The Zoom address is zoom.us and the meeting ID is 835-1838-6873.  The meeting will begin at 5:00 pm on September 1, 2020.

Please make plans to attend.  We will be sending more updates this week along with other breaking news and ways that you can make your voices heard, despite the COVID restrains on public meetings such as these!  

You will be hearing a lot of talk about the proverbial “trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.”  In land planning jargon, that is precisely what the School Board (referred to as the Applicant) is trying to get away with in its “land use plan amendment” or "LUPA" application.  Taking a step back for a moment, it’s important to understand the history of this particular lot and what the School Board's past actions have cost each of you in extra property tax costs. 

Back in 1993, when the original developer for what is now Hawks Landing (formerly referred to as “the Enclave”) sought approval by the County for its housing community, the School Board demanded that the 10 acre corner lot (now located at Broward Boulevard and Hiatus Road) be set aside for a school.  The original developer wasn’t seeking to alter the underlying land use plan (which called for development of a residential housing community at a maximum of 3 density units to the acre (or 3du/acre) and no school had been designated for that particular location on the governing map.  In order to avoid a delay and in the spirit of cooperation, it was agreed that the lot would be sold to the School Board.  In fact, no one really believed that an elementary school would ever be located on the lot as there were already plans to construct a school at what is now the Central Park Elementary location, and the 10-acre site was always too small for a middle school.  The sale, which was a forced one, ended up causing the City and County to lose millions of dollars in tax revenue from 1995 to 2020 (assuming 1.5. homes per acre were built on the 10 acres, or 15 homes with average yearly tax of $14,000 per home, over a 25-year span, the average tax revenue would have resulted in $5,250,000) which, in the end, cost each Plantation resident additional tax dollars making up for the deficit resulting in the failure to collect those taxes [keep in mind that the School Board paid zero (nothing) on the 10 acre lot over the last 25 years].

Now, having failed to pay a dime in taxes to the City, the School Board is asking for you to give it a bonanza.  'We rob you of your tax base and you reward us.'  The School Board is playing a clever game of hide the ball.  They set up an auction for the property whereby scores of bids are received and the highest bid is that, which they assert, justifiably sets the pace by which development must occur.  This is unheard of in any conventional planning sense.  The fact that the price paid for the dirt should govern the actions of our own Planning and Zoning experts is simply ludicrous when the actions bely the same underlying comprehensive land plan that each of us relied upon to develop and build and live in Plantation.

We can do better than that and this is your opportunity to say so!