Bill Baggs State Park Dadeland Sprawl/Urban Sprawl Deep Well Injection Everglades		Fla Tort Refrom Act Freshwater Lake Belt Plan Homestead Air Base		Offshore Drilling Port of Miami Violations Virginia Key

Dadeland Sprawl
Editorial

 Dadeland has requested and received a deferral until May 10th on its sprawl request before the Miami-Dade CountyCommission. Dadeland was seeking extended permission to exempt itself from the sustainable principles of the Downtown Kendall plan. For more on that
plan, please visit DadelandSprawl.com.

It seems that our calls and emails have helped convince Dadeland that
they don't have the votes to prevail at the commission. Dadeland will be
meeting with County staff to see how they might work within the spirit of the
pedestrian plan for Downtown Kendall, which requires public greens,
collonaded walkways for pedestrians, apartments above shopfronts and
strong connections to transit.

The Downtown Kendall plan is part of the Eastward Ho! statewide
initiative, which advocates building along the rocky ridge along the eastern edge of
South Florida, along the route of US 1. This coincides with existing
transit corridors such as Metrorail and the South Dade Busway, and leaves land to
the west open for recharge of the Biscayne Aquifer.

- Albert Harum-Alvarez
Miami Sierra Conservation Committee

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Urban Sprawl

In the path of a successful 1998 campaign against urban sprawl by national Sierra Club, the Miami Group is planning an initiative targeting urban sprawl during the upcoming 1999 session of the Florida Legislature.

Restoration of the South Florida Ecosystem is a cornerstone of the national environmental agenda and enjoys bipartisan support in Congress. But the natural wilderness, the Everglades, is in critical health, in part, because local zoning and state regulations are weak and ineffectual and do not protect the environment against the impacts of suburban tract development, malls, and highways at its borders.

It is fitting that the 1999 initiative begins in Miami and South Florida, whose urban sprawl jumped like a bacterial infection to other parts of the state. Despite regulations, urban sprawl is a public subsidy and corporate welfare that enriches its beneficiaries at the expense of urban taxpayers, communities, and poorly served infrastructure. Alan Farago, Miami Group conservation chair and leader of the anti-sprawl campaign, says, ôWe have learned a lot from recent battles, like our fight against a planned commercial airport at Homestead Air Base that would sprawl to the edge of Biscayne National Park. Before the first millennium, the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar said that all roadslead to Rome. Were he living in south Florida in the second millennium, he could boast; all roads lead to Sprawl. 1999 is shaping up to be a terrific year for environmentalists!

- Alan Farago

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