The Lee Communities Coalition — a coalition of civic and community groups in Lee County — has released a new resource to help residents navigate sweeping changes to the Lee County Comprehensive Plan (Lee Plan) and the Lee County Land Development Code. (LDC)

The resource — LeeCommunities.com — is a website dedicated to helping educate the community about the proposed changes and their potential impacts.

“On Aug. 25, Lee County hosted its first and only public information meeting focused on changes to the Lee Plan and LDC,” said TLCC Coordinator Nadine Slimak. “These documents and revisions are hundreds of pages long — that’s a lot for a non-expert to take in. We wanted to have a place where residents could see side-by-side comparisons of revisions for each community and offer a resource to help them get involved in the conversation about these changes.”

In addition to side-by-side comparisons, LeeCommunities.com also offers talking points to help residents put together their own remarks for Commission meetings as well as contact email addresses so they can send emails to County Commissioners letting them know what they think of the changes.

“The Board of Commissioners is scheduled to take up this issue on Oct. 7 — that’s not much time for the public to review hundreds and hundreds of pages of technical language,” Slimak said. “The bottom line is that the county is proposing the wholesale elimination of Community Plans and the removal of the requirement for developers to inform local communities of their plans. In addition to throwing away thousands of hours of effort that communities put into developing their plans, this move also reduces opportunities for the public to have a say in how their communities grow. That’s just plain wrong.”

TLCC also questions the speed at which these changes are proposed to occur. “The County staff had more than 500 days to review and change the documents,” Slimak said. “The public — the taxpayers who will have to live with these plans — have had less than 30 days. Plans that were thoughtfully created over decades shouldn’t just disappear overnight.”

About

• The Lee Communities Coalition is an alliance of civic and community organizations working together to preserve meaningful citizen participation and community-specific planning in unincorporated Lee County. Lee County’s communities may be different, but our local voices deserve to remain involved in all of the decisions that shape them.

Coalition Members

• Greater Pine Island Civic Association
• Matlacha Civic Association
• Buckingham Community Association, Inc.
• Alva, Inc.
• Captiva Civic Association
• Captiva Community Panel
• Concerned Citizens of Bayshore Community, Inc.
• Greater Pine Island Water Association