With MLB stadium full of folks moving here, widen urban area around Vero Beach, Sebastian?
This column has been amended to correct the date of the county's final urban services meeting.
Imagine a sold-out crowd at a Major League Baseball stadium packing up their homes and coming to live in Indian River County.
How would you plan to accommodate the additional 42,319 people state economists project will move to this county by 2050?
This doesn’t include folks who will impact our lifestyles by flocking to neighboring St. Lucie and Brevard counties, which seem to have no limits on development.
How ominous does this sound given the traffic we’ve faced in recent months, the continued degradation of the Indian River Lagoon and the clear-cutting of nature for such things as cookie-cutter subdivisions, strip malls and the new Interstate 95 exchange?
What do you want to see?
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From late 2013: Can one-word answers seal fate of area around Vero Beach, Sebastian? A homework assignment
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What’s the plan? Everyone wants to move to “Free Florida,” and we can’t just build a wall, right?
Do we need to start constructing or paving roads, extending water and sewer utilities and other services to the western parts of our county?
Or can we focus on more efficiently delivering services to folks inside the area — mostly east of Interstate 95 — that for 30 years or so has been designated for those “urban”-type services, including parks, schools and the like?
These are timely and critical questions you can help answer as county officials on May 8 launch a series of public meetings seeking your input on how the county should evolve over the next 25 years.
You can start to help protect where you live by visiting a special website county consultants have created to start the process: inspire-engagement.com/indian-river-usb
Land more valuable inside urban area, so ...
There, you can learn more about the issue and take a short poll on how you’d like to see the county grow. The county said it received about 600 responses in the first week the poll was live.
One thing I learned from county meetings in 2021 and 2022 was about 35,000 potential residential units were available inside the urban service area, including 10,000 in existing or approved subdivisions and 25,000 on undeveloped land. That translates to about 80,000 people.
In other words, even with 882 single-family homes and 500 apartments county officials said were permitted the past year, the current urban area has plenty of capacity.
But that won’t stop some landowners in more rural areas — west of 58th Avenue in the south part of the county, 66th Avenue in the central part — from trying to get the county to move their land into the urban services area so they can develop their property to what they say is its "highest and best use."
Some might want to turn barren citrus groves into new towns or hope to build subdivisions, allowing them to sell 3 or 4 homes per acre vs. the 1 unit per 5, 10 or 25 acres zoned now.
Fellsmere, Sebastian, Vero Beach have their own plans
Some might want to capitalize on the Oslo Road interchange to build distribution centers (and homes for people who supposedly would work there), new subdivisions (pitched as "hamlets" or "villages") or the typical interstate mishmash of gas stations, chain restaurants and motels.
Others might want to build the kind of projects Martin County has debated lately: high-end golf courses with (vacation) homes that promise, at least in the short term, to boost county tax collections.
Indian River County, unlike so many others, has never substantively had to increase its urban services area and may never have to because two cities, in controversial fashion, have essentially done so for them.
In the early 2000s, Fellsmere began expanding its boundaries into the unincorporated county, allowing urban development. About 6 square miles turned into 55 square miles, from the north Indian River County line to almost State Road 60, with room for about 70,000 new residents by 2050, former city manager Jason Nunemaker told me in 2019.
In 2023, there were estimates Sebastian's annexation of more than 2,000 acres, about 20% of the city's existing land mass, could eventually double its 25,000 population.
Longtime local planning principles key
Meantime, Vero Beach is looking at increasing the size of buildings and number of people who can live in its downtown.
No matter where the growth occurs, all of us will pay for it — potentially in increased costs of government and quality of life. No matter where newcomers live, many will go to the beach and to thriving areas like Sebastian’s waterfront or Vero Beach.
How can we best manage the future?
I’m not sure, but I know it’s not following Brevard, St. Lucie or the other sprawling metropolitan counties of Florida.
I do know this:
We must maintain this county’s conservative growth principles. Change slowly, and only for good reason.
Instead of focusing on urban expansion, the county should bolster its urban core. Given the Florida Legislature’s 2023 law restricting septic tanks by 2030, the county should not only hook up Sebastian septic-tank users to sewer service to benefit the Indian River Lagoon, but also septic-tank users in its own urban services area.
In other words, there's no reason to expand urban services when they cannot be delivered efficiently to people inside the “urban” area.
The good news is county officials have given us ample opportunities to learn more and offer our opinions.
I hope to attend at least one session and maybe will see you at 11:30 a.m. and/or 6:30 p.m.:
May 8 at the North County Library, 1001 Sebastian Blvd., Sebastian.
May 22 at the Intergenerational Center, 1590 Ninth Street SW, Vero Beach.
May 29 at the County Commission chambers in Building A, 1801 27th St., Vero Beach.
This column reflects the opinion of Laurence Reisman. Contact him via email at larry.reisman@tcpalm.com, phone at 772-978-2223, Facebook.com/larryreisman or Twitter @LaurenceReisman.
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This article originally appeared on Treasure Coast Newspapers: Vero Beach, Sebastian growing; should county expand its urban area?
