Amendment 4 on WBPT and in The Miami Herald: A Reflection ... by gimleteye

The program on Amendment 4 was taped on public broadcasting's "WBPT Issues" yesterday, Amendment 4 is the highly anticipated ballot referendum to change the Florida Constitution in the following way: the measure would break up the immoveable politics of land use, bonding developers and special interests to local elected officials through campaign contributions. It provides that changes to local master plans would be accomplished after a final vote; not by city or county commissioners, but by local voters. On the WPBT program I am one of the speakers in favor, alongside Lesley Blackner, co-founder of Florida Hometown Democracy. View it here.

Amendment 4 was also front page news in The Miami Herald yesterday. Here's my quote, as "... Alan Farago, a longtime Miami-Dade environmental activist who was among the early champions of the Hometown Democracy effort, describes growth management as "basically a carcass that has been fed over by special interests. Everyone who has warned me about the issues of unintended consequences [from Amendment 4] failed to acknowledge the set of unintended consequences to Florida's landscape is unacceptable now." Read the Herald story, here.

Last night, as I was drifting off I thought about a comment that one of the opponents of the measure, real estate consultant Jack McCabe, made on the WPBT program: how Florida's economy is dependent on development and construction and how it is necessary to keep expanding the tax base to avoid an economic collapse. This argument is the mother's milk of Florida's political and economic status quo.

I remember being shocked when I first heard the same argument nearly twenty five years ago. At the time, I had just moved to the Florida Keys. My children were young. I expected to be able to show them as they grew the profound beauty of the place I had experienced, first, in the 1970's. But by the late 1980's, all that was going, going, gone. I became involved in environmental issues and local politics as a result. Those politics revolved around land use decisions whose individual and cumulative impacts severely threatened unique natural resources that comprise the foundation of the Key's multi-billion dollar tourism economy. The majority of the Monroe County Commission proudly self-identified as "The Concrete Coalition". They were led on the county commission by a local version of Tom DeLay-- an insecticide salesman-- powerful local developers, land use lawyers and locals who were cashing in on real estate; and they all made exactly the same argument, with the same words, that Jack McCabe made yesterday: you have to expand to the tax base to be able to afford the costs of growth.

Amendment 4 grew out of the abounding frustration of citizens in Florida who saw what they valued in this place, trashed and overwhelmed by that illogic: inadequate schools, roadways, poorly planned infrastructure and sacrifices to quality of life that constantly creep in the wrong direction. And it is because of Amendment 4 that took years to arrive-- an election-- that its opponents waged and passed their own change to the Constitution; requiring that any further changes must pass in a general state-wide election by 60 percent or the referendum fails. No other state in the nation has such a high threshold.

Today in Florida, we live the consequences of what Amendment 4 seeks to address. The costs of growth have far exceeded the capacity of the tax base; that's why real estate taxes are increasing and the cost of government will continue to increase for the foreseeable future. The current system of growth management is not only broken at the local level, at the state capitol the Florida legislature is determined to erase the growth regulatory agency. Period. (Related note: check out what is happening to St. Joe Corporation.)

In the Keys when I was a quarter century younger, there was a young attorney for The Wilderness Society who stood at the podium and public hearings of the planning commission, who inspired me to dedicate much of my time as a community activist. His name is Ross Burnaman, and Ross is a co-founder of the Florida Hometown Democracy movement. In the early 1990's Ross moved to Tallahassee where he is now a sole practitioner of law. The point is that Florida Hometown Democracy did not spring up from nowhere: this movement was grounded in the manifest failures of growth management in South Florida. Right here. It grew up right here in the Chambers of the Miami-Dade County Commission and the City of Miami, where the pleas of citizens from the podium are routinely ignored by elected officials on cell phones with lobbyists or snoozing or joking with each other or showing their disrespect for ordinary people and ordinary taxpayers taking entire days to attend land use hearings where, for the most part, they are ignored.

So far as I am concerned, Florida Hometown Democracy is for George Kuntz of Key Colony Beach, who attended each and every land use hearing in the Keys for a decade and testified against land use changes, who fought and scrapped until his last days. Amendment 4 is for Grace Maniello of Big Pine Key, a minority voice on the Monroe County Planning Commission, who endured the taunts and ridicule and isolation in a place where platted lots had been used, for generations, as payola. Grace and Fred and Freddy: the whole family fought the good fight and they are gone, too. Amendment 4 is for friends who never gave up on the bonefish, the bay in front of Islamorada stretching to Flamingo, and the sweet virtues of place that can't be recovered once they are lost. Amendment 4 has similar backstories across the state of Florida. It is from people who love this state. It is an heroic effort by a group of dedicated volunteers around the state of Florida who have made sacrifices-- in the case of Lesley Blackner, who put in nearly $1 million of her own money-- to put this measure on the November ballot: the fact of Amendment 4 is for each and every citizen who tried to protect a river, or stream, or wetland or the character of a neighborhood and cohesion of a community. It is for every person who summoned the courage to speak in public in a forum where other more practiced, monied voices rose up to bitch them out. They have the money and the influence, and right now, two weeks before the election, they are getting ready to spend the $10 to $15 million they have raised to defeat Amendment 4.

While Lesley Blackner has been the visible, public champion of this movement; Ross Burnaman helped forge the measures passage through and over hurdles and roadblocks thrown up in its way, including the third political party in America: The US Chamber of Commerce. Twenty five years ago, when Florida Keys public officials were making the same weak arguments in favor of sacrificing quality of life and natural resources to expanded tax base, that could only happen by weakening environmental protection rules and regulations, Ross Burnaman was tough as nails. Today, special interests make the same arguments, and Ross Burnaman is still tough as nails.

I hope Amendment 4 passes. The public is in an uproar in the grinding economic collapse; the worst since the Depression. Hearing Amendment 4's opponents darkly warn of lost jobs and catastrophe if the measure passes is like watching people clinging to the hull of a capsized ship blaming the water. The scent of extremism is heavy in the air. Amendment 4 will pass, if voters on November 2nd read the ballot issue all the way through.