A developer-backed bill would unravel rural protections in Orlando, allow an ethanol plant near Jacksonville

The legislation could also make it easier to put subdivisions on farmland, turn a Miami fuel terminal into luxury mansions, and kill popular local programs that make developers pay for public art.

Photo credit: Carol VanHook

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Florida lawmakers could dissolve protections for rural land around Orlando and pave the way for a controversial ethanol plant north of Jacksonville, under a developer-backed bill that surfaced Friday in the Florida Senate.

The sweeping set of changes, which is scheduled for a vote Monday afternoon in Tallahassee, could also help turn an oceanfront fuel terminal in Miami into luxury mansions — and end popular programs around the state that make large real-estate developers help pay for public art.

The legislation in question is Senate Bill 1118, which began as an effort to make it easier for homebuilders to build new subdivisions on farmland around cities — and harder for local governments to impose tighter limits on future development and housing density. Sponsored by Sen. Stan McClain, a Republican from Ocala, the legislation is a top priority for the homebuilding lobby.

The homebuilding bill has stirred angry opposition across the state, uniting an unlikely alliance that includes everyone from the local Republican Party in McClain’s home county to the conservation group 1000 Friends of Florida.

And that was before McClain unveiled a 47-page rewrite that would add a host of new provisions to the bill — some of which would help out a few politically plugged-in companies with friends in Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature.

For example, the legislation would overturn new, voter-approved development rules meant to slow suburban sprawl in Orange County, the fast-growing region in central Florida that reaches from Walt Disney World to the St. Johns River and includes the city of Orlando.

Those new rules — enacted through a pair of local referendums that each passed in November with roughly 70 percent of the vote — established a so-called “rural boundary” in Orange County, beyond which there are now tighter controls on housing density.

The new rules also include a mechanism meant to stop developers from evading those controls simply by convincing some growth-hungry city to annex their land — by giving county commissioners the power to veto an annexation agreement.

Senate Bill 1118 would undo it all.

The legislation would do so in two ways. First, it would outlaw any local referendums to regulate housing density or municipal boundary lines — and undo any that have recently been approved by voters. And second, it would erase any recent local laws that give a county government veto power over a voluntary annexation agreement between a landowner and a city.

The proposal surfaced just days after a company affiliated with the largest landowner in central Florida — the Mormon Church-owned Deseret Ranches, which has long-term plans to develop a enormous swath of ranchlands east of Orlando — disclosed that it was lobbying lawmakers on Senate Bill 1118.

It also comes after the company tried to get the city of Orlando to annex more than 50,000 acres of its land before Orange County voters could decide the fate of the rural boundary referendums. City leaders ultimately abandoned the annexation attempt, in part due to backlash from locals.

This is also the second year in a row that development industry lobbyists and state lawmakers have tried to block a rural boundary in Orange County.

A year ago, state senators slipped a last-minute amendment into a bill meant to stop any referendum from happening. Records later obtained by Seeking Rents showed that the measure — which ultimately failed to stop the votes — was initially given to lawmakers by a lobbying group whose members include Deseret Ranches.

The provisions abolishing Orange County’s rural boundary aren’t the only items in Senate Bill 1118 that would help a large corporation prevail in a local controversy.

Last month, city leaders in Fernandina Beach rejected plans from industrial giant Rayonier Advanced Materials to build a $53 million on-site ethanol plant at a nearly century-old pulp mill the company operates in the historic seaport town on the Florida-Georgia border.

The proposed facility would take industrial waste generated when Rayonier converts wood chips into cellulose pulp and use it to produce more than 7 million gallons a year of bioethanol, which could be used as fuel additive, food coloring or solvent.

The ethanol plant triggered such hostility from local voters that a mayor of Fernandina Beach who supported the project lost re-election. City leaders then decided to reject Rayonier’s plans, arguing that state law forbid them from allowing chemical manufacturing or refining in the area.

Rayonier just sued to have the decision overturned. The company argues that its bioethanol plant should not be classified as a chemical manufacturing or refining facility because it would produce ethanol through fermentation — similar to the process used to make beer or yogurt.

The new version of Senate Bill 1118 would overrule Fernandina Beach and resolve the dispute in Rayonier’s favor. It would do so by decreeing that “the production of ethanol from plants and plant products…by fermentation…is not chemical manufacturing or chemical refining.”

Records show that Rayonier has a team of lobbyists working the Legislature this year on “issues related to bioethanol.”

Another part of Senate Bill 1118 would tweak a decade-old law that is meant to keep fuel-storage facilities in operation across Florida and ensure any operator can rebuild and reopen a terminal if it is damaged during a hurricane.

That 2014 law — which was sponsored by then-state Sen. Wilton Simpson, a Republican who is now Florida’s agriculture commissioner — essentially handcuffs cities and counties so they cannot rezone land around a fuel terminal.

The new version of Senate Bill 1118 would tighten those handcuffs in order to stop a local government from making any changes that might prevent a ship from docking at a terminal to load or offload fuel.

But it would also give communities new freedom to rezone a fuel terminal — if the terminal owner announces that it plans to close the facility.

The idea emerged in Tallahassee just a few weeks after TransMontaigne Partners — an operator of oil pipelines and terminals that records show is lobbying on Senate Bill 1118 — struck a deal to sell a terminal on Miami’s ultra-exclusive Fisher Island for $180 million.

According to The Real Deal, a real-estate news publication, TransMontaigne is selling to a Chicago-based buyer that plans to build luxury homes on the land. But the sale has been complicated by the fact that the fuel terminal site “has no development rights,” the Real Deal reported in January.

Then there’s another provision in Senate Bill 1118 that would help cut costs for real-estate developers around the state — at the expense of public art.

The new version of the legislation would forbid any community in Florida from requiring larger developers to help pay for public art as a condition of approval for their proposed development.

The legislation would eliminate programs like one in the city of Sarasota in which a developer seeking approval for a project valued at $1 million or more must contribute an amount equal to one-half of 1 percent of its construction costs to a fund that finances art installations around the city. The developer can also choose to install a work of art itself instead.

The attempt to kill developer-funded public art programs — which is also tucked inside at least two other bills — has sparked bipartisan criticism in Sarasota.