Fernandina survey finds 73% call overdevelopment top threat

Nearly three-quarters of Fernandina Beach residents surveyed this summer named overdevelopment as the city's greatest challenge, far outpacing concerns about housing costs and traffic.

The finding comes as the City Commission voted to spend up to $240,000 on new conservation land and a local columnist argued that the late writer Wendell Berry's philosophy of land stewardship speaks directly to Amelia Island.

Survey found older, longtime homeowners most concerned about growth

The survey, presented to the City Commission in August as part of the city's Evaluation and Appraisal Review of its Comprehensive Plan, collected about 150 responses through neighborhood meetings and community events. Seventy-three percent of respondents identified overdevelopment as the top challenge. Rising housing costs came in at 13%. Traffic congestion followed at 6%.

Most respondents were older than 65, owned their homes and had lived in Fernandina Beach for more than 20 years.

Jennifer Bryla, community development program manager for the Northeast Florida Regional Council, said residents repeatedly objected to older homes being demolished and replaced with incompatible structures. The Fernandina Observer reported that preservation of community character was the top planning priority for 42% of respondents. Environmental sustainability followed at 21%. Forests and the city's tree canopy ranked as the environmental resource most in need of protection at 39%.

Commission approves $240,000 land deal to expand greenway

The commission acted on those concerns. On Sept. 1, commissioners voted 4-0 to approve a new agreement with the North Florida Land Trust, authorizing up to $240,000 from the city's Land Conservation Trust Fund to buy five properties totaling about 28 acres. The land trust is contributing about $500,000 toward the roughly $740,000 total cost. The acquisition will expand the Ron Sapp Egans Creek Greenway through the center of Amelia Island, and deed restrictions will limit the land to nature-based recreation, passive parks or open space.

"How will this island still function as a place to live 200 years from now? … It won't if we don't do some major land conservation," Commissioner Joyce Tuten said during the vote, as the Fernandina Observer reported.

Columnist ties Wendell Berry's land ethic to island's growth debate

The preservation debate gained a new voice on Sept. 5, when Fernandina Beach pastor and columnist Linda Hart Green published a Fernandina Observer column connecting Berry's ideas to the island. Berry, a poet, essayist, farmer and activist, died Aug. 31 at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was 92.

Green, who heard Berry speak at the Florida Pastors' School at Stetson University in DeLand in 2010, wrote that his central argument was that modern society's relationship to the land had become one of extraction. She credited him with helping start the sustainability movement.

"I think he would understand the tensions between preservation and development that we contend with here," Green wrote.

Berry farmed the same Kentucky land for six decades

Berry and his wife, Tanya, farmed a 125-acre homestead in Henry County, Kentucky, for more than six decades, according to the Louisville Courier Journal. He wrote his drafts by hand on yellow legal pads in a cabin with no electricity. He refused to install power because it came from strip-mined coal.