Taking the dog out for a walk: notes on the Homestead Air Force Base

It's how I describe the deformation of county government in the absence of demand for new building and development by insiders, lobbyists and land speculators to move the Urban Development Boundary: taking the dog out for a walk. Big corporations like Lowe's or Lennar need to keep things organized and everyone in line, so there is a plan and tasking and strategy that is also serves to align political campaigns: it is how things work. All is centered on keeping local elected officials focused on doing what is necessary to keep the game going; miscalculating risk.

When, fifteen years ago, the plan to redevelop the Homestead Air Force Base as a commercial, private airport emerged; miscalculating risk was its central feature. The Herald reports today that a state court rejected the lawsuit by the corporation then formed from board directors of the Latin Builders Association called HABDI, for $100 million in damages. The long fade of the HABDI plan -- that a decade ago was as controversial as the plan to build a jetport in the middle of the Everglades in the late 1960's-- tends to ignore that miscalculation of risk is still the centerpiece of the unreformable majority, lead by Natacha Seijas, and her chief of staff Terry Murphy. Then, they were key HABDI boosters on the county commission. (please click, 'read more')

I lead the effort to stop the air base plan by Miami-Dade County to turn property it did not even control to well connected political insiders. It was an epic battle, over six years, and eventually involved enough politics to last a lifetime. I became involved after a series of reports-- outstanding-- by then New Times journalist Jim DeFede. Why I became interested in Homestead Air Force Base goes back earlier, to the late 1980's, when I was persuaded to join a fledgling effort to protect the coral reef ecosystem in the Florida Keys.

What had drawn me to the Keys-- and a main reason I moved there-- was the spectacular wilderness of Florida Bay that I first experienced in the 1970's. To make a long story short-- and it is a long story-- while the coral reef had its advocates, there was no one standing up for the extraordinary decline of Florida Bay that was readily evident to me, as a lay observer, in the difference between that moment and what I had seen with my own eyes only a little more than ten years earlier. It was necessary to draw the connections, I believed, between upstream impacts on Florida Bay and the reef tract and to encourage government to follow laws and to enforce regulations it had already passed.

There was no shortage of science, stretching back decades, on the harm to the Everglades upstream from diking and ditching and permitting new sprawling communities on the edge. In the Keys, I became both knowledgeable of environmental efforts and skeptical, too, of mainstream environmental groups-- mostly the large and well funded ones-- who seemed to have the right values but spent a lot of time justifying half-measures for one reason or another. I gravitated in the Keys to the effort to educate and inform a wider audience about the likely effects of environmental decline and sought out specific issues that the mainstream groups had overlooked. Among those, the decline of shallow water flats and habitats in the bay. Two phenomenon were occurring at the same time: the long term influence of upstream pollution and mis-management of water resources had finally piled up enough momentum to turn Florida Bay sour, and, more and more boating impacts to near shore waters were causing substantial problems for habitats.

In 1992, I moved to Miami. It was a moment when environmental groups--especially the larger ones like National Audubon--were planning for a new president, Bill Clinton, to solve the Everglades restoration problem. The deal making was proceeding in court--where the state of Florida finally agreed to settle litigation over Big Sugar's pollution of the Everglades--and in the optimistic hands of new regulators in DC like Carol Browner, a Miamian who led the EPA, and Bruce Babbitt, Secretary of the Interior. But I was interested, as I had been in the Keys, in how the grand plan was subverted by local gaming of growth and development.

In the late 1980's, the hardest nosed environmentalists in the Keys were the ones who were engaged by the challenge of implementing Florida's Growth Management Act. Among them, Ross Burnaman-- a co-founder of the Florida Hometown Democracy movement. The Act required all of Florida's counties and municipalities to come up with comprehensive plans for future growth. As one of Florida's only 'areas of critical state concern', the matter of controlling growth pitted a few brave activists against local pro-growthers who were supported by the keen interest of property rights attorneys and land speculators stretching all the way from Tallahassee to mansions of Palm Beach and the sugar fields of the Everglades Agricultural Area.

It was clear to me, as a new arrival in Miami in 1992, that little to no attention was being paid by the mainstream, large environmental groups to the massive growth of western suburbs in Miami-Dade. Again-- to make a long story short-- there was considerable activity and controversy over the most western parts of the county: in particular, the 8.5 Square Mile Area and illegal development supported by the Miami Dade county commission. But my concern was the growth management process that both built constituencies for more suburban sprawl and eroded the natural environment that eventually badly compromised the chances for Florida Bay and the Everglades and the coral reef to revive.

In 1993 I tried to energize homeowner associations and other civic groups in an effort to support what was, that year, the most intensely argued initiative in Miami-Dade: the requirement for a 2/3rds majority of the county commission to support zoning changes outside the urban growth boundary. It was proposed by Miguel Diaz de la Portilla, a former county commissioner who now represents developers on land use issues. It was massively opposed by the Latin Builders Association whose directors were mostly small to medium size production homebuilders or in the supply chain. As a new arrival to Miami, but seasoned in land use battles in the Keys, I thought it might be possible to reach out to the opposition and to use the argument that would soon become a kind of mantra: that it was better for developers, for communities, for taxpayers and for the environment to concentrate development inside areas already served by infrastructure. I offered this point of view to a LBA director Ramon Rasco at a lunch. He listened politely, and that wasn't the last of it. I didn't know about the HABDI plan for the Homestead Air Force Base that was already in its early phases.

The heart of the HABDI proposal for the reuse of the Homestead Air Force Base was several hundred acres around the airstrip, but the bigger prize was the undeveloped farmland of South Dade and the Redland; tens of thousands of acres that could become the next Kendall, or Weston, or Miami Lakes. Rasco, a founder of US Century Bank later, was the central HABDI organizer. The key HABDI lobbyist, MIguel De Grandy then working for Greenberg Traurig.

The battle for the future of the Homestead Air Force Base, in the following years, would eventually consume tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, chasing a fruitless plan on behalf of big campaign contributors and a status quo at the county commission that is still intact. A full accounting is owed Miami Dade citizens. It was a national political embarrassment as well. At first, the mainstream environmental groups did either not want to become involved or did not understand its value as an iconic representation of miscalculating risk. But I believed, from the first article that Jim DeFede published in New Times, the air base issue had the power to change and to engage Miami-Dade in a more rational and better way to grow. I was right and I was wrong.

The housing crash and economic bust is not a no-fault accident, nor is it simply an inevitable point in the economic cycle. There were many cautionary tales along the way: the ill-fated plan to redevelop the Homestead Air Force Base as a major commercial airport is one.