Legal Currents is a blog series that explores timely topics and trends in Florida marine and coastal law and policy. This blog examines Cedar Key’s efforts to integrate resiliency planning into its Community Redevelopment Area (CRA) plan in response to Hurricane Idalia. The author served as Florida Sea Grant’s consultant on the projects discussed below and continues to support Cedar Key’s recovery and resiliency initiatives.
When the Gulf of Mexico sneezes, Cedar Key catches a cold. The island city has experienced five hurricanes in the last nine years (Hermine, Idalia, Debbie, Helene & Milton), each producing at least 6 feet of storm surge. This repetitive flooding has strained island infrastructure, even for a town that prides itself in sweeping up and getting back to work. This is after all, a place that has already picked up and moved once. In 1896, after a devastating hurricane, the City moved from the outer key of Atsena Otie, to its current location on Way Key.¹
Hurricane Idalia damage to infrastructure in Cedar Key, Florida. Photo by UF/IFAS.
As a traditional working waterfront that has become the commercial aquaculture capital of Florida, and a natural resource-based tourist destination with recreational fishing at its core, Cedar Key necessarily hugs the waterfront. It has no choice but to build back – and build back stronger.
In the wake of Hurricane Idalia in 2023, Cedar Key moved resiliency to the forefront of its policymaking. The City’s longstanding Community Redevelopment Area (CRA) had finally recovered from the nosedive in property taxes brought on by the Great Recession and would begin generating positive tax increment revenue again in 2023.² Cities that create CRA’s benefit from the incremental increase in ad valorem property taxes within the CRA as redevelopment occurs.³ Fiscally sound again, the Cedar Key Community Redevelopment Plan, scheduled to sunset in 2030, needed to be amended to reflect current realities, and extended to provide additional time to implement capital improvement projects. While the existing CRA plan remained relevant for various aspects of redevelopment – including addressing flooding – it had been written with other priorities in mind, and long before coastal resiliency had become a stated priority at all levels of government.
In 2021, the Florida Legislature established the Resilient Florida Grants Program (RFGP).⁴ The RFGP provides local governments with competitive access to at least $100 million in yearly funding for resiliency planning and implementation ($225 million in FY 24). To be eligible for the RFGP, local governments first must conduct (or be conducting) a vulnerability assessment that conforms to very specific state requirements and identify specific infrastructure projects to reduce vulnerabilities. Local governments may also prepare an adaptation plan that is based on the vulnerability assessment.
With technical support from Florida Sea Grant, the City of Cedar Key retained the University of Florida’s Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER) to conduct a vulnerability assessment in conformance with State requirements. Based on the vulnerability assessment, FIBER also drafted a detailed adaptation plan.
The City’s Adaptation Plan identifies and prioritizes 75 large- and small-scale capital improvement projects that would enhance the resiliency of Cedar Key – everything from elevating roads, bridges, buildings, and lift stations, to relocating critical infrastructure and critical community and emergency facilities such as City Hall and the fire station. The Plan also includes a number of nature-based solutions (NBS) projects such as living shorelines that conform to the City’s living shoreline master plan FSG helped to develop in 2018.⁵
One larger scale nature-based solution will promote restoration of historic flows between the several islands that make up the archipelago that is The Cedar Keys. The roads, bridges and culverts linking these islands serve as choke points to rising seas and storm surge seeking the path of least resistance through the Keys. Elevating roads and expanding bridges and culverts at these choke points will allow surge waters to flow more easily through the archipelago, and not over it.
UF FIBER and the Cedar Key Community Redevelopment Area Team host meetings with the Cedar Key community to discuss the CRA.
While FIBER was concluding its work, the chairperson of the Cedar Key Community Redevelopment Area reached out to Florida Sea Grant to discuss amending and extending the City Community Redevelopment Plan. FSG recommended bringing in faculty and students from the Environmental and Community Development Clinic at UF’s Levin College of Law, which has a long history of collaboration with Cedar Key, including the initial establishment of the Community Redevelopment Area in 2000. Aware of the adaptation planning work underway at FIBER, FSG and the Clinic recommended incorporating the Vulnerability Assessment and Adaptation Plan into the amended and extended CRA and including the specifically identified projects from the Plan as capital improvement projects eligible for CRA funding. The idea got traction with the City’s CRA board and the City engaged FIBER, the Clinic and FSG in a collaborative effort to re-envision the City’s CRA Plan, at least in large part, as a resiliency plan – with a dedicated revenue stream.
At its August 2024 meeting, the first after Hurricane Debbie added an exclamation mark to the effort, the Cedar Key Commission adopted the new CRA plan, and extended its life to 2054. While a few other cities in Florida have explicitly incorporated resiliency programming into their CRA plans, Cedar Key is likely the first to embrace resiliency planning as a key component of its future redevelopment efforts. Tax increment revenue generated by the CRA can be dedicated to the capital improvement projects identified by FIBER, and can be used to provide matching funds for federal and state grant programs.
Shoring up the City’s infrastructure to withstand future flooding will improve property values on the island and help maintain the flow of TIF money into the City as it continues its effort to thrive as a working waterfront on Florida’s increasingly stormy Big Bend. The City made “Re-archipelagizing” the Cedar Keys its first priority under its new plan.
Mother nature had other ideas, however.
Later in 2024 Cedar Key became ground zero yet again for two late season storms, Hurricane’s Helene (September) and Milton (October), which made the previous ones seems tame by comparison. Hurricane Helene’s storm surge topped 10 feet and proved too much, even for a city that routinely sweeps up and quickly gets back to work after 6 – 8 foot surges. The storms inflicted catastrophic damage on civic infrastructure and commercial and residential buildings throughout the island city. Resiliency planning has had to take a backseat to recovery as the City struggles in the aftermath of the flooding.
As the Cedar Key continues to recover from these devastating storms, it has not forgotten its commitment to resiliency, and plans to return to its resiliency program once it has confidence that the City and its residents are back on its feet.
For more information see presentation Strategies for Building Resilience in Cedar Key. This presentation was given by the Cedar Key Vulnerability Assessment/Community Redevelopment Area Plan team at the annual meeting of the Florida Chapter of the American Association of Landscape Architects in August of 2024.
