Pine Island

And that's what happened on Fort Myers Beach in particular.

Pine Island.

Yeah, Pine Island as well.

And even Sanibel.

Not every house is on the beach.

But, yeah, most of the people who weren't on the beach, they still faced... terrifying flooding and destruction of their homes and they can't build them back and that's a real problem.

So what do you do? Do you want to literally just change that law? Do you change it to a different percentage or get rid of it entirely? you know

i the exact way to do it i i have not done the math uh but i've spoken to a lot of people i'm meeting with uh town of fort myers beach i think it's next week sometime and uh you know we'll talk about it there i'll talk about there's a there's a pine islands gentlemen's club and uh you know they it's a big issue for them and i've spoken to them so i'm I'm working on it to figure out what do they feel would best suit each of their communities.

'Cause d- does the Caloosahatchee influence Charlotte Harbor at all? It's south of you, right?

It's south, and it, it's, it's the lower part of Charlotte Harbor or, um, actually Pine Island Sound-

Yeah.

Yeah

... which is, which is all part of the same, uh, area, but Pine Island Sound is the body of water that's on the south of Pine Island, which sort of sits sort of in the middle of Charlotte Harbor, the lower middle, if you will.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

It, it truly is an island.

We had Hurricane Charlie.

We lived on Pine Island.

I went to Pine Island Elementary School.

We lived right off Birdsong Lane.

And, you know, I remember walking that island as a kid and it just was...

I was in the adventurous stage of my prepubescent childhood, and we used to get in some trouble.

I remember one time we got brought back home by one of the cops out there on Pine Island, and we were walking around on the roof of the museum out there.

And You know, it's just stupid stuff like that that we got into.

Lee County saw this problem years ago and said, hey, we have vastly different communities throughout Lee County.

Alva is very different than Pine Island, which is very different than Captiva.

And all of these communities cannot equally be represented in one one-size-fits-all document of the Lee plan.

So instead of making an overly long or overly generalized Lee plan, the solution was these community plans.

And when you look at the analysis that was done hastily by county staff showing where they think they see redundancy between the community plans and the Comprehensive Land Use Plan and the Land Development Code writ large, you can really start to see the cracks beginning to show because the reason we built these community plans, remember, is because these unique protections were not in place in the Lee Plan and the communities felt that they were necessary.

So by whole cloth just removing them without replacing them, without paying attention to the specific goals of the individual chapters of the Lee Plan where these community plans resided, and continue to reside until these changes go through, you're really not respecting the individual will of those communities, and I think that is really the heart of this issue.

Exactly, and if that wasn't made clear as we were going over the sort of timeline and intro of this, basically, the biggest issue the community and SCCF sees with this amendment to the Lee Plan and the LDC is, Essentially, each of the 17 community plans in Lee County for the 17 unincorporated areas, including Captiva, North Fort Myers, Alva, Lehigh, North Captiva, Pine Island, Buckingham, many others.

Essentially, each of those community plans is being completely eliminated through this amendment.