Lee County is proposing extensive changes to two of the documents that guide how and where our county grows: the Lee Plan, the County’s Comprehensive Plan, and the Land Development Code (LDC).

The proposed changes would reorganize, relocate and eliminate numerous provisions, including many that were created specifically for individual Lee County communities.

The Lee Communities Coalition supports thoughtful updates to outdated planning regulations. But modernization should not come at the expense of meaningful public participation or the community-specific protections developed by residents over decades.

In April 2025, the Lee County Commission directed staff to review The Plan and LDC to “increase efficiency, reduce unnecessary regulations, while maintaining the protection of public health, safety, and welfare and meeting State requirements.” On Aug. 25, 2026, Lee County staff released the proposed changes during a public information session held just days before the proposed revisions were to be considered by the Lee County Local Planning Agency (LPA). The public had little time to review hundreds of pages of documents outlining the changes to determine the true impacts on unincorporated Lee County Communities.

However, early reviews by community and civic groups have raised alarm: these are not just revisions to reduce redundancy, they are sweeping changes that delete and eliminate long-established community planning and development policies that have been in place for nearly four decades.

The Lee Plan is Lee County’s Comprehensive Plan—the long-range policy document that guides growth and development in unincorporated Lee County.

It establishes the County’s overall vision for issues including:

The Lee Plan is more than a vision statement. Land-development regulations and development decisions must be consistent with the Comprehensive Plan.

That makes the policies contained in the Lee Plan an important foundation for how Lee County grows and for the protections afforded to individual communities.

The Land Development Code, or LDC, implements the Lee Plan through the detailed regulations used to review development.

If the Lee Plan establishes the County’s policies and direction, the LDC provides many of the specific rules used to carry them out.

The LDC addresses matters such as zoning, permitted uses, building heights, setbacks, buffers, landscaping, development review procedures and other standards governing how property may be developed.

The distinction matters.

A protection contained in the Comprehensive Plan has a different status from a regulation contained only in the LDC. Changes to the Comprehensive Plan generally require the formal comprehensive-plan amendment process, including state-law procedures applicable to plan amendments. LDC regulations can generally be changed by the County through its ordinance-amendment process.

For that reason, where a community protection resides can matter as much as whether some version of it remains.

Lee County is not one uniform place.

Pine Island is different from Lehigh Acres. Captiva is different from Buckingham. Alva is different from North Fort Myers.

Over the years, residents spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars of their own money to work with Lee County to develop Community Plans that address particular characteristics, needs and concerns of their individual communities.

Today, the Lee Plan contains 17 Community Planning Areas, with community-specific goals and policies addressing issues such as hurricane evacuation, rural character, agricultural lands, coastal resources, development patterns, transportation, building scale, commercial development and public participation.

Some communities also have detailed regulations in Chapter 33 of the Land Development Code that implement their community planning provisions.

These plans did not exempt communities from Lee County’s broader planning rules. Instead, they added another layer of planning and protections intended to recognize that development appropriate in one part of Lee County may not be appropriate in another.

Lee County has undertaken a major rewrite and reorganization of the Lee Plan and corresponding portions of the Land Development Code.

Under the proposed amendments, most of the existing stand-alone Community Plan goals would be deleted from the Lee Plan. Some existing policies and protections would be relocated into other sections of the Lee Plan or the LDC. Others would be modified, consolidated under countywide regulations or eliminated.

The companion LDC amendments would also delete Chapter 33 in its entirety, relocating selected community-specific regulations into other portions of the code.

Our review has found examples of protections that are being preserved or relocated, as well as others that are being modified or eliminated. The effects also differ significantly from one community to another.

This is precisely why we are calling for a community-by-community review and asking Lee County to start this process back at the beginning.

The Coalition’s concerns extend beyond any single development standard or individual community. The proposed restructuring raises several broader questions:

The Lee Communities Coalition is not opposed to updating the Lee Plan or Land Development Code.

We believe Lee County can modernize its planning documents without abandoning the community-specific protections and public participation provisions that residents worked for years to establish.

Before these amendments move forward, Lee County should provide a clear, community-by-community accounting of what is changing and ensure that substantive protections and meaningful opportunities for community participation are retained or replaced with equivalent or stronger provisions.