Alachua County v. Reddick

• Court: Florida District Court of Appeals
• Writing for the Court: SMITH
• Citation: Alachua County v. Reddick, 368 So.2d 653 (Fla. App. 1979)
• Decision Date: 20 March 1979
• Docket Number: No. KK-191,KK-191
• Parties: ALACHUA COUNTY, Appellant, v. James K. REDDICK and Annie Mae Reddick, his wife, Appellees.

Page 653

368 So.2d 653

ALACHUA COUNTY, Appellant, v. James K. REDDICK and Annie Mae Reddick, his wife, Appellees.

No. KK-191.

District Court of Appeal of Florida, First District.

March 20, 1979.

George H. Nickerson, Jr. and Marilyn C. Wolf, Gainesville, for appellant.

Philip A. DeLaney, of Andrews & DeLaney, Gainesville, for appellees.

SMITH, Acting Chief Judge.

Alachua County appeals from a circuit court judgment enjoining the enforcement of a zoning classification of the Reddicks' property more restrictive than commercial. The property is now zoned for low-density residential purposes. The board of county commissioners denied the Reddicks' application for BH (Highway Oriented Services) zoning. After a trial, the circuit court ordered commercial zoning of an unspecified character, holding that the board's decision

. . . was not reasonably related to any valid public need, nor did it have a material bearing upon the public health, safety, morals or general welfare of the community, and was therefore not a valid exercise of the police power vested in the (county).

Alachua County contends on appeal that its zoning decision had a rational basis in the circumstances and the public welfare, that the basis for its action was at least fairly debatable, that the Reddicks' property interests were not confiscated, and that the circuit court erred in issuing a mandatory injunction for commercial rezoning. We agree, and reverse.

Archer Road intersects Interstate Highway 75 southwest of Gainesville in an area previously devoted to agricultural, residential, and scattered industrial use. The interchange connecting the two roadways is the largest in Alachua County, indeed the largest in north Florida. Alachua County's director of planning and development, the witness Lewis, described the interchange as "probably one of the most important . . . in the state of Florida." By that interchange I-75 motorists from the north and south turn east on Archer Roach to reach Gainesville's large public medical complex and "sporting events and the conferences and so on going on at the university." At the interchange I-75 lies northwest and southeast and Archer Road lies northeast (six lanes through shopping area toward Gainesville) and southwest (four lanes now, two additional lanes proposed). Neighborhood circumstances are as shown in the appended sketch.

The zoning here questioned restricts automobile-oriented commercial development near the interchange to 109 acres of land lying in four roughly equivalent quadrants immediately surrounding the structure. Service roads to those quadrant properties minimize interference by their traffic with free passage on the interchange and on Archer Road. The Reddicks' narrowly rectangular property, 5.7 heavily wooded acres fronting 210 feet on the south side of Archer Road, lies just beyond and southwest of the southwest quadrant and its service road, 1,000 feet from I-75. The Reddick tract is separated from the southwest quadrant by a cleared 100 foot wide electrical transmission easement adjoining the Reddicks' eastern boundary. At Archer Road the transmission lines turn west on an old 60 foot wide railroad right-of-way between Archer Road and adjoining private properties.

The Reddicks' tract is zoned R-1A (Single Family-Low Intensity), and they maintain their home there. The house is two to three hundred feet back from the frontage. Neighboring properties farther southwest on Archer Road are similarly zoned and used as residences. The Reddicks, desiring now to place a motel on their property, requested rezoning to commercial BH (Highway Oriented Services), and intensive commercial classification which permits motels, filling stations, and restaurants including fast food drive-ins. The county commission accepted professional advice to prevent strip commercial development along Archer Road southwest of the interchange, and denied the BH rezoning requested by the Reddicks.

The board of county commissioners denied the Reddicks' application for BH zoning after repeated hearings and long study of this and other rezoning requests affecting property near the Archer Road interchange. Three years before the scope and design of the Archer Road interchange were fully developed, the commission had adopted a highly generalized color-coded land use planning map (exhibited in this record at 1' = 3,000 feet) which shows commercial usage surrounding the Archer interchange and including the northeast tip of the Reddicks' tract. In 1975 and early 1976, the board of commissioners, the county director of planning and development, the county planning commission, and the North Central Florida Regional Planning Council, engaged as a consultant, proposed and debated several more carefully drawn approaches to the problem. The commission's final decision in February 1976 endorsed the advice of planning and development director Lewis against strip commercial development southwest of the interchange on Archer Road; and, to that end, the commission denied the Reddicks' and four other petitions for intensive commercial development. As the witness Lewis testified, the county commissioners had come to regard the strip commercial development on the Newberry Road approach to I-75, approximately three miles to the north, as a "disaster." The Newberry Road lesson was that the proliferation of automobile-oriented businesses on an interchange approach produces numerous driveways serving narrowly spaced establishments, a considerable volume of locally-bound traffic turning off and on the approach, left and right, and a resulting "glut" of traffic tending to make the highway "unusable."

The testimony of Lewis and the written submissions to the board of county commissioners, during their deliberations, reveal also that the commission was concerned about striking a proper balance county-wide in the amount and locale of commercial and noncommercial properties. Of the 3,300 commercially-zoned acres in the Gainesville urban area, including the city, only 800 were in actual commercial use when the commissioners made their decision in this case. The underdevelopment of land already available for commercial use was another factor in the commission's decision not to expand, in this particular place, the county's inventory of such land.

Accepting the premise that strip commercial development should be restricted southwest of I-75 on Archer Road, the commission turned to the task of drawing a line somewhere between the commercial usage to be permitted in the southwest quadrant of the interchange, on service roads, and the existing residential properties on the southwestern stretch of Archer Road. On that subject Mr. Lewis' formal report advised the commission that the 100 foot wide electrical transmission easement which separates the Reddick property from the southwest quadrant and its service road was the best if not the only logical place to draw that line:

To the west of I-75 on the south side of Archer Road there exists a 100-foot easement immediately west of the Brown's Mobile Home Park, which provides a natural buffer between residential and non-residential uses. This buffer also fronts at the point where the southwest quadrant access road intersects with Archer Road. Any intrusion of commercial uses of any kind beyond this buffer line, on either side of Archer Road, to the west in the residentially zoned and partially developed area would open the door for strip commercial zoning along this entire stretch. There would be no reasonable cause for stopping it. Yet, so far as local market business is concerned, there is a five-acre neighborhood shopping center planned and zoned on the north side of Archer Road approximately 1 3/4 miles west of the center line of I-75. There will therefore be no need for local market businesses between that location and I-75, anyway.

In testimony before the circuit court the witness Lewis repeated the analysis he gave the county commission on the day of its decision:

(A)bout any conclusion you could make on any of the properties on the (west) side of I-75 along Archer Road can be said if you make justification for (rezoning) one property, you can make the same justification for all others. The result could be strip commercial development all the way down at least to Tower Road and perhaps even beyond.

Q. In your opinion does this (100-foot wide easement) provide a boundary between commercial and residential use?

A. It provides a logical place to draw the line because there is no other logical place to the west.

Q. And why do you say that?

A. Well, because all the properties to the west are similar in nature. There are no open spaces as such that would service as a logical cutoff point. Once you get beyond to the west of that, there is no basis for saying there is where we are going to draw the line, because there's nothing physical present to make that distinction.

There is no substantial evidence in the record that the Reddicks have been deprived of the beneficial use of their property by the county's refusal to zone it for commercial development. Of course the tract is not the secluded country place it was when the Reddicks purchased it 30 years ago. The traffic on Archer Road is "more noisy" than before, though the house has some protection in its setback 200 feet from Archer Road. Other Archer Road residences, similarly situated, continue in use despite incursion of automobiles. The power poles and lines to the east, and extending westward along Archer Road on old railroad right-of-way, detract from the otherwise rustic appearance of the heavily wooded land. Traffic on I-75 was described by Mr. Reddick as "quite noisy," although the noise is muffled somewhat by the heavy woods surrounding the Reddicks' house. Significantly, a mobile home park continues to operate on the tract immediately northeast, across the 100-foot transmission line easement and within the southwest quadrant of the...