On Florida Hometown Democracy, For Four! by gimleteye

According to The Miami Herald, developer Jorge Perez has whittled down his debt to $1.2 billion from $1.5 billion but has stashed away enough net worth to consider investing in the Miami Dolphins football team. What is good for Jorge was once considered to be good for Miami. This question of judgment has a lot to do with Florida Hometown Democracy-- the constitutional amendment by ballot referendum that is headed to a state wide vote in 2010. FHD would require that changes to local growth plans be approved first by popular vote.

If Florida Hometown Democracy had been in place during the late, great building boom-- the Miami skyline might not look different today but it would not have been transformed into largely vacant, see-thru towers without a convincing pitch by developers like Mr. Perez to voters and not just malleable elected officials.

From Miami Mayor Manny Diaz to the panoply of city commissioners: building speculative condominium towers was considered the highest achievement of local government. They chased tax base like kids running after fireflies. Zoning changes to the local comprehensive development plan for Miami accommodated thousands of residential units that the market could not bear. Mr. Perez may have stashed away enough millions to be able to invest in professional sports, but the Miami landscape permanently reflects the hubris that swamped City Hall and the public interest. Someone is paying for the billions in debt and the liabilities to the city budget straining against reality. Miami taxpayers are on the hook for costs related to inadvisable zoning decisions that might have been avoided. Thanks to lobbyists like Mr. Perez--more photogenic than most--we are living with the results: Florida Hometown Democracy could hardly have resulted in a worse economic mess than the builders and development lobby inflicted on the state.

Last Sunday, the St. Pete Times editorial board wrote, "Floridians' concerns about unchecked growth have been largely ignored, and Hometown Democracy has tapped a legitimate anger." It is an anger born of the late, great building boom that blessed places like downtown Miami in serial hyperbole of marketers and converted wetlands and farmland into examples of abject sprawl. Although the Times editorial opposes FHD today, the causes and effects have been brilliantly detailed by the paper's reporters Matthew Waite and Craig Pittman in the 2009 book, "Paving Paradise".

Florida Hometown Democracy would take away the power from local elected officials, acting as zoning councils, to rubber stamp changes to growth plans. If Florida Hometown Democracy had been in place, there would have been a public discussion first about the piling of condo towers out of scale and proportion with demand and vision of the city's future.

The St. Pete Times continues with a point made by some observers on this blog: "... turning complex community development decisions into an up-or-down vote without any quality negotiations won't solve that problem. It will take electing candidates who embrace growth management and responsible development."

There are two parts to this assumption. First, local and state elections are controlled by a narrow group of campaign contributors related to real estate and construction. To serve their interests, the purposes of government have been deformed in order to speed sprawling development and condo canyons. The deformation manifests as deliberate and willful miscalculation of risk to taxpayers by local government, acting as zoning councils. The St. Pete Times acknowledges this point: "Developers hold too much political influence at all levels of government, which was reinforced by Gov. Charlie Crist's indefensible decision to sign SB 360 and gut Florida's growth management laws."

Although Florida Hometown Democracy is not a magic bullet, with Florida Hometown Democracy in place these special interests will have to come up with a better way to convince the public that their growth plans have merit. Besides, voters could hardly have made a greater shambles of Florida's economy than the Growth Machine that chewed up our quality of life, environment, and fiscal budgets-- all in service of unsustainable development..

What Florida Hometown Democracy will do--for the first time--is change the equation of how local growth plans are assembled. Some argue that it will cause local government to abandon "comprehensive planning" altogether. I believe in time that FHD will result in those "quality negotiations" mentioned by the St. Pete Times. With Florida Hometown Democracy in place, developers and their trade associations will have to do the hard work they have refused to do in cities like Miami and in unincorporated areas of Dade County: they will have to come together and support workable, constructive long-term planning instead of taking their individual and selfish bites at the zoning apple one at a time.

Inclusive planning efforts-- like the South Dade Watershed Study-- costing millions of dollars will not be torpedoed by the Latin Builders or South Florida Builders Associations: they will become blueprints for sustainable growth that they were meant to be.

This is exactly what frightens the builders and developers: that Florida Hometown Democracy will require political insiders--accustomed to getting their way through simple fact of campaign contributions and insider lobbying-- to take growth management seriously instead of using it, one legislative after another, to pummel the public interest.

For Amendment Four!