How it Happened, Part III: How Beulah Exploded

Several factors led to the exponential growth of the northwest portion of District 1 over the last decade.....

The exponential growth out in the Northwest portion of District 1 and Beulah has had several causes.

I discussed them in parts one and two of this series.

This area is the home for a growing contingent of employees at what has become one of our county's largest employers, Navy Federal Credit Union.

Navy Federal Credit Union has been an absolute grand-slam home run victory in our community from just about every metric from which one utilizes to measure the success of an economic development project.  Once completely built-out over the next three years--this company will support $500 Million yearly in annual payroll, and will have made an economic impact in our area of $5 Billion dollars.

This has been a huge success story for Escambia County, Pensacola, and our region.

But it has put a lot of stress on the community of Beulah.

With Beulah's relatively close proximity to the interstate, and with an abundant supply of land that sellers were willing to part with-this area became a magnet for the home builders.

In 2011, coming out of one of our nation's worst recessions, the legislators in Tallahassee passed the Growth Management Act of 2011 which essentially ended the state requirement for local government concurrency;  at that time, as a member of the Board of Education in Escambia County--we had negotiated Interlocal Agreements with Escambia County, Pensacola, and the city of Century. I voted against the Interlocal in 2008 because I felt it was too lenient on the builders 

But Tallahassee legislators wanted to take down some of the regulatory hurdles of government in order to stimulate growth in the then-sluggish housing sector to help Florida's economy.

Concurrency was a method for orderly growth that mandated that builders and developers plans had to be reviewed by the county, city, and school district to insure the contemplated developments were in areas that had the infrastructure necessary to accommodate such development.  Not exactly like an impact fee--this method induced building where infrastructure was already sufficient and mandated certain requirements be met before building could be completed in areas where the infrastructure was not sufficient.

Like impact fees--builders did not like the burdensome and often costly concurrency requirements.  It served to limit growth where builders wanted to build to maximize profit.

After the state did away with the requirement for concurrency in 2011, the Escambia county commissioners at that time moved concurrency over to the county's Land Development Code (LDC) and kept it in force locally--albeit for only a short period of time.  A few years later, in 2013, after several new commissioners joined the board, and after the county and the nation moved out of the recession and as our economy improved rapidly locally--a new comprehensive plan was adopted by the commission. The direction was given to "do away with concurrency in the land development code, so as not to have any local standards to be applied to builders more burdensome than what was required by the state" according to a staff member with whom I spoke that was at the county at the time.

So now, with no impact fees locally and with no concurrency requirements to meet--the pendulum had swung strongly in the favor of the home builders and the developers starting in 2014---subdivisions were planned and platted, and we have what we have seen now out in the Northwest portion of District 1.

By the time I took my seat on the Escambia BCC at the end of 2016, the Beulah area was inundated with planned subdivisions, condominiums and townhomes in the planning pipeline--because there were minimal requirements to meet in order to get these sorts of developments approved.  No impact fees, no traffic or school concurrency requirements, and a land development code that savy builders knew very well how to navigate successfully.

And this is where we are in 2019.  This, combined with what I discussed in part I and II, is how it happened.

In my next entry on this subject, I will discuss ideas for fixing this issue going forward--now that we know what the problems are....