Captiva community meeting to be held for stormwater management system plan
Residents of Captiva Island will have an opportunity to hear from a consulting firm concerning a stormwater management system plan, as well as ask questions.
Captiva Community Panel Secretary Jay Brown, who is part of the stormwater committee, said the consulting firm has completed the design of the stormwater management system for Captiva.
“It involves putting drains along significant portions of Captiva Drive in the Village area. Also property drainage for a significant number of side streets in the Village area,” he said. “The plan is done now.”
The consultants, Brown said, at this stage will do a rough cost estimate of what the plan will be, as well as a cost benefit analysis. He said the analysis is for what they can save if they implement the stormwater management program.
“What they are saying is the cost benefit analysis is an important part of the study. If we are going to get funding – it’s a good return for the community if the cost is going to be absorbed by someone,” Brown said.
On Tuesday, Nov. 10 the firm will present a report to the public from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at the Civic Center.
Brown said the firm will receive input from the panel before they write a final plan, which will be completed later in November, early December.
An update was also given by the wastewater committee, which is still on hold. Brown said for a long time they were trying to partner with Sanibel to have their wastewater processing done at the Donax plant. He said through evaluation, it showed a significant cost to go this route.
“We might shift our focus from having Donax doing our processing to the plant in South Seas to doing our processing,” he said.
Brown said they have to wait to see how much development will happen at South Seas, the improvement needed for their FGUA South Seas Waste Water Treatment Plant.
“It’s on hold until we know what the issues will be at the plant at South Seas,” he said.
The panel also discussed the county’s proposal to eliminate the Captiva Plan.
Brown said there are 17 communities in Lee County that have local community planning, who like Captiva, have their own plans, or visions, for what the future looks like in terms of developing polices and rules to implement the plans.
“Historically, our county has even supported this effort. We used to get annual grants from the county to help offset the cost for doing our community plan. That all changed about three months ago when we found out that the county wanted to cease doing local community planning,” he said, adding that the county feels it was a waste of time.
Brown said the local plans were duplicating what Lee County was doing.
“I think the real reason is the county saw this as being anti-development doing our own plans because so many of us are doing plans retaining the current level of development in our community passing height and density regulations,” Brown said. “The county wanted to emphasize development at the expense of what we wanted, which was to retain our natural surroundings.”
He said there has been a very dramatic blowback form various community organizations regarding the elimination of community planning.
“A lot of people do not like it, and want to continue to do our community planning. I know Captiva very much feels that way. At a recent meeting of the county commissioners, two of the commissioners, felt very strongly the whole effort ought to be delayed indefinitely. The county should go back to local communities and do presentations and get community input before making this kind of change,” Brown said. “The effort to eliminate community planning is going to be off the table for a while.”
He said it is all on hold right now, which gives them more time to come up with additional ways to fight against the elimination of community planning.
To reach MEGHAN BRADBURY, please email mbradbury@breezenewspapers.com