VERO BEACH — Planning for the county's future growth would be better than just letting it happen, but it won't be easy, a University of Florida urban planner warned this week.

"Usually the public doesn't care," Jim Nicholas said Wednesday. "And when the public doesn't care, it doesn't get done."

Such public apathy would be a far cry from Indian River County residents' growth concerns, some members of the Pelican Island Audubon Society observed.

Nicholas, the associate director of UF's Environmental and Land Use Law Program, addressed the environmental group in the Vero Beach Community Center.

He discussed various ways that counties and regions in Maryland, New Jersey and New York have preserved agricultural or conservation lands by transferring their rights of development to urban lands.

The concept generally involves the local government designating a large area as "sending lands" to be preserved.

Owners of property there can sell their development rights to the government at $10,000 or so or market them through banks to developers in the "receiving lands," where more density is allowed. The owners of the low-density land get paid for surrendering their development rights to the higher-density land.

Bob Adair, the second vice president of the Audubon group, has discussed the idea as a way of keeping agricultural areas in agricultural densities, while the Urban Service Area fills up with homes.

And the Indian River County Land Acquisition Advisory Committee is looking at spending part of a $50 million land bond the buy development rights to agricultural property and preserve it.

Buying development rights would let the landowners continue to farm, Nicholas said, but pay them not to sell to residential homebuilders.

"This is a way of sharing the wealth" that is generated as more homes go up in the receiving lands, Nicholas added.

But only about 15 or 20 transfer programs have worked across the nation, he said, out of 300 programs attempted.

That's because, he said, many times, the public doesn't care and political leaders lack the will to make a development-transfer system strong enough to resist other means of growth.

"If a developer can get a rezoning (to higher density), why buy development rights?" Nicholas asked his audience.

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