Redland, the Wades, and the armies of compassion: Part 2 ... by gimleteye

To read the first part, click here. To read part 2, click 'read more'. Part 3, tomorrow.

Pat and John Wade began, two decades ago, as volunteers determined to defend their community from suburban sprawl like so many others around the nation: collecting signatures, signing speaker cards and rising to testify at public forums, and writing letters to the editor.

These volunteers never traveled by corporate jet or wrote off every expense for gas, copies, papers and pens. They are far below the mainstream media radar because, in challenging the economic order, they threaten advertisers and challenge in its key respects the money that fuels political fortunes from county commissioners to Congressmen, Senators and American presidents.

They were determined to keep Redland from becoming another seamless suburb of Miami. Like so many civic activists, they proceeded from the belief that public input—in the form of hearings and meetings--was as integral to the decision-making process as influential lobbyists and campaign contributors. This is the point of departure from most citizens who look at the high moats built around legislatures and throw up their hands in the futility of trying to ‘fight the system’.

It would have been so much easier if they had just been the occasional speaker at a public hearing, or holder of signs at a street corner rally: what sets their contribution apart goes beyond the commitment of neighbors who were also vocal, engaged, and thoughtful; but their entry finally into the political process involving a recall attempt of an incumbent county commissioner, Natacha Seijas whose career is imbedded in the machinery of suburban sprawl.

Kendall is Miami’s largest unincorporated suburb. It has no City Hall of its own, and its services are provided by county government that presides over more than 2 million residents in similarly unincorporated areas.

Kendall and its sprawl a dozen miles away are the abject example that the Wades fought to prevent spreading; a warren of strip malls, retail and commerce organized around successive rings of platted subdivisions, separated by high walls, cul de sacs, and transportation designed only to move the first increment of population growth by car.

Redland and Kendall’s western border is also within a few miles of Everglades National Park, the focal point of what is said to be the most costly and intensive effort to restore a damaged ecosystem in the world, entailing the expenditure of billions of state and federal tax dollars to re-plumb a system that served the needs of flood control for cities and agriculture perfectly well, but caused severe damage to the environment.

(My first experience of Kendall, two decades ago, was trying to find a Kendall soccer field for my then 12 year old son where a game was scheduled; I had an address and we were within a mile of the field, but none of the residents in the series of subdivisions we drove into, knew where it was or how to get there.)

Over time, the Wade’s learned that all the efforts of persuasion were useless in processes governing land use that were tilted toward land speculators; their evolution as activists crystallized around specific provisions of land use and environmental laws to protect Redland from the same over-development that ruined Kendall to the north.

I met the Wades in the backwash from Hurricane Andrew in 1992, after Redland and nearby municipalities, Homestead and Florida City, had started to revive. The Wades and their neighbors objected to high density developments planned outside the Urban Development Boundary; the conversion of a nursery to sprawl and the establishment of a grocery chain outpost on an avocado grove.

In 1993 the Wades and other community activists throughout the county supported a proposal by then county commissioner Miguel Diaz de la Portilla to establish community councils, comprising locally elected officers into a board, as a first line of approval to change the underlying zoning of property for building and development. The principle of community councils, a sublayer of county government with individual representatives running within districts but for seats in specific neighborhoods, was an example of “devolution” of government authority. And the developers hated it.

For developers, there were two advantages to the centralized, downtown location and concentration of zoning decisions with the county commission. First, they knew that their opponents could scarcely afford to take the time off from work to venture from distant neighborhoods to downtown. In other words, the then-existing system with endless hours—billable to attorneys—of debate, shifting agenda items, and unpredictability served special interests perfectly well.

By having all zoning decisions centralized in downtown Miami, an extremely lucrative culture had developed alongside poorly paid county commissioners: the same lobbyists and engineers and law firms profited handsomely by having a single locale as a funnel, the way that herons profit by feeding in a small, shallow pond.

The Diaz de la Portilla propopsal would have created more than a dozen separately constituted community councils. At County Hall, the builders had downtown zoning decisions “wired” through a network of lobbyists; Chris Korge, a big contributor to Democratic campaigns, Rodney Barreto and Sergio Pino, Bush loyalists, and an entire pecking order dedicated to lubricating zoning changes.

Community councils threatened to subject zoning decisions to the unknown: newly elected zoning council members from within community council districts; especially lightly populated rural areas like Redland where motivated activists might actually be elected by majority vote.

Miami’s developers had Homestead and Florida City in their cross-hairs for decades. For local businessmen who harbored jealousy to the way growth had spread northward from Miami toward Fort Lauderdale, they were frustrated and determined to lay the tracks to Homestead. The Homestead Air Force Base, destroyed in the 1992 hurricane, was intended to be the driver of billions of dollars of economic growth. Board members of the Latin Builders Association had constituted a private company, HABDI, to secure a 99 year, no-bid lease for the wrecked air base—even before the military had decided whether or not to allow its use as a commercial airport as the prospective developers planned; using county agencies to set up FAA approvals and transportation routes while other political processes ground on.

The tidal wave of “help” for hurricane relief included banks anxious to lend to underwrite and generate fees from large-scale projects, and Wall Street financiers anxious to take advantage of advances in securitizing debt that included “diversifying risk” through mortgage pools comprised of platted subdivisions and shared, common, and easily quantifiable and ratable demographics.

Some local Homestead activists and Redland neighbors who opposed the air base redevelopment as a private airport, like Chris Spaulding, endured harassment and, finally, were driven out of their jobs. Others were threatened by employers and left the area.

In response, the Wades helped to organize a county-funded study to evaluate, analyze and to protect agriculture. The Miami Dade County Agriculture & Rural Area Study was initiated in 1996. It took a full four years to award a contract to a consultant led by Duany Plater-Zyberk, lead by Elizabeth Plater Zyber, the dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture. A 16-member committee was constituted as “a two-way conduit of information between the consultants and community interests”. The study was immediately opposed by the Dade County Farm Bureau . Despite the best attempts at inclusivity and to give appropriate deference to agricultural interests including the Farm Bureau, protecting agriculture was entirely antithetical to the goals of land speculators and developers who controlled the county commission, and by extension the fate of the agricultural review. In November 2003, the study was rejected by the committee on a 7-5 vote; seven years after the process began and in the midst of the housing boom now in crashed in cinders.

The report was not delivered to the county commission until March, 2006, fully ten years after the process began. County Manager George Burgess wrote to the commissioners, “We will continue to investigate strategies to address the economic viability of agriculture and to achieve the Preliminary Performance/Key Perfomance Indicator in Miami-Dade County’s Strategic Plan of “No net loss of agricultural or environmentally sensitive lands.”

Large landowners and land speculators, in South Dade, had long experience with blocking government initiatives to protect public lands; they viewed the Agriculture Retention Study as another plot to take their property; between hurricanes and free trade agreements like NAFTA, they were determined to preserve their opportunity to cash out of land at the moment that best suited their interest: in the early 1990’s, the prospect of $10 billion of tax base created by a new commercial airport made them salivate.

The proposal to create community councils was intended to replace the full county commission sitting as the zoning appeals board. Commission meetings in downtown Miami, when convened as the zoning board, tended to be interminable, often lasting into the early hours of the morning.

Putting initial decisions for zoning closer to neighborhoods where people lived seemed, at the time, to be a pro-civic, pro-citizen initiative that would empower people, supported by the Wades and other civic activists.

The political arm of the builders, the Latin Builders Association, worried about the demographics: Redland was not Hispanic as other parts of Miami-Dade and could be susceptible to a different kind of politics than those they had been able to control in the newer suburbs, where their surrogates controlled board positions in local homeowner associations. Controlling zoning decisions was easier as the number of subdivisions grew, bringing waves of immigrants to the area, but not necessarily in farmland and the rural areas where votes were harder to count and where the historic, cultural value of agriculture still mattered.

To the builders’ lobby, community councils seemed at the time a costly and harmful evolution of democracy away from patterns that had served them profitably and well.

County commissioner Javier Souto was the tie-breaking vote that approved the community councils against the wishes of his builder/developer constituents in 1993. In a trademark tirade, that meandered from invectives against Castro against, he began mumbling aloud about a long morning walk he had taken on the beach and then described nearly every grain of sand on the way: the Latin Builders’ lobbyists rose and stormed out of the chamber, steaming with anger. They knew that their friend was going to vote against them and for the community councils.

It took a few years for county agencies to organize the community councils. By 1996, the Homestead Air Force Base battle was well underway. When the Redland community council was constituted and its members voted in, for the first time, among its first representatives was a banker owner in South Dade, Bill Losner. For decades, as owner of the local community bank, Losner had been a powerful and threatening figure. He was pro-development to the core; the growth of his bank depended on lending—to homeowners and to builders, from retailers to commercial.

There was not a single aspect of growth that Losner didn’t champion or a complaint against the environment and its advocates that he didn’t embrace. He represented—over a very long period of time—the animus against nearby national parks that, in that estimation, contributed nothing but a drain on growth and impediment to flood control, to make development closer to the Everglades even more safe and secure.

Pat Wade was the most visible and constant opponent of the economic order that Losner represented. In small towns, where power can be wielded outside the view of the media in particularly vindictive and mean-spirit ways, “becoming involved” in one’s community requires a high pain threshold. This snap shot necessarily passes over the zoning meetings in the middle of night in rural Florida, the enmity and long drives home over deserted roads used mostly, still, for farm equipment and transporting produce.

In 2000, Wade ran against Losner and won. She served on the community council for eight years. By 2000, the agricultural and rural lands study had cost millions, enslisted teams of experts, agronomists and other experts: all its recommendations were strongly pro-agriculture, and yet then county manager Steve Shiver requested the formation of another committee to “review” the study recommendations by experts. He selected a group heavily weighted to farmers and land speculators. “There is no way in hell the Dade County Farm Bureau would let that go, so they killed it,” Pat Wade says today. Along with those volunteers who had contributed countless hours to public meetings, the Wades watched developers and large farmers remand the study to a bookshelf in the county planning department.

Environmentalists had successfully prevailed on the military to deny the use of the air base as a commercial airport, partly on the argument against suburban sprawl and its impacts as a secondary consequence of the ill-advised disposal of the former military base.

It was a time that roughly coincided with cuts in the Federal Reserve benchmark interest rate by Alan Greenspan igniting a period of the fastest period of building and construction—far in excess of what the market could absorb—in Florida history. In response to the potential threats to the region from development and to nearby national parks, Miami Dade County agreed in 1996 to form another study group, ostensibly to protect Biscayne Bay Land Trust.

A further outgrowth of the Biscayne Bay Land Trust Committee was a plan to evaluate how to grow and also protect critical watersheds in the area; the Miami Dade County Watershed Study. But like the earlier Agriculture Retention Study, the Wades and other community and environmental advocates found themselves in the same situation: vastly outnumbered by the appointment of committee members, by then county manager and former mayor of Homestead Steve Shiver, in favor of economic interests like Losner and the political hierarchy that had developed in response to the profits from suburban sprawl.

The period of the South Dade Watershed Plan spanned from 2000 to 2007, when its final recommendations were similarly axed by interests allied with land speculators, including the Dade County Farm Bureau, and shelved by county commissioners. The Wades attended countless meetings of the advisory committee to the plan, rising in a familiar plaintive opposition to the development representatives who were blocking and tackling for the massive expansion of platted subdivisions in farmland all the while. The worst foreclosure and housing collapse today is exactly in these areas of the county.

Pat Wade says, “Scientists again came out in favor of agriculture, not moving UDB, density along transportation corridors; and again the Dade County Farm Bureau killed it…they will wait until there is a study that agriculture is dead, then they will approve (it). As long as you have a committee of the farm bureau; this has going on since 1982 it will be the same damn thing; as long as Bill Losner and his big farmer/developer buddies control the committees. Half a dozen studies all said farming is viable and important to the county and they all got killed because they recommended preserving agriculture.” By independent acclaim, the South Miami-Dade Watershed Study was the most comprehensive, thorough, and science-based study of a regional watershed and its economic impacts and prospective uses and planning that had ever been conducted, anywhere in the United States.

In addition to the community council, the Wades became interested in the other ways of influencing growth in South Dade; transportation policies around concurrency, required by the State of Florida through the Growth Management Act—related primarily to the expansion of Krome Avenue in far West Dade—the Urban Development Boundary, whose edge ran inside Redland, stopping the designation of rural roads to urban roads, and lastly, incorporation.

So the Wades took their commitment one step further: frustrated and angry by the failure of the political system to take into account the public interest, they decided to follow the maxim: if you don’t do politics, they do you.

It is largely the ineffectiveness of a county commission, with 13 single member districts, paid $6,000 a year to supervise a $7 billion budget that has led to the ceaseless demand of neighborhoods to separately incorporate; leading to a kind of Balkanization and severing of shared, regional interests.

In 1998 the Wades began hosting informal, open meetings at their house on incorporating Redland. Pat Wade says, “Sometimes there were 20 people, other times only 4 or 5. We conducted a massive survey to ask people their vision of Redland. We produced our own feasibility study, the Risa Report, which was submitted to the county in 2000.”

Two county commissioners shared interest in the boundaries of Redland: Katy Sorenson and Dennis Moss. In mid-2000, Commissioner Sorenson sponsored a municipal advisory committee; a step along the way to independence from county government. Pat Wade was the chairwoman of the incorporation committee for the first year. The Wades ushered the study, gaining approval from every department.

The developers had their own plan of attack. Their staunchest ally was then-mayor of Miami Dade County Alex Penelas; who had just incurred the wrath of his own party by refusing to support the recount of the contested 2000 presidential to proceed in Miami-Dade. At the time, Penelas was angry that neither Clinton nor candidate Gore had explicitly endorsed the plan by powerful and politically connected developers to redevelop the Homestead Air Force Base, adjacent to Redland, into a major commercial airport.

Penelas appointed the mayor of Homestead—the local driving force for the developers—Steve Shiver, to be county manager. As county manager, Shiver made certain that the incorporation process started by the Wades would wither on the vine. According to Pat Wade, “Shiver slashed the boundaries, planning and zoning suddenly added poison pills for incorporation outside the UDB.” African Americans in the district, mainly represented on the county commission by Dennis Moss, from historic neighborhoods of Goulds and Naranja suddenly emerged to contest the incorporation drive, claimed their communities extended to Redland and the western boundary transit route; Krome Avenue.

In Miami, ethnic rivalries often act as surrogates for development and for lobbyists of the development industry who trade influence on campaigns for political support of urban commissioners for zoning votes far from their own neighborhoods. From the public hearings and surveys about incorporation, the land speculators, developers and big farmers who Shiver and Penelas represented know that Redland incorporation would pass, if it came to a vote. But it never did, snuffed out the same was as all the studies had been that community activists supported, that concluded agriculture should be protected.

Citizen activists representing Doral, Palmetto Bay, Miami Gardens and Cutler Bay were all able to persuade the county commission to authorize incorporation. But Redland was delayed for consideration by the county commission repeatedly and finally “put on permanent deferral in 2003.”

Of course by 2003, the housing boom was in full swing; platted subdivisions were spring up in south Dade farmland like weeds. The Wades then decided to take another route: a petition drive that would allow the incorporation of Redland to be put to a district vote. “We collected the signatures in record time and went before the county commission. Commissioner Moss deferred the hearing, called us ‘disrespectful’ and ended the meeting. We never had a hearing. We took the issue to court, lost, appealed and lost again. The state court said that incorporation was the sole discretion of the Board of County Commissioners. By 2004, we were dead. Commissioner Moss changed the incorporation ordinance and eliminated the provision that allowed citizens to petition for incorporation.”