A letter from Commissioner Katy Sorenson

Thanks to so many concerned Miami-Dade citizens, we won an important victory at the April CDMP hearings as we held the line against nine applications to move the Urban Development Boundary.  Our residents and our leaders have clearly begun to recognize that we can't deal with growth simply by opening up more land for development.  In this county, the land is finite and the barriers are real.

But we must be clear that it's not enough to tell the developers what they can't do.  The flip side of saying no to sprawl is saying yes to smart growth. 

Smart growth is about creating the American dream of sustainable communities, and here in Miami-Dade there are many components of that dream.  It includes a viable agricultural industry, safe drinking water, and the ability to evacuate in a disaster.

As the County seeks to promote smart growth, it's important that we begin the process with community planning charrettes that allow citizens to envision the future of their neighborhoods.  Many neighborhoods throughout Miami-Dade have already gone through this step, and in South Miami-Dade, we have led the way along the US1 corridor.

What we've found is that people are saying yes to nodes of development that will allow our County to continue to grow, but not at the expense of our national parks or public open spaces.  They recognize that development makes sense along current and future transit corridors so that our traffic situation does not continue to get worse.  They also acknowledge that while we should take our fair share of this development, we cannot build in such a way that existing neighborhoods are destroyed.

Smart growth is about planning for the future.  It's about preparing for growth so that it can happen in manageable ways that allow us to both maintain and improve our quality of life.  Now that we've held the line and said no to moving the UDB, we need to say yes to positive, inclusive development strategies.  That way we can create a community of lasting value for all our citizens.