Logan Blvd. extension shut down

Ronto Development's Logan Boulevard road extension work was shut down at 9 a.m. Monday by Collier County government officials.

That's when county workers posted a stop-work order at the north and south ends of the construction site.

Signed by county inspector Daryl Hughes, the notice states that Ronto cleared and filled the entire Logan extension without permits or approval.

Logan Boulevard dead-ends on the northern side of Vanderbilt Beach Road. Ronto plans to extend Logan up to Bonita Beach Road.

County and South Florida Water Management District officials were alarmed last week to discover that Ronto workers had carved out a road through the 622-acre Parklands site without appropriate permits.

Alerted by environmentalists to the clearing and construction, water management district officials issued a notice of violation on June 7.

Situated at the Collier-Lee county border with development in each county, Parklands will be a combination residential-commercial project.

Photo by Chad Yoder, Daily News

Collier's environmental services chief, Joe Schmitt, said Friday the county had red-tagged the project and started an investigation on Thursday, but weren't able to get the stop-work order to the site until Monday morning.

On April 14, environmentalists photographed a completed S-shaped road, carved through the wetlands.

Water management district officials took their own aerial photographs of the Logan extension on May 26.

According to Schmitt, Ronto's land development director Brian Farrar believed his company had obtained all the necessary permits.

Farrar couldn't be reached for comment despite repeated attempts.

On May 23, Collier commissioners gave Ronto permission to establish Parklands as a community development district. However, that is a governance designation and has nothing to do with zoning, Schmitt said last week.

A May 30 lawsuit filed against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers by numerous environmental groups also targets the Parklands project, among others.

Environmentalists maintain that federal agencies failed to uphold environmental laws prohibiting destruction of wetlands adjacent to Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary.

Ronto would be able to dump excessive quantities of stormwater into the wetlands, environmentalists protested.