From The Annals of Florida's Unsustainable Growth: Page 42,121 ... by gimleteye

"Just five years ago, Port St. Lucie was America's fastest-growing large city. Then the foreclosure crisis slammed it like a hurricane. Today it sits in one of the hardest-hit counties in the nation. Thousands of houses are empty or unfinished. Neighborhoods are littered with for-sale and foreclosure signs and overgrown, neglected yards. Break-ins are on the rise. But one politician believes he has a unique solution: declare St. Lucie County a disaster area."This is a man-made disaster," County Commissioner Doug Coward acknowledged." (St. Pete Times, March 3, 2009)

Commissioner Coward is arguing that Port St. Lucie should be officially declared a "disaster area", to qualify the city for state and federal help. Thanks, but man-made disaster doesn't describe the half of it. Port St. Lucie has company throughout the state of Florida; West Kendall, Homestead, and Florida City's bereft platted subdivisions among local examples. This mostly happened because local politicians opened the larder for greedy developers over the interest of citizens and under the lazy eye of the mainstream media.

For their part, the politicians claim they were doing what the builders wanted. And the builders and their supply chain advertised in the newspapers; and the newspaper publishers waved their wand encrusted with stock options and said, let it be so.

They claimed they were building what the market wanted, but in fact they were only building what Wall Street needed: fresh acreage to feed into the Wall Street derivatives machine. You have to reach into the archives to understand why Port St. Lucie is a special case.

In 2003 the Palm Beach Post reported, "State regulators and environmental watchdogs are concerned about solid waste flowing from a (Port St. Lucie) city sewer plant into two deep-injection wells, especially after a plant operator said he was told not to worry about the discharges unless it was time for state overseers to conduct their weekly tests. The Northport Wastewater Treatment Plant on St. James Drive has been strained to capacity for months because of the city's intense building boom, reaching daily flows up to 2.4 million gallons in August despite a permitted capacity of 1.8 million gallons." (Complaints spark Port St. Lucie sewer plant probe, Palm Beach Post, Sunday, September 7, 2003)

The example bears further scrutiny. You don't get to unsustainable growth and a tulip bubble craze in housing without a lot of help from politicians who are supposed to protect the health, welfare and safety of citizens. One of the easiest ways to promote growth is to use cheap infrastructure to industrialize the disposal of solid waste and drinking water. Both require the use of wells; the one to inject effluent (ie. crap) and the other to extract water. In Miami-Dade County, trillions of gallons of scarcely treated municipal wastewater have been injected underneath Biscayne National Park into wells at the site of Mt. Trashmore, known as the South Dade Treatment Facility. Those wells are leaking under provisions of federal law (Safe Drinking Water Act) that was recently amended under pressure by Florida to legalize the pollution of underground aquifers. (In Miami-Dade, the cost for safely disposing of wastewater had been routinely ignored by the local environment and government operations committee of the county commission, led by Natacha Seijas.)

There are a hundred plot lines reaching out from the fact of unsustainable development; they have so permeated our lives we scarcely blink. At the state level, the shifting of cost that allowed suburban sprawl to proliferate was promoted by Florida's former Senate President, Ken Pruitt, who has received awards from Audubon of Florida for his support of investments to "protect" the St. Lucie River.

Pruitt, a Republican and former well driller, represents Port St. Lucie.

In 2005, Port St. Lucie West drinking water wells went bone dry. Do you think that the production homebuilders who were plowing thousands of units west of the Florida Turnpike cared an iota? Or, that they cared the reporting to the public by the State of Florida of aquifer exploitation was a deep, black hole of misinformation? Did Ken Pruitt of Port St. Lucie care?

According to the news report, some "politicians fear a disaster declaration could scare off investors and drive down the county's credit rating, which would make it more expensive to borrow money. But the idea has appeal among many home owners, particularly those in the construction trades, which have unemployment rates up to 40 percent."

Today's local leader, Commissioner Coward, says, "Clearly, the economic crisis of the country far exceeds the ability of local governments to solve it, but we're trying be a part of the solution."

Part of the solution? The only part of the solution is to wipe off the map the formulas of greed and fraud that supported the late, great housing boom. In that respect, there is no solution in sight.