Better Growth for Miami: Nothing in the pipeline ... by gimleteye

It was a strange public meeting in downtown Miami yesterday on the Urban Development Boundary and an evaluation by technical assistants under the banner of the EPA Office of Smart Growth, or, something to that effect. The live blogging didn't capture the nuances, or those I thought important enough to take several hours from my day-- as a matter of civic engagement and not professional one like the crew arrayed on the left side of the room: "environmental" land use attorneys and members of the building and engineering cartel.

I tried to address those nuances in my comments. I began by telling the panelists that the U.S. EPA had a terrible record in Florida. It has been AWOL in Florida: a pitiful job in permitting wetlands destruction (see: "Paving Paradise: Florida's vanishing wetlands" by St. Pete Times writers Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite) and failing to regulate toxics and pollution. (please click 'read more')

I understood the group assembled under the technical wing of EPA is separate from the regulatory and permitting functions of the nation's federal environmental agency. But the point expressed as a matter of anger illuminates my thinking overnight about this strange matter of county commissioners who depend on campaign contributions from local land speculators and developers inviting a federal agency to review the Urban Development Boundary policy.

The conflict at the Urban Development Boundary-- precisely because it is a line-- engages a decades-old battle: property rights (the pithy point made by "environmental" land use attorney Stanley Price at the outset) against the stated mission of agencies like the EPA. In this battle, "environmental protection" gets lost in the well-made fog of statistics, a ceaseless tide of corrosive legislation, mission creep, and CYA (covering your asses) by agency staff.

The bottom line of this exercise appears to be an effort to "rationalize" the movement of the Urban Development Boundary, away from the developer driven application process. It is not a new idea, but a chewed-over bone that fits a time when there is nothing in the pipeline except major, humongous development plans outside the Urban Development Boundary that are either being fueled by pre-bust cash hoards or large corporations like Lennar that bury millions of dollars in planning fees in billion dollar budgets or craters as the case may be.

Back when I was on talking terms with Joe Martinez, a charter member of the unreformable majority of the county commission-- the year was 2002 or 2003-- he asked the question: can't we just "straighten out" the line here and there, can't we just sit down with the development lobby and come up with a plan, can't we all just be friends? I told him, then, the problem is that civic groups can't negotiate with Growth Machine (I didn't use that term, I said builders and developers) because the goal posts on the field always move, they always shift. I knew, of course, that what Martinez had in mind was a "plan" that accommodated his big campaign contributors from the development industry. HE would be the one to make it less costly, intrusive, and aggravating to move the UDB. It didn't happen.

This brings me to the second, third and fourth and fifth points I made to the EPA panel yesterday: that moving the UDB has been an extraordinarily politicized process, virtually transforming the purpose of local government from providing for the health, welfare and safety of citizens to meshing with builders and developers who want to plow cheap sprawl into farmland. I've written about this phenomenon at length: you can check our archive under "UDB" or the Hold The Line website for more. I noted, at the very same time that the Growth Machine was pushing for state review of large scale developments and changes to land use plans, it was actively lobbying the Florida legislature to eliminate the Florida Department of Community Affairs; the agency charged with reviewing those plans.

No one knew how this tactical warfare against growth management is played out better than the assembled audience from the development and land speculator community, including Terry Murphy-- Natacha Seijas' chief of staff, or how the pecking order at the county commission has been organized around the Urban Development Boundary.

There were some good points made by members of the public interest community: by Barry White, Nancy Lee, Andrew Georgiadis, and Dawn Shirreffs whose organization, Clean Water Action, has taken the lead in the Hold the Line effort involving more than 140 local community, civic, and business groups: that it apparently occurs to no one involved in planning, that the South Florida economy could be heading into a multi-year if not decade of low to no-growth. Furthermore, nowhere have voters agreed to pay for infrastructure deficits that fund the profiteers of suburban sprawl. Still, it is clear from the connection between the professional planners on the EPA panel and the "environmental" land use and engineering cartel, that the preference is to measure outcomes by statistical arguments (a neat way to conceal political influence peddling) like medieval monks counting angels on the heads of a pin.

Miami-Dade County does have a plan for rationalizing growth and protecting the environmental resources, to correct the dismal matter of ignoring costs that are never accounted for in equations of growth (Andrew Georgiadis did a fine job explaining these "externalities"). The plan is called the South Miami Dade Watershed Study. The county spent more than $4 million developing this plan, engaging a broad spectrum of the community and involving thousands and thousands of hours volunteered by civic activists. The plan, years in development and vetting, entailed the most comprehensive scientific review of watersheds ever undertaken in the US. Under the ugly forcing of Terry Murphy and Natacha Seijas, it was shelved in 2008-- just like the earlier Agriculture Retention Study. Who killed the Watershed Study that reviewed the territory that now will be combed through by the EPA study panel? The builders, developers, bankers and land speculators: exactly the same representation at yesterday's meeting at the Public Library.
(also see yesterday's post: Live Blogging from EPA Hearing on Urban Development Boundary.)