Amendment 4: The End of Life As We Know It...in Florida. By Geniusofdespair

THIS COLUMN FROM THE ST. PETE TIMES SAYS IT ALL:

If you vote for Amendment 4, you'll turn purple and get fat (and other exaggerations)

By Howard Troxler, Times Columnist
In Print: Sunday, October 3, 2010

If this crazy constitutional amendment passes, it will destroy Florida. Florida will go out of business. We will lose our jobs. Other states will beat us.

Yep, those were the dire warnings that we heard from Florida's business leaders …Back in 2004, when they tried to scare voters into rejecting a $1 increase in Florida's minimum wage.

This year, we're hearing the same kind of thing about Amendment 4 on the November ballot, the "Hometown Democracy" idea.

Amendment 4 simply says that local voters in Florida should have the final say over some growth decisions. But to hear Florida's business community tell it, such an idea would be the end of the world. The state might well sink into the ocean.

Phooey. Nuts. Hockey pucks.

If Hometown Democracy passes, here is what will not happen:

People will not quit building things in Florida. And we will not have to hold 8,000 local elections a year. Or a million. Or whatever it is they're claiming.

Remember that Amendment 4 requires an election only for changes to a city or county's "comprehensive plan," which is the basic map for how a community should look — industrial here, commercial there, and so forth.

So if Amendment 4 passes, the first thing that will happen is:

Many developers will tweak their proposals to avoid the need for plan amendments and elections. And this is exactly the idea. They can still build — consistent with the plan.

The way it works now, any time anybody wants to build something, they just go to the City Council or County Commission and get the plan changed.

The plan is not driving our growth — we're just changing our plan to fit the growth.

The second thing to consider if Amendment 4 passes is that:

Local governments will still screen proposed developments, and decide for themselves how many elections to hold. This is an often-overlooked aspect of Amendment 4. We are not turning every proposal into a willy-nilly election popularity contest. The experts will still review these things. The local government can still reject them. What we're adding is a voter veto over their final approval.

Third, if Amendment 4 passes:

Florida communities will prove perfectly capable of making these decisions in local elections.

In fact, I think we will adapt to the new system rather quickly, and that it will even work to developers' advantage at times.

Winning public passage will become a routine part of the process of winning approval for big projects — a relative drop in the bucket compared to the existing costs, and the already lengthy process, of winning regulatory approval.

In some cases, it even will be better for developers to make their case to an entire community, rather than fighting one particularly noisy or influential neighborhood.

Wouldn't all of us in, say, Hillsborough or Pinellas County be better off with Project X? Wouldn't our entire city of (insert name here) benefit from this new (mall, restaurant, theater)?

Listen.

If you're agin' it, you're agin' it.

If you think this is a bad idea and that your local County Commission or City Council should make these decisions, and that if we don't like what they do, then we just should not re-elect them, that is a perfectly fine opinion.

But if you are on the fence about Amendment 4, and are wondering whether all this doom and gloom and predictions of the end of the world are true — I think they are a bunch of hooey, and that the opponents so ridiculously overstate it that they hurt their own cause.