BRIC / Boca Raton Innovation Campus. (Photo: Boca Daily News)
One of the first tie votes in years on the part of the Boca Raton city council this week has left the city’s legal counsel as well as the owners of the Boca Raton Innovation Center campus with something of a conundrum to deal with.
The governing body was tasked with determining whether the majority of the acreage in BRIC, the former IBM development campus off Yamato Road, should be removed from the list of properties contained within a “DRI,” an acronym enshrined into Florida law in the 1970s that stands for “Development of Regional Impact.” The DRI designation was originally intended to give additional stakeholders a say in developments that would inherently affect a region as a whole, versus an individual city. The DRI designation gave counties, state agencies and other regional bodies oversight into major projects. While the DRI law is still on the books in Florida, legal counsel for the city as well as BRIC said it is a largely moot point in Boca Raton, which has since been exempted from DRI regulations since it was designated a “Dense Urban Land Area” by the legislature…