Letter: Ponce project will be environmental disaster
Robert E. Ulanowicz
St. Augustine
Publication Date: 09/27/06
Editor: Ponce Associates LLC is requesting that the city of St. Augustine endorse its application for support under Florida's Brownfields Act to subsidize the cleanup of the former Ponce Golf Course (Arsenic still on U.S. 1 property, St. Augustine Record, Sept. 21.)
Although the request is posed as a positive environmental action, the cold truth is that they are asking to use public monies and credits to ensure unseemly profits from a project that will be an environmental travesty.
In an effort to maximize profits, the developer wants to crowd a very large number of single-family dwellings onto the tract, with distances between units as small as 15 feet.
This is undesirable sprawl at its worst, and it greatly reduces aquifer recharge because of the large area of impervious surface presented by houses and roads. Most of the remaining area will become suburban lawns, which require copious water and contribute fertilizer and pesticides to the groundwater at rates that exceed virtually all other uses.
The same number of new city taxpayers could be accommodated if housing units were aggregated into a few multi-family units, separated by large natural areas chosen to coincide with where contaminants are present in highest concentrations.
Such open spaces would maintain aquifer recharge, avoid contact exposure by the new residents and significantly diminish the costs of remediation.
Such a plan might even increase the amount of affordable housing so lacking in our area.
A few weeks ago, St. Johns voters demonstrated forcefully that they are fed-up with chicanery between public officials and developers.
If the developer insists on continuing with his damaging proposal, he should have to shoulder the entire cost of the required cleanup.
Only if he were to make radical changes to bring his plans more in line with the public good and environmental harmony should any thought of city endorsement be entertained.
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