Can we please bulldoze the builders off the political map? ... by gimleteye

Developers are using the financial crisis as an excuse to deregulate!

The Idiocrats are hoping to do what they could not finish during the disgraceful terms of former Gov. Jeb Bush: dismantle growth management regulations in the state of Florida. You don’t have to be a cross-eyed economist to know that the collapse of real estate markets is due to a vast over-supply of existing residential and commercial space meeting up with a tidal wave of foreclosures.

That's not the reality the builders want to hear. Why? It puts off the recovery to the balance of the free market. To find a new equilibrium according to the laws of supply and demand could take years, even a decade, to work out. So while a trillion dollars is going to seek to redress the sins of hundreds of trillions that exploded from artificial manipulation of the "free market", the builders in Florida have another plan.

Jeb's former appointee and mouthpiece, Rep. Trudi Williams, R-Fort Myers, tells the St. Pete Times: "We've got to get permits going and flowing... We need to make some incentives for people to revitalize our economy."

So how would the builders get the nail guns going, the particle board flying off pallets, the plumbing supplies dropping off storage racks? By beheading their totemic enemy: regulation. Regulation that impedes the "free market". That would be the same free market that they cannot abide when it comes to balancing vast over-supply they caused with demand that they helped to artificially inflate.

For decades, critics of growth-at-any cost policies were thrashed by Florida’s public officials; from local city commissions to county commissions and the state legislature. Branded elitist. “I’ve got mine’ers”. Tree-huggers. Champions of big government. (Gee, that worked out well, didn't it?) At public hearings, growling antagonists culled from NASCAR dads, Century 21 brokers and moms who just wanted a nearby mall were summoned to do their dirty work. And if that didn’t do the job, SLAPP suits and new prohibitive legislation kicked in the balance.

Now there’s a new card in the deck: if you can’t shrink government, destroy it from within and use public dollars to fill in the next bubble accruing to wealthy builders who fund political campaigns. And kill growth management.

“The economic analysis we have received suggests impact fees, concurrency rules and DRI (Development of Regional Impact) requirements ‘impede economic development’, said Don Gaetz, a Niceville Republican and longtime Miami businessman. Added Select Committee Co-Chair Jeremy Ring, a Margate Democrat: “We’re not turning back the clock. We’re creating a more streamlined process.” (Miami Today, February 12, 2009)

Critics of Florida’s reckless growth know that former Gov. Bush and his compliant legislature didn’t need to eliminate regulation, or the Florida Department of Community Affairs (the state agency that supposedly regulates growth) to neuter its work. In fact, the simple revolving door of lobbyists, industry, and public office did it quite well, thank you very much.

If you were a state regulator or government scientist, at any time in the past decade, you didn’t need The Miami Herald to reveal that more than 10,000 convicted felons were welcomed into the mortgage business by the state’s Office of Financial Regulation. That “many of those felons went on to perpetrate dishonest deeds and victimize gullible citizens” was simply another day at the office; unleashing the free market on a state that needed thousands of new residents a day to grow.

“Today there's a new wave of growth in the Sunshine State: Ghost suburbs. They're springing up from one coast to the other -- block after block of vacant, foreclosed homes, or houses that were built but never sold," reports Carl Hiassen. (“Reaping the fruit planted by Greed, Miami Herald Feburary 14, 2009) Most of those ghost suburbs are in the last ring of development that encouraged land speculators to wildly invest in the leap-frog to the next tranche of open space and farmland.

In defiance of reality, St. Lucie County just gave Lennar—the Miami-based production homebuilder— a development agreement to put 325 homes on about 156 acres, drawing heavy criticism of course. Its concession was for a three year permit, instead of five. Only a hundred miles away, in Miami-Dade, Lennar is pressing for permitting of four thousands homes called Parkland that won’t break ground until 2014. Lennar’s regional vice president, Anthony Seijas, was recently named president of the Latin Builders Association in Miami, the most corrosive influence in Florida politics. “We are fortunate to have Anthony assume this leadership responsibility at this time of flux and transition,” the LBA press release says. “His executive experience and relationships will serve the LBA and community well”.

The president of the South Florida Builders Association, Ashley Bosch, tells Miami Today, “a number of local development projects had been viable in the recent past but are no longer after awaiting a length local and state Development of Regional Impact review.”

This is simply the working-out of the Republican change philosophy advocated by free-marketeers who turned the economy into an IED in the first place.

For the Cato Institute, anti-regulation drummer Randal O’Toole expressed it clearly enough a year ago: “I am sick of everyone blaming the breakdown in the credit and housing markets on subprime loans,” says D.C.-area homebuilder Michael Hill in the Washington Post. Subprime mortgages were only a symptom of the real problem, which is unaffordable housing. But what made American housing unaffordable? Hill is silent on that question, but University of Washington economist Theo Eicher knows the answer: land-use regulation.”

In promoting this nonsense, O’Toole represents the Idiocrats whose zeal masks fraud as virtue, selective adoration of the free market, self interest as the highest good, and the demonization of regulation. (For the most acerbic news report, yet, illustrating how Florida's legislators are pushing us toward a Depression, read in its entirety the St. Pete Times article below.)

According to President Obama yesterday, “we are all going to pay for the mortgage crisis” even though only a few are responsible. Now, we are all in the same leaky boat. It’s the patriotic thing to do, to man the oars next to the dunces who threw away the life-preservers because they weighed too much.

The Wall Street bankers facing scrutiny gave up their private jets for a day and still do not cop to blame because in Congress they are still not facing their critics. If this economic calamity had happened in the 18th century all their heads would have been on pikes.

Is more growth the solution?

By Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite, Times Staff Writers 

Published Monday, February 16, 2009

Florida legislative leaders want to make it easier to get permits to destroy wetlands, tap the water supply and wipe out endangered species habitat, all in the interest of building houses, stores and offices.

They say streamlining the permitting process will get the economy moving again.
"We've got to get permits going and flowing," said Rep. Trudi Williams, R-Fort Myers. "We need to make some incentives for people to revitalize our economy."
But opponents, ranging from Audubon of Florida to the Florida League of Cities, say making permits easier to get ultimately would hurt the economy and the environment.
State officials estimate more than 300,000 Florida houses are vacant. Why add more, asked Audubon's Eric Draper.

"We do not believe the current environmental regulatory structure is the root cause of our economic problems," agreed Kurt Spitzer, who lobbies for the Florida Stormwater Association. "The problem with the Florida economy is declining home prices and tightening credit."

The groups pushing for looser permitting include such politically powerful entities as Associated Industries, the Florida Home Builders Association and the Association of Florida Community Developers.

"We need to be creating conducive conditions for more growth," said Frank Matthews, who lobbies for the builders and developers. "You know what the Florida economy is based on. It's an article of faith that those houses will one day be occupied. (The recession) is not going to last forever."

Associated Industries president Barney Bishop has been passing out a booklet headlined "Economic Stimulus Package 2.0." It prioritizes something called "Regulatory Relief," which says, "Policymakers must look at reductions in regulatory red tape as a way to stimulate business activity.''

Bishop pointed to impact fees that local governments charge developers to help pay for roads, schools, sewer lines and other public facilities for new residents. He suggested a temporary suspension of those fees, as well as easing the challenge to such fees in the future.

Senate Bill 630, sponsored by Sen. Mike Bennett, R-Bradenton, would block local governments from collecting impact fees on new development through 2012. Another Bennett bill, Senate Bill 360, calls for eliminating most state growth-management review of big, new developments proposed for Hillsborough County and a host of other cities and counties around Florida.

The home builders, meanwhile, want to reduce the number of agencies that have a say on development permits. Matthews called it "less overlap, less duplication."
Take endangered species habitat, he said. Right now a federal agency, the U.S. Fish and Widlife Service, as well as the state's Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and various local governments all get to comment on permits regarding destruction of that habitat.

"We like the idea of having a single regulatory body in charge of a single subject matter," he said.

The same goes for Florida's wetlands. Wiping out wetlands requires a permit from the state that says the project won't harm water quality, and another from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that says it's in the public interest under the Clean Water Act.
However, those agencies rarely reject a permit, which is why Florida lost an estimated 84,000 acres of wetlands to houses, stores, roads and parking lots between 1990 and 2003, according to a St. Petersburg Times analysis of satellite imagery.

The state's wetlands permitting criteria have failed to halt pollution from fertilizer-laden stormwater runoff, which has spurred toxic algae blooms in the St. Johns River and other waterways. Last month U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials announced they would impose new, tougher runoff restrictions because the state's criteria weren't working.

Some counties such as Hillsborough have their own wetland rules that are more stringent than the state or federal regulations. The builders have tried before to pre-empt those local rules.

"We're hoping we can move the ball forward a little more," Matthews said.
Williams said she was charged with pushing regulatory reform by former House Speaker Ray Sansom.

Sansom's ties to a Panhandle developer and a community college led to a grand jury investigation and his ouster from that post this month. But Williams said she and other leaders are still pursuing a rollback in regulations.
Williams, an engineer who has worked for some of Florida's biggest developers, chairs the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Committee, which has a scheduled workshop today. The agenda lists one item for the two-hour meeting: "Workshop on streamlined permitting issues."

Williams said she wants to hear other people's ideas for speeding up permits, but she has a few of her own. For one thing, she said, she'd like to see the state water managers make it easier to get permits to take large quantities of water for new development.

Williams said she would also like to see the state wetlands permitting process cut in half. State law now requires approval or rejection of a permit within 90 days or the permit is automatically approved. She suggested cutting that to 45 days. A Times analysis of state permits found that in 2003 the average processing time was 44 days.
Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.