Dear Editor:
Do you trust your local government to follow its own rules? After the Bradford County Commission’s recent rezoning, I’m not so sure. I’m the “Belford” mentioned in the Telegraph’s coverage.
Here’s the nutshell. A 2.5-acre parcel directly behind our home was sliced into five half-acre lots and shifted from Residential Single Family-1 to RSF/Mobile Home-1. My wife and I don’t oppose mobile homes — what we oppose is doing it off-process and off-standard. If the law requires notice, hearings and evidence, then that’s what should happen, before the bulldozers and move-ins, not after.
Two failures stand out.
Process. Under Florida Supreme Court precedent (Snyder), parcel-specific rezonings must be handled as quasi-judicial matters, with Bradford County’s Land Development Regulations supplying the notice and hearing steps, including sworn testimony, documents, and an evidentiary record the commission actually relies on. That didn’t happen. Our attorney had to fight just to speak longer than three minutes. That’s not due process; that’s a public-comment box check.
Substance. Appendix A sets a 10-acre standard for establishing the RSF/MH-1 district (with narrow contiguity exceptions). Even counting the “add-ons,” this area is barely seven acres. The commission voted 5–0 anyway. If rules matter, they should matter here.
And the timeline makes it worse. Months before the vote, the county zoning director acknowledged in writing that he “took it upon myself to grant the zoning change,” with no hearing and no posted notice. Only later did the county bring forward Z 25-02, a “clean-up” ordinance, to make that off-book change official. The board’s 5–0 approval effectively ratified what staff had already done without the public process the law contemplates.
This isn’t neighbors versus mobile homes. Many of us would welcome lawful, well-kept units developed in the right way. This is about trust. When rules are bent for convenience, the public loses confidence that those same rules will protect them tomorrow.
Accountability shouldn’t be controversial. It looks like this:
—An independent review of when and how the Official Zoning Atlas was altered — and who authorized permits tied to that alteration.
—A public release of audit logs, fee receipts, and permit/CO records, plus the county’s legal rationale for treating RSF-1 as RSF/MH-1 before any ordinance.
—A bright-line policy: no zoning map change takes effect without an adopted ordinance — full stop.
—Training and consequences so “I took it upon myself” never appears in another zoning email.
I am forced to ask, if the county commission is OK with ratifying their planning director making the zoning change on his own, who in the county is asking the planning director why he did that without following the law?
Trust in local government is built (or broken) on process. We’re asking for nothing more — and nothing less — than the process the law already requires.
Sincerely,
Scott Belford
