scott and the 2011 Florida Legislature.”

PTSD from I-4

If you wonder what sort of non-mountainous attractions Polk might have to offer, someone will probably mention Dinosaur World. It used to have 200 phony dinosaurs for you to see — until someone stole one. No one knows why or how.

Keep an eye out for that missing dino. It answers to the name of Rex.

Polk has lots of natural, non-phony attractions too. Its environmental features include the Green Swamp, the source for four major rivers: the Hillsborough, Withlacoochee, Ocklawaha, and Peace. It also has the Lake Wales Ridge, an ancient sand dune running up the spine of the state.

One lovely spot on the Lake Wales Ridge is Bok Tower Gardens, which is like a musical castle with lots of cool landscaping. David Price is its CEO. He and his wife, Catherine, a sometime political candidate who produces a local video blog with friends called “Three Little Ladies,” have lived in Lake Wales since 1989.

Catherine Price told me that the newer Polk residents are mostly working up in Orange County at the artificially exciting theme parks and plentiful hotels serving the massive influx of tourists.

Another of the Polk folks I called about this is Marian Layton Ryan, who’s been a staunch Central Florida environmental advocate since the 1980s. When I asked her why so many people were moving to Polk, she said, “Because we’re cheap. Slightly more than 50% of the people now living in Polk are employed outside Polk.”

Because the workers can’t afford to live there, they settle for an affordable place in Polk and commute back and forth. That’s one reason Polk’s roads are so badly clogged.

“U.S. 27 is a nightmare, and I have PTSD from the last time I was on I-4,” David Price said.

The developments where the new residents are buying homes have been springing up in areas that used to be covered by ranches or citrus groves, David Price said. That means they’re scattered far from the town centers, which encourages even more driving and more traffic problems.

“Our Commissioners have never assessed adequate impact fees and now it’s come back to bite them,” Ryan told me.

There’s talk of building a big reliever road across the Green Swamp, despite its significance, she said. Mass transit might help, Ryan said, “but we have no money to pay for transit.”

In the new neighborhoods, the houses are being crammed in so close to each other that there’s no room for even a single tree in the backyard, David Price told me. One builder had plans to put up 24 houses on 2-1/2 acres.

Here’s the really disturbing part.

“Water is short, but we’re building homes like crazy,” David Price told me.

Polk County has handed out so many water permits that it’s now hit the limit, Ryan said. For a solution, it’s trying a $600 million experiment: drill into the brackish lower level of the Floridan Aquifer.

But the product from that level will be saltier than a Samuel L. Jackson monologue. It will be good for the rim of your margarita glass, but not much else.

To be drinkable, the water will require so much treatment — including disposing of the extracted brine — that it will be much more expensive. David Price says he’s seen figures that show it would cost 12 times more than the trickle of water being pumped from the regular aquifer.

“There is no more cheap water,” Commissioner Lindsey confirmed. But even if this new source works, he told me, it won’t be available for new development to use until 2030.

Meanwhile, Polk faces a more immediate crisis with the icky waste from septic tanks.

The end of BS

I’ve written about the aptly named BS Ranch before, and not just because the name cracks me up.

The land where their “ranch” is located used to be part of a phosphate mine back in the 1950s. The company’s 2010 incorporation papers listed its purpose as “Improve the Earth.” But that’s not the neighbors’ opinion of what Brandy and Bill Stanton — the BS couple behind the BS name — were up to.

They convinced County Commissioners they’d take yard and food waste and turn it into mulch. But once it opened, the neighbors reported seeing tanker trucks carrying treated and partly treated sewage pulling in.

The aroma wafting over to their noses was simply putrid, they said. The county, upset by the deception, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying, without success, to shut the place down.

Meanwhile, the Department of Environmental Poop-spreading — er, I mean “Protection” — had given BS a permit for the stuff the Commissioners had seen. But in 2014, a DEP inspector discovered they were also making tons of money from letting haulers from across Florida dump sewage and the waste from septic tank pump-outs on their property.

Instead of finding the Stantons in violation, the inspection report said the DEP was “working with” them to figure out how to let them keep doing legally what they had been doing illegally. The Department issued permits for a “pilot program” unlike any being done anywhere else.

You’ll be shocked to hear that DEP recently reconsidered that decision.

“The DEP refused to renew its permit, citing potential groundwater contamination,” WTVT-TV reported. And it only took ’em a decade!

Not everyone is happy with how this has worked out. The companies from all over the state that were dumpling their waste there are now out of luck.

Trucking the mess elsewhere will double the price, they said. Recently, the haulers even demonstrated outside the County Administration Building as they demanded help from the Commissioners.

Lindsey, a longtime critic of BS (and how many Florida politicians can you say that about?), told me that the haulers have known for years this day would come. Yet they still had no backup plan.

To me, that’s the crux of all of these Polk problems with water, sewer, and roads: The lack of planning. And for that, we should all blame Governor-turned-Senator Scott, R-BatBoy.

All the lights are green

The new folks moving into Polk won’t know this, but Florida didn’t used to do development by the seat of its pants.

We had a law, passed in 1985 and signed by the late Bob Graham, called the Growth Management Act. It required local governments to draw up detailed plans for what their futures would look like.

Then the local governments would submit those plans to a state agency, the Department of Community Affairs, for approval. The DCA would compare the plans to make sure they all fit together like one of those 5,000-piece puzzles your Great-Aunt Harriet loves so much.

The law required “concurrency” for all the roads, sewers, etc., so that new growth paid for itself. The new law also offered enhanced “citizen standing,” meaning you and I had the right to go to court and challenge government land-use decisions that seemed off-base.

Over and over, the DCA headed off bad development ideas and ensured new projects paid for the new infrastructure they needed.

Developers hated the DCA and the Growth Management Act the way your typical pimply-faced teen hates hearing grownups tell them what to do. They also hated the DCA’s steely-eyed secretary, a farm-raised Florida native named Tom Pelham who was willing to fight to preserve the best of Florida.

They moaned and groaned and threw money at candidates until they finally elected Scott, a political novice from Texas who had no idea how important the law was.

When Scott took office, he and his allies in the Legislature swiftly dismantled the growth management system after a mere 26 years, meanwhile laying waste to the staffs of environment-related agencies. It was as if they’d fixed every traffic light to no longer show any color but green, no matter how many crashes occur.

Environmental groups urged Scott to veto the repeal, warning of the consequences of unplanned growth. He ignored them.

The repeal “largely eliminates state oversight of local planning decisions and raises barriers for citizens seeking to challenge development decisions,” the Sarasota Herald Tribune reported then. “And it eases the requirement known as concurrency, which requires new developments to have adequate roads and infrastructure before they proceed.”

Those warnings to Scott were more accurate than any hurricane projection. With the regulations gone, we’re in a lawless landscape with no Stetson-hatted Marshal Raylan Givens to shoot down bad plans before they get started.

When someone tries to enforce one of the old plans, the developers just take their case to our subservient Governor and Cabinet, who leap like bellhops at a fancy hotel to carry out whatever the developers want

You can look at the pickle Polk is now in as the logical outcome of what Scott did.

“That was a mistake,” Lindsey said of Scott’s repeal — and, I should mention, he is not only a Polk Commissioner but also is in the real estate business. “It was good to have another set of eyes looking at these growth plans.”

Unless our Legislature stops kowtowing to these profits-over-people developers and reinstates the Growth Management Act, you can also view Polk as a glimpse of Florida’s future.

We’re already seeing warnings about running out of water because we’ve put too many thirsty people on top of our aquifer. Even the hard-headed economics-first folks at Florida TaxWatch — not exactly tree huggers — have sounded the alarm on the rapid depletion of our water supply, predicting a shortage by next year.

Obviously, we need a plan for dealing with future growth. But what would a good growth plan even look like?

Turns out there’s an excellent example right in Polk County.

Building communities

Victor Dover picked up a couple of major awards this week — and no, I don’t mean the leg lamp from “A Christmas Story.”

Dover is the town planner who spearheaded the preparation of the growth plan for Luke Wales, plus a 30-minute video that explains the process. Both just won awards from the American Planning Association’s Florida chapter.

When I mentioned Polk’s many problems, Dover explained the key to good planning is doing more than merely supplying immediate needs.

“There’s more to accommodating and managing growth than just increasing capacity,” he told me. “The issue that’s hard to resolve is how to channel growth into forms that will do the best to create good communities.”

Fail to focus on communities, he said, and you wind up with everything out of balance, which leads to a declining quality of life.

“You need to make it so people don’t need to make 14 car trips a day per household,” he explained. “Communities need to feel like places for human habitation, with human connections through front porches and other places for friends to interact.”

Instead of harmonious communities, Florida’s lack of planning has left us with big mountains of what BS Ranch used to dispose of. Is it any wonder that it stinks?

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Craig Pittman reporting. Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: [email protected]. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and Twitter.