The Greater Pine Island Civic Association is the only civic group encompassing all of the Greater Pine Island area including St. James City, Bokeelia, Pineland and Matlacha. The GPICA strives to protect the health, safety and quality of life of the residents through educational programs and necessary group actions.
The GPICA has been active for over forty years and is responsible for the retention of the “Old Florida” charm and atmosphere that attracted most of us to this location. In the 1980's when a developer in the St. James City area proposed high-rise condos and the traffic began to increase, a group of GPICA members with foresight spent thousands of dollars of their own money to write a land use plan specifically for Pine Island. This was completed in 1989 and incorporated into the Lee County Comprehensive Land Use Plan as Goal 14.
Goal 14 includes sections limiting density of development, designating commercial nodes, setting height limitations for all buildings and establishing the 810/910 rule that restricts rezoning and permitting based on the traffic count as recorded through Matlacha. In response to developers seeking elimination of some of Goal 14's provisions, the GPICA persuaded Lee County Commissioners to allow the residents of Pine Island to review and revise Goal 14, rather than changing or eliminating the provisions written in 1989. As a result, with the approval of the County Commissioners, the Land Use Committee was formed in late 1999 and a fundraiser was held to energize the project.
The first step was to contact all homeowner associations, other civic associations, fraternal organizations and churches on the island to inform them of the planned revision and to invite participation. Advertised public meetings were held to obtain suggestions from all segments of the island population. After over two years and hundreds of hours of work by Land Use Committee Members and professional consultants, the revised plan was presented to the County. The County Commissioners and the Florida Department of Community Affairs approved the plan as written. Years more of legal challenges followed and it wasn’t until May, 2007 that the Pine Island Plan was fully implemented. Because the law allows for comprehensive plan amendments every 6 months, we expect the Pine Island Plan to be challenged repeatedly by developers seeking to weaken it.
We need the support of all Greater Pine Islanders to keep that from happening. For more information on the Plan visit the Pine Island Plan page here.
A Brief History of GPICA Actions: 2000-2009
by Bill Mantis
An invitation to all Pine Islanders who would like to help Pine Island avoid the kind of over-development that plagues much of SW Florida: Please join our organization and even consider serving as a board member of the GPICA. The Greater Pine Island Civic Association is the sole island-wide organization committed to preserving and enhancing the features that drew us to Pine Island in the first place. County elected officials and county agencies consider us to be credible and reliable advocates for our community’s interests.
While the GPICA's history goes back more than 40 years, our recent efforts to maintain the quality of life on Pine Island have met with regular success, perhaps none more significant than the year-long effort to prevent the construction of 128 farmworker housing units at the corner of Stringfellow and Alcorn. This effort involved meeting with the neighbors who would be most severely impacted by the proposed project. We lined up people willing to testify before the hearing examiner in April, 2008 then again before the county commissioners. We identified the arguments most likely to be effective in testimony. We helped to organize car pools to make sure Pine Island was well represented. Although we prevailed ultimately, a good deal of cooperation, patience and persistence were called for. Merely the fact that so many islanders were willing to show up for the hearings undoubtedly had a huge impact on the outcome.
We have taken part in a whole string of similarly successful initiatives.
We helped to defeat a proposal to build a "big box" Walgreens at the 4-way stop; producing signs, banners and bumper stickers to raise public awareness.
We testified against Highpoint Tower's "Stringfellow 15" project which sought to build mini-warehouses in Bokeelia.
We helped to defeat a proposal to make Jug Creek Marina become the transfer point for the trash coming in from the outer islands.
In June of 2009, we persuaded county planning staff to reconsider their proposal to expand commercial activities into coastal rural areas.
We testified against a proposed "Masters Landing" development because of its failure to comply with the Pine Island community land use plan.
In the spring of 2005 we successfully lobbied state legislators (by letter and phone), urging them not to pass the "agricultural enclave" act which would have allowed many prospective developers to skirt local land use plans.
We have adopted a resolution opposing Highpoint Tower's plan to build a large marina on the northern tip of Pine Island. The case will go before an administrative law judge in late January, 2010.
We have become a party in the legal action to prevent Cape Coral from removing the Ceitus boat lift unless they agree to institute other suitable environmental controls.
We have protested the unauthorized filling and leveling of Willow Lake.
Most of our actions are motivated by our desire to protect the integrity of the Pine Island community plan which we amended at the turn of the millennium. Community discussions on the content of the amendment were initiated in 1999. A draft was submitted to county commissioners in the fall of 2001. In general, the amendment reaffirmed the importance of the 810 and 910 rules in controlling and managing growth. (The 810 and 910 traffic thresholds were established by the Pine Island plan ten years earlier, in 1989. And no good, viable alternative to the 810/910 rule has emerged in the intervening twenty years.) The amendment also established a new future land use category: "coastal rural." While limiting residential densities in coastal rural designations, the amendment allowed land owners to recapture some of the lost densities if they were willing to set up perpetual conservation or agricultural easements on a portion of their property. Though commissioners adopted the amendment in Jan '03, implementation regulations and language were not adopted till September, 2007.
Two-thirds of the way through the amendment-approval process, a major stumbling block appeared: county agencies could not agree on the correct interpretation of the 910 rule. Did 910 mean re-zonings likely to result in a higher traffic count were no longer allowed? Or did it mean a re-zoning could occur as long as it did not--by and of itself--trigger the 910 threshold? Did 910, in other words, represent a red light for new subdivisions? Or just a yellow light? To settle the dispute, commissioners created a 3 member annotation committee, but they were not able to come to an agreement. After another series of hearings, meetings and even a petition drive sponsored by the GPICA, we persuaded county commissioners that the 910 rule should be interpreted exactly the way we Pine Islanders had been interpreting it all along.
"The price of freedom," according to Thomas Jefferson, "is eternal vigilance." Presumably, the same principle applies to the price of freedom from over-development. Please join us in our vigil. You can download a membership application form here.
