Ag Reserve buy a success -- if county follows plan

The years of uncertainty for the county's Agricultural Reserve Area are over. Developers are running out of room while farmers are guaranteed a permanent place to grow some of the nation's finest winter vegetables.

The county's approach to the 20,500-acre area west of Florida's Turnpike between Boca Raton and Boynton Beach, outlined recently in The Post, has been a success for two reasons: stringent limits on development and taxpayer support. The rules forced developers to preserve 60 acres for every 40 they developed. Taxpayers helped by approving a $100 million program in 1999 to buy land for farming. Since then, the county, under the stewardship of the Conservation Fund, has used all but $8 million of that money to buy 2,500 acres at strategic locations. Every acre the county owned was an acre a developer couldn't build on or preserve.

Driven by rapid home sales and undeterred by soaring land prices, developers built anyway, buying the most remote sites for preserves while building on more accessible land. The remote sites are gone. To build in the Ag Reserve, a developer must preserve the most accessible land. Combined with the county land, which is being leased to farmers, most of the reserve's center, between Boynton Beach Boulevard and Atlantic Avenue, and nearly all of the land west of State Road 7 and bordering the Everglades, is green.

The county's success, however, is tempered by a willingness to sell out its own plan. On two occasions, the county let developers trade preserves outside the Ag Reserve for the right to build within it. In the most recent deal, which the county just finalized, GL Homes worked with the South Florida Water Management District to pay $20 million to stop development of a 335-acre property west of Palm Beach Gardens. In exchange, GL can build about 700 homes on 700 acres in the Ag Reserve. Without the trade, GL would have had to squeeze the homes onto 280 acres. The county undermines its own success when it allows deals like that.

The county sent more wrong signals when it resurrected a proposal to convert 40 acres of Ag Reserve farmland into a trash transfer station. Farmland preserved with public money does not create a land bank to be cared for until something better comes along. That is the commission's new charge in the Ag Reserve: making sure that what the county has saved remains protected for future generations.