Just being there: here Comes the EPA on the Urban Development Boundary ... by gimleteye

On October 15th, a long-postponed "workshop" involving planners and independent contractors lined up by the U.S. EPA will review policies related to the Urban Development Boundary. The EPA is coming in at the invitation of the Miami Dade County Commission. It will be an open public meeting; dismal as the case may be.

For the main part Miami-Dade's Urban Development Boundary policy-- crafted by skilled professional planners-- has endured assaults by the development community. Never more intensely than during the late, great building boom now crashed in cinders. Recall, for example, the dog-and-pony show powerpoint presentation trotted out to the Chamber of Commerce and other downtown business groups in 2005-- with Neisen Kasdin, Jeffrey Bercow, Andy Dolkart, and others-- showing graphs and statistics of "inevitable" population explosion in Miami-Dade and claims against county planners who sat quietly and spoke softly with no one in a position of authority to defend them, except at other times by County Commissioners Katy Sorenson, Carlos Gimenez, and Mayor Carlos Alvarez.

The Growth Machine just nodded its collective head in murmuring assent: all growth is good. All tax base increase is good. And, of course: without economic development you can't protect the environment.

I'm not certain of the origin of the idea to summon the EPA to review Miami-Dade's growth policies. If I were to guess, it seemed a good idea to developers-- frustrated by the conflict as applications to move the UDB helped to organize opposition against their own favored like Natacha Seijas and Pepe Diaz and Joe Martinez. Call in the EPA. Why not. The strange part of this desire to "seek" independent advice is that the county commission, in respect to applications to change the UDB, has routinely off-loaded decisions to state government, or shelved advice, whether from outside sources like the Urban Land Institute or advisory committees and exhaustive reports.

The builders and land speculators always get the last word. That is why Bob Traurig (a founding partner of the "environmental land use" law firm, Greenberg Traurig) used to show up at zoning hearings, sitting in one of the back rows. He rarely got up to speak. He didn't need to. The unreformable majority of county commissioners knew exactly who and what he represented, just being there.

In the last session of the legislature, Republicans passed SB 360 to "streamline" zoning and permitting new large scale development. What the Republican legislature wanted, and what Gov. Crist signed into law, was to put the burden of growth management decisions on local government. What a clusterfuck it turns out to be, there. Time and again, the county commission boots developer applications (that they favor) to Tallahassee for review. Passing the buck is so routine that groups like "Hold The Line" have become thoroughly inured to the pretense of "public hearings" required by law on big zoning issues. (In the interests of full disclosure, I'm a founding member and proposed the name, 'Hold The Line'.) To individual developers, the frustration of complying with burdensome and lengthy reviews, including the cost of consultants by the bucketful, the price is palpable. But to the cumulative result of this awful shell game is wetlands paved by tens of thousands of acres, "mitigation" banks serving fraudsters, wealth creation at the expense of the public, ghost town suburbs, and Growth Machine that burned its bearings.

In the Obama administration, federal agencies like the EPA are apparently protected from the worst forms of industry interference. That is the President's promise. No longer controlled by political hacks placed within sub-Cabinet level positions of authority, still EPA career employees must be suffering their own Post Traumatic Stress Disease.

For the most part, over the past twenty years, the EPA has deferred to Florida. That could change.

Now that the state has washed its hands of growth management, it will be interesting to watch a federal agency that has been whip-sawed by politics offer "advice" on growth policies at the local level that all boil down in the end to which lobbyists are sitting in the front row of commission chambers, arms locked with politicians higher up the food chain. (Who can forget Julio Robaina, Raul Martinez, Sergio Pino, and Armando Codina all sitting together at the county commission in the first row for the last move of the UDB in Hialeah, with the Graham Company representatives sitting meekly a few rows behind while the Cuban American developers did the heavy lifting?)

It has happened so many times, there really is no point reiterating the phenomenon except to say it is not so different from what happens to the turtles sticking up their heads when my Chesapeake Bay retriever jumps into the pond to chase a stick: they know exactly how to retract their necks and sink out of sight to live another day.