BY TRACY LEE TATE
Times Editor
LAKE BUTLER — It’s been a long road. For more than six years the Union County Board of County Commissioners has been at odds with a group of four families who wanted to mine phosphate in Union and Bradford counties.
Since 2018 the county has been under the threat of a suit under the Bert Harris Act filed against it for nearly $300 million for compensation for the restriction of mining activities – depriving HPS Enterprises II of its rightful use of its land and other related matters. Whether the issue of mining is now mute, or whether it may return, for now the county is out from under the onus of the suit after both parties recently agreed to “stipulate to the dismissal without prejudice of this action.” The agreement was announced by County Attorney Russ Wade at the regular June meeting (June 20) of the Board of Commissioners.
When the mining proposal first came to the fore, commissioners did their due diligence and agreed that the mining operation would be a detriment to the county and its citizens if allowed to proceed as planned. They sought the aid of the North Florida Regional Planning Council to update the Land Development Regulations (LDRs) to help protect environmentally delicate areas and to reduce the risk to county residents and their welfare. This began the run of three year-long moratoriums that prohibited the county from accepting any applications for mining permits until the new regulations could be put in place, which they were in mid-2018. In Oct. 2018, HPS II filed suit for $298,750,000.00, plus attorney fees and court costs against the county for the “inverse condemnation” of its property, “restricting the development potential of the Property” and rendering HPS II unable to “attain its reasonable, investment-backed expectation for the existing use of the property.”
In the claim it was stated that the new LDRs would restrict HPS II to the use of only 341 acres of the 2,757.6 acres it had originally planned to mine – an 87% reduction. Also claimed was the loss of the “fair market value’ of the property in the amount of $298,750,000 and that the county’s actions had “deprived the landowner of substantially all economically viable use of the property.”
The summons for this action was filed with the court on March 8, 2019 and served on the board on March 14, 2019 with no court date set. Also on March 8, 2019, the county filed a motion to dismiss the suit, citing seven defects it. HPS II filed an opposition to the county’s motion to dismiss on April 16, 2019. The case was heard on June 26, 2019 by Eighth Judicial District Judge Denise Ferrero and she delivered her judgement on March 6, 2020 – she deemed the suit filed by HPS II was “legally sufficient”, which meant it would be heard, not that it was decided in their favor. She also dismissed HPS II’s claim of “inverse condemnation” as being “not ripe” – not ready for consideration because it depended on contingent events in the future that might not unfold as expected.
In February 2021 a case management hearing was held under the authority of Judge Robert Groeb. This was during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the case was conducted as a ZOOM virtual meeting. Because of the judicial backlog caused by the pandemic, no definite date was set for the hearing of the case. Since that time the court ordered both parties to enter into mediation sessions to see if any or all of the problems could be worked out between them, allowing for a shorter and less costly trial. The result of these sessions has not yet been made available to the Times as public records, so it is not known what took place in the meetings.
Now that the suit by HPS II has been dismissed it is really not known what will happen next. The matter could be resolved with no mining to take place, mining could be conducted on the 341 acres of Union County allowed by the LDRs and the property in Bradford County included in the original plan or HPS II could come back and file suit against the county again. Only time will tell what will come next, but commissioners and Union County residents are breathing a little easier for now with the threat of the lawsuit off the table.
There is still a great deal that is not known, such as what occurred in the mediation sessions and what the thoughts are of the participants on both sides throughout the past years. The Times will attempt to gather this information and fill in the rest of the story in the near future.
