Rumor and Truth Factory: Miami Dade County. By Geniusofdespair

Yes I do report rumors and truth...

Codina Partners in February hired a shitload of lobbyists. Now what is he up to?

Lennar's Mega-Development Parkland, (on the wrong side of the Urban Development Boundary) a DRI from 11/2005 -- according to the South Florida Regional Planning Council is still alive. Jeff Bercow is no longer lobbying for them according to the lobbyist list. Bercow is lobbying for Panattoni Development Company's approval for Westview Property. According to the bizjournals.com, Westview is seeking $9.5 Million in taxpayer funds. That is OUR funds.

Parkland might be coming back during the May CDMP cycle although I don't see a lobbyist for it yet. It is time. Lennar has been itching to get it going according to a Lennar insider. Yes, I know developers.

Rebeca Sosa said she is NOT running for County Mayor. Raquel Regalado is stuck on the fence on the Mayoral run.

Lynda Bell gets some retribution -- after her chain link fence fiasco, that partly did her in -- from Javier Souto, who hates chain link fences. He says they cheapen neighborhoods. This is on the Agenda today:

4F 150330 Ordinance Sen. Javier D. Souto, Prime Sponsor ORDINANCE RELATING TO ZONING; MODIFYING REGULATIONS REGARDING CHAIN LINK FENCES; AMENDING SECTIONS 33-11 AND 33-311 OF THE CODE OF MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, FLORIDA; PROVIDING SEVERABILITY, INCLUSION IN THE CODE, AND AN EFFECTIVE DATE Commissioner Souto is seeks to ban the installation of new chain link fences around the County. Under the changes proposed in this item, chain link fences will only be allowed in areas zoned IU districts, AU districts and GU districts trended agricultural.

Rally to save endangered land

Pine Rockland: This is on the Agenda today -- I heard 40 people are there to speak but it is getting deferred for a second time (wear the people down, that is what they do, make everyone go all the way downtown...for nothing). I heard he wasn't even at the Commission, will have to turn on the TV to see if this is a rumor:

142509 Resolution Dennis C. Moss, Prime Sponsor

RESOLUTION DECLARING CERTAIN GEOGRAPHIC AREA OF UNINCORPORATED MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, FLORIDA DESCRIBED GENERALLY AS BOUNDED ON THE NORTH BY SW 152 STREET, ON THE WEST BY SW 137 AVENUE, ON THE SOUTH BY SW 184 STREET, AND ON THE EAST BY SW 117 AVENUE TO BE A SLUM OR BLIGHTED AREA; DECLARING THE REBUILDING, REHABILITATION, CONSERVATION AND REDEVELOPMENT OF THE AREA TO BE IN THE INTEREST OF THE PUBLIC HEALTH, SAFETY, MORALS AND WELFARE OF RESIDENTS OF RICHMOND HEIGHTS/METROZOO AREA, AND MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, FLORIDA; FINDING NEED FOR CREATION OF COMMUNITY REDEVELOPMENT AGENCY; AND DIRECTING THE COUNTY MAYOR OR COUNTY MAYOR’S DESIGNEE TO PREPARE A REDEVELOPMENT PLAN(Office of Management and Budget)

On another note...
My eyes are so itchy I could scream.  Should I change our logo to this? I think so, to keep an Eye on Miami it is pretty painful.  I can see again and everything is fine except for the damn itching. Thank you all for your good wishes.  I am very cranky.

Deafening silence on stupid development plans … by gimleteye

The Miami Herald editorial board took many years to swing to view climate change for the threat it is.

As evidence accumulated on the costs of unsustainable growth, the Herald was not only silent … it was complicit in the ruinous policies leading to the housing boom and bust. EOM earlier posts, in the archive under 'housing crash', chronicle the dismal times and political gains when housing developments were seeded in low lying flood plains like rice thrown at bride and groom on wedding day.

Those were also the years -- in the late 1980's and 1990's -- in which the buffer areas between the Everglades and farm land and developments in western Dade were lost to conservation purposes and, later, when the coastline was buried in a condo boom that cost banks billions of dollars yet kept speculators like Jorge Perez on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans.

The Herald was a poor record of note on these subjects. The bankers and downtown land use lobbyists at Greenberg Traurig held sway at the Herald publisher and Knight Ridder board. Too bad.

On sea level rise, the Herald's editorial board finally swung around. In its Sunday editorial, the Herald asks:

What lies in South Florida's future? More elevated roads and buildings, more so-called "retreats" from building on the coast, more 24-hour pumps to keep water at bay everywhere, more storm-water runoff collected from urban areas and redirected for irrigation - all feats of engineering that will require big financial investments over the next 50 years.

And government officials in coastal cities will have to rethink zoning laws near their beaches. When an aging Miami Beach hotel is razed, it should not be the site for another high-rise condo, for example, which simply puts more people at risk. It could become green space instead. Better to take a hit on city property-tax coffers than put more residents in harm's way.

Sure, all these changes in attitude and policy sound daunting. But what other choice do South Floridians have?

Stand by and wring their hands as the underpinnings of beachside condos and resorts are washed away during a hurricane's storm surge, the tourist industry drowns as beaches disappear under water and a whole way of life is permanently altered for the worse? Those aren't options.

We did have options and there were voices to those options, but they were denied space in the media and in decision making processes. For example, the two terms of Jeb Bush as governor of Florida -- leading up to and during the housing boom -- were marked by glee and high-fives at blocking advocates for the environment and sensible growth management policies. The Rick Scott years simply delivered the coup de grace, using the excuse of "jobs" and "economic stimulus" that is -- in respect to the record of bad development patterns in Florida -- rubbed by over-use to a nub.

Now in Miami today, there are many pots on boil at the county, with respect to more dumb development -- not to accommodate more people, as the lobbyists would have city and county commissioners believe -- but to bail out investors who bought farmland in the hinterlands or on the coast at speculative prices during the housing boom.

In its recent editorial on rising seas, the Herald editorial board leads with the "good news" that sea level rise is going to be good for jobs for engineers and construction projects. It goes on to point out that the prudent course for decision makers is to deny any more building and construction in unprotect-able flood plains or on vulnerable coast lines.

But what about Lennar's Parkland? A massive development in west Dade that folds alongside Little Crooks' Krome Gold? The Herald editorial board might take the lead from its pivot on sea level rise to criticize the schemes of wealthy insiders who once held sway at 1 Herald Square. It wouldn't make for comfortable Christmas parties where insiders, comfortable in their status as "community leaders", toast with representatives of the free and independent press.

And while we are at it: isn't it time for the Herald editorial board to weigh in on the idiotic plan by FPL to put two new nuclear reactors at sea level in South Dade? This silence, from the Herald, is deafening.

Read: Combating rising seas, Miami Herald - Editorial, September 28, 2013
OUR OPINION: Miami Beach on right course to keep low-lying areas dry

Another Back-Door Assault on the Urban Development Boundary. By Geniiusofdespair

Lobbyists for Lennar are trying very hard to get developer friendly land-use changes through in the Evaluation and Appraisal Report so Lennar can develop the Parkland project.  They were at the Planning Advisory Board last week lobbying up a storm for Lennar.

Hired to lobby for Lennar are:

JEFFREY BERCOW (short one)
Lobbying for: EAR-BASED AMENDMENTS 4/12/2013
GRAHAM C PENN (tall one)
Lobbying for: EAR-BASED AMENDMENTS 4/12/2013
ANDY DOLKART (can make any number work for developers, pictured below. Also working with Bercow and Penn on Lennar)

Lennar's profits rose 310% in the 4th quarter. They are on a roll. The land in question is owned by Edward W. Easton (Lynda Bell got a lot of money in her 2010 campaign from Ed Easton and his companies) as Trustee for Krome Groves Land Trust (he paid over $16 Million for the land in 2004). I would suppose Lennar has an option on Parkland.

Parkland: Approximately 900 acre site (almost 1.5 square miles - half the size of the City of Aventura) on the wrong side of the Urban development Boundary.

Should We Widen SW 157th Avenue? Guest Blog by Ted Wilde

Below is my recent citizen’s comment to the Citizen's Independent Transportation Trust. On April 25, the CITT approved its 5-year plan, including the SW 157th Ave. widening, with two dissenting votes. Implementation of the SW 157th Ave. project will require two votes on specific contracts later this year, after the mandated further traffic study. One contract will be for moving the power lines and other utilities; the second will be the contract for the actual construction. This project Is not only a further waste of $11 million, it can readily be used in the near future to support moving the UDB with the argument: “the infrastructure is already in place." (Genius: Lennar/Ed Easton's Parkland Development of Regional Impact is in this area as well as other mega developments like Horton Homes).

An expensive, unnecessary planned project: widening from two to four lanes with raised median the road segment of SW 157th Ave. from SW 152nd St. to SW 184th St.;

Summary. This lane-doubling project at this time is an ill-advised use of a further $11 million of CITT funds. Benefits claimed for this project, like the provision of north-south connectivity, are already available now, with no investment at all. Traffic moves without congestion the whole day, including during morning and afternoon rush hours, as can be verified by site visits. This project is in the 5-year plan presented for CITT approval today. The CITT should amend the plan to remove this project.

The Public Works Department [PWD] plans to conclude contracts this year for utility relocation and for construction. The CITT memo accompanying the 5-year plan recommends for this project, “that traffic studies be updated prior to immediate commencement of construction.” This is not a promising step. It sounds like the decision is already made and the traffic study is window dressing for starting as soon as possible. In reality, the 2006 traffic study specifically indicated comfortable traffic levels far below capacity, but that did not deter Public Works, the County Administration, and Commissioner Moss from advocating this expensive road expansion. None of the official presentations of this project to the CITT communicated that the whole west side of this road segment is agricultural land outside the Urban Development Boundary [UDB]. This bordering on the UDB makes this segment different from the already improved segments of SW 157th Ave. to the north, which pass through populated areas on both sides of the road. By omitting this information on the UDB, the presentations withhold information needed for an intelligent decision by the CITT.

US Century Bank, Zero Leadership, Credibility, and Zero Rating ... by gimleteye

On the same day that Sergio Pino announced his resignation from the board of the bank he founded, US Century Bank had more bad news: the ratings agency, Fitch, withdrew its rating. In a public statement to South Florida Business Journal, Pino said his withdrawal had nothing to do with the severely deteriorating condition of the bank.

Pino, along with other bank directors, have been major Republican campaign contributors and lobbyists for suburban sprawl in Florida wetlands and farmland. They have strongly supported and pushed for the expansion of the Urban Development Boundary in Miami-Dade to include lands purchased as speculative investments for future platted subdivisions and sprawl. The bank they founded has been the recipient of the largest infusion of federal taxpayer moneys, through TARP, among all Florida banks.

Also on March 15, Business Wire reported on the mounting troubles at US Century, "Although the company remains above minimum regulatory capital standards to be considered 'well-capitalized', Fitch believes that, given the bank's CRE and construction portfolios, the embedded losses will deplete capital further. In Fitch's opinion, USCB will likely need to raise additional capital. It is also extremely likely that the bank's regulator will place capital requirements on the bank through a regulatory agreement." Business Wire notes that the new Fitch rating, by definition, considers US Century Bank to have exceptionally high levels of credit risk.

Fitch noted, also, a lack of information provided by the company. Eyeonmiami has written extensively about the role of US Century Bank and its founders, including Sergio Pino, in fomenting the housing and construction bubble in Miami-Dade and, by extension of its political influence, in the state of Florida. For example, US Century investors and shareholders are prominent owners of land outside the Miami Dade Urban Development Boundary, bought in some cases at the height of the real estate bubble. Last week South Florida Business Journal reported that Pino’s 77 Acres LLC lost a $22.6 million foreclosure judgment over a site in Hialeah Gardens. BankUnited is suing Pino for $34 million on a Doral project, Century Grand. In 2009, Pino reportedly was seeking to create a visa program to allow temporary residency visas to foreigners if they invested in his project. Wachovia Bank, in Dec. 2009, hit Pino with a $65.5 million foreclosure lawsuit for Century Grand. In addition, Pino was battling recovery by Mercantil Commercialbank of a $4.4 million loan for an office building in Coral Gables.

Another bank rating agency, Bauer Financial based in Coral Gables, has noted that among the bank's problems-- leading to a recent rating of "zero"-- are the extraordinarily high level of loans to insiders, as expressed as a percentage of total loans; nearly ten times higher than similarly sized banks. It is possible that US Century's disclosure of the exact nature of those insider transactions would prove an embarrassing connection to politically connected individuals in Miami Dade County. Like the 2008 disclosure that US Senator Marco Rubio, with little worth at the time, in 2005 at the height of the real estate bubble obtained a $135,000 equity loan from US Century to the purchase of a $550,000 home in West Dade. Rubio failed to disclose it until three years later. So much slipped through the cracks.

In the last quarter of 2010, US Century Bank lost $44.7 million. In 2008, the bank received the top minority business award from the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce that was the victim of a $2 million theft by its financial auditors in 2004. Absent federal rescue, US Century would not have survived. Some banks are too big to fail, some banks should be allowed to sink of their own weight. In that category, would be Ocean Bank-- another favorite bank with sprawl developers-- that in July 2010 extended a $39.1 million loan to Pino for another condominium project in Coral Gables. The due date on that loan, according to South Florida Business Journal, is April 30. There is no similar expiration date on the enormous political pressure brought to bear on county governments and the state legislature by lobbyists using the economic crisis to eviscerate environmental regulations, hoping that a free pass to build more sprawl in wetlands and the Everglades will refloat their speculative investments. A yacht owned in whole or part by Pino sank two weeks ago in a Coral Gables canal.

Natacha Seijas, US Century Bank: top supporters, going down with the ship ... by gimleteye

County commissioner Natacha Seijas, facing a recall election next week in Hialeah, represents the land speculators and developers whose greed and determination to turn every last square acre of the county into suburban sprawl symbolizes the poverty of imagination that is a hallmark of South Florida. The political forces in Miami Dade who championed sprawl-- leading by force of campaign contributions that shut out all opposition-- center around the Latin Builders Association and its directors.

Seijas, in a recent public opinion poll, likely to face defeat by an angry electorate next week. What is not clear, and has never been clear to the electorate, is the extent to which Seijas stands for the influence peddling and horrendous politics that came to full expression through suburban sprawl. Seijas' approval ratings are at rock bottom, but so are her supporters and their business lines that depended on massive infusion of capital to service debt loads built on land speculation. Take her top supporters for example; Century Homes and US Century Bank.

Sergio Pino, Ramon Rasco, Jose Cancela, Augustin Herran: the founders and directors of US Century Bank had a simple purpose: to extend the empire of suburban sprawl to the Everglades in Miami-Dade, using up every buildable acre. They are among the biggest land speculators, as individual investors, outside the Urban Development Boundary (projects like Parkland) where they are still at work, hand in glove with Lennar and other publicly held companies, to push sprawl into farmland. They are omnipresent at County Hall where their political influence deformed the entire purpose of local government during the run up to the biggest housing boom and then crash in Florida history-- miming the economic fortunes of the nation--, turning the county zoning department into an embattled and stressed hothouse where planners either grew skin thick as a rino's or found another place to work.

Seijas and staff including Terry Murphy played the central role in shaping the accommodation of power, money and authority in government to the needs and preferences of the builders and bankers. In the case of the Homestead Air Force Base fiasco, tens of millions of dollars and nearly a decade deformed the focus of local government to serve their plans. Wasted. The subsidiary effect of so much lobbying was to degrade every other effort to protect Miami Dade's quality of life and environment. For example, there was nothing coincidental about the M-D Police Department looting the environmental fund, millions of dollars cobbled together from fines collected by polluters. Snatch and grab has been the entire culture of county government, with its corner markers set down in clear scents on the playing field by the big dogs. Yes, Ramon Rasco and the HABDI investors were about aviation and how to maximize private profit, but the real play in Homestead was for suburban sprawl: to make billions by putting tens of thousands of newcomers into crappy subdivisions in South Dade, the Redland and West Dade.

US Century Bank was at the forefront: a homegrown bank to serve the mortgage needs of sprawl. Like Seijas, the bank is rated zero today. The latest report by Bauer Financial has some astounding statistics: in the quarter ended Sept 30, 2010, loans to insiders as a percentage of total networth was 62%, or eighty percent higher than its peer group. Partly, as a result, Bauer rated US Century with a single star, representing a "troubled bank" rating. In the latest quarter, as of Dec 31, 2010, that ratio -- of insider loans to total net worth, soared to 76%, or ninety three percent higher than its peers. The bank has four times the amount of nonperforming assets compared to its peer group and ten times the value of repossessed assets-- essentially sprawl waiting for the next crop of gullible buyers-- to its net worth. Although the Bauer report notes that the bank is "adequately capitalized", US Century is one of the financial system's walking dead: alive thanks to the generosity of the Federal Reserve, propping up speculators who continue to influence local, state and national politics.

In the end, the piggy bank serving Natacha Seijas will be absorbed by another investor-- a bank too big to fail perhaps, or a financial engineer who wipes out shareholders for pennies on the dollar in order to start afresh on the game of sprawl with a clean slate. Like BankUnited, US Century will have great memories of hosting basketball stadiums, fundraisers for Republican candidates and Chamber of Commerce luncheons, where everyone nodded in unison what a swell thing it is to take wetlands and turn them into something profitable, what wonders the "free market" is compared to Havana or Managua or Caracas. US Century will go the way of the dodo, the bird that couldn't fly. Its assets will be scavenged while the politicians who supported all those shifted costs to taxpayers and voters will retire to Ocala, cashing in their undeclared gambling chips or foreign corporate ownership of condos in the Bahamas or Panama. They will sink from sight to be recovered at a fraction of their original worth, like the 73 foot Donzi that sunk this week in Gables Estates and salvaged. It is called, "Century Star", and if its walls could speak who knows what else we would learn about these years when our options shrank to the size of a inflatable dinghy.

Type the rest of the post here

Update on a Development of Regional Impact: Parkland. By Geniusofdespair

This article was written May 20, 2010 in the Daily Business Review but I missed it so I think many of you might have too. I last reported on Parkland in February when the loan was in default. Lynda Bell got a lot of money from Ed Easton for her campaign. It is pretty important to keep up with developments looming on the wrong side of the Urban Development Boundary. This Parkland development of regional impact (DRI) was particularly awful...Hold the Line!!

Developer sues partners after loan to keep project afloat

Developer Ed Easton is suing two partners to recover money he claims he put up to help rescue a controversial Miami-Dade project from a potential foreclosure.

Easton sued developers Michael Latterner and Wayne Rosen in Miami-Dade Circuit Court early this week over the Parkland project proposed for outside the county’s urban boundary.

Easton is seeking $1.18 million he said he paid to help cover his partners’ share of mortgage payments. The money was used to pay down loans that at the time totaled $47 million tied to the 961-acre Parkland site, bounded by Southwest 162nd and 177th avenues and 136th and 152nd streets.

Latterner and Rosen did not immediately return calls for comment.

In 2004, Easton, Latterner and Rosen created a partnership called Krome Grove Investors. The partnership is one of several entities behind Krome Groves Land Trust, which is seeking state and county permits to develop the 6,941-home community in western Miami-Dade.

Each of the three partners in Krome Grove Investors was responsible for capital contributions to help the trust cover expenses and keep loans current. If one of the partners could not make a capital payment, the others were to make the payment, according to the lawsuit. The payment was to be in the form of a loan.

In September, the partners were required to contribute close to $3.9 million to help the trust reduce a $44.6 million mortgage with City National Bank to $40 million, according to Miami-Dade County records.(hit read more)

The payment also helped cut two second mortgages totaling nearly $2 million to $414,150 last year, county records showed.


When Latterner and Rosen couldn’t pay their combined $1.18 million share of the $3.9 million payment, Easton paid the entire amount.

Easton has been trying to get paid for nearly eight months, said Miami attorney Bill McCaughan, who represents Easton.

“They don’t question that they owe that money,” said McCaughan, a partner with K&L Gates. “Their concern is that there is going to be future capital calls and they want to structure things in a way that Mr. Easton would cover future ones so they would have all the benefits but none of the obligations.”

Easton, managing partner of Krome Grove Investors, is also the trustee of the Krome Groves Land Trust. Other investors in the trust include Miami-based Lennar Homes, Miami developer Sergio Pino, members of the Herran and Guerra families — who own Sedano’s Supermarkets — and lobbyists Rodney Barreto and Ramon Rasco.

McCaughan said the future of Parkland is safe since Easton helped pay down the trust’s debt and obtain a City National Bank loan extension until April 2011.

In addition to thousands of homes, the proposed community would include 200,000 square feet of retail space, 100,000 square feet of medical offices, a 200-bed hospital and 550,000 square feet of light industrial space.

The trust applied for a county permit to build the massive project outside the county’s urban development boundary in 2007, as the housing market began to rapidly deteriorate. But in December 2008, the trust put its application on hold.

Paola Iuspa-Abbott can be reached at (305) 347-6657.

Gov. Twitter and Jobs in Florida ... by gimleteye

Note: to voters persuaded by Gov. Twitter's campaign pledge to create "700,000 jobs in seven years with seven steps". How is that going to happen? Cut taxes and regulations? In case you haven't heard, Florida is already the cheapest state in the nation for business. It is a point highlighted by BizCosts.com in a recent analysis of the states.

No other state has as many areas cited by the study as "cheap" to do business. The Orlando Sentinel dryly noted, "With the state facing record unemployment levels -- a 12 percent jobless rate, with 1.1 million people out of work -- state political leaders built campaigns around the need to bring more jobs to Florida. Central to that was the implication that the state had not done enough to accommodate business or, in some cases, fostered an adversarial relationship with the business community."

The implication is wrong. Note to Chamber of Commerce: your growth-at-any-cost policies are directly responsible for the depth of the Florida economic crisis. Your credibility rating is zero.

Consider Miami-Dade County. Here, elected county officials over decades took the natural attributes of place and allowed bulldozers, lobbyists, and land speculators to wring value out of Miami like water from a sponge. Since the housing crash, the politics of ignorance have worsened. Instead of taking a step back, public officials-- goaded by lobbyists for business-- have tightened the noose.

Is it really so mysterious why corporations prefer not to locate jobs here? Look at our sprawl, traffic nightmares, underfunded infrastructure. They pay dues to the US Chamber of Chamber because they are "pro-business", but they are not so pro-business to risk profits by relocating here. Voters: Miami-Dade screwed the pooch with your quality of life, allowing bad business practices and terrible zoning decisions to be exalted to the level of worship.

One St. Pete Times business columnist writes, "If we're already among the cheapest and business-friendliest places, how will Florida Gov. Rick Scott's mandate to try and make Florida cheaper (lower taxes) and even friendlier to business (less regulatory red tape) really be able to make a big difference?" It won't. To that I'd add: explain how the zeal by the legislature to eliminate environmental regulations or to make Florida's waters MORE polluted is going to help "jobs"?

Drive around Miami-Dade's outer ring suburbs and note the vacant homes signs. Ask yourselves, in the absence of consumer demand, how will politicians "create" jobs. For decades, US consumers were allowed -- by federal policies and laws-- to use debt and margin to borrow their way into unsustainable levels of prosperity. It wasn't just Republicans, of course, but it WAS Republicans from Florida (and Miami, especially) who fanned the flames of the "Ownership Society" now in grey cinders across the landscape. The land speculators still control legislatures. But that is all they control. Voters ought to understand that the homebuilding industry will not stand for anything in the next decade other than scavengers of the disastrous result they created by turning government to the purposes of re-zoning farmland and wetlands for sprawl. There are no conceivable conditions under which construction jobs return to Miami-Dade as a "pillar" of the jobs market. It ain't gonna happen and no amount of wishing it is so, will make those jobs materialize the way they do out of Governor Twitter's account. I loathe the idea that the Florida Department of Community Affairs is a "jobs killer". It is a crock. After sustaining years and years of repetitive assaults on its budget, Florida DCA was already hobbled long before Gov. Twitter took office. And the special interests know it. Wasn't it in 2003, that Jeb! Bush announced the neutron bomb effect of his policies in his inaugural address: to hollow out Tallahassee buildings filled with regulators and turn the reigns over to private enterprise? Today, the GOP insiders who have big plans for vacant land outside the Miami-Dade Urban Development Boundary know exactly why it is important to decapitate the state agency and environmental regulations: when that happens, they will be able to "flip" their stinking investments onto someone else's less stinking balance sheet.

Florida voters are politically bonded to the consequences of economic illiteracy for the foreseeable future. (And if the Democrats have any hope in 2012, it is finding a way to be honest with voters about what caused the housing market collapses.) The only way to keep up the pretenses is to gamble that voters can be dumbed down even further. Politicians can't "will" jobs to a state that is already one of the most accommodating to business in the nation. Under the spell of such illusions, it is no coincidence that bringing full scale gambling to Florida is high on the list of the family values, conservative GOP. They might as well be rolling the dice on their wish machines.

What's up with our Best Buds? By Geniusofdespair

I always like to check-in on the doings of our local developers. In February Sergio Pino was getting a mortgage from U.S. Century Bank - the same bank that he is a Board Member. The end of March he sold his condo at Club Atlantis in Miami Beach. He got market value.

Ed Easton was modifying a Krome Grove Land Trust mortgage (3 original notes were $1,935,606.88) in December. The original notes were made in favor of the Mortgagee Lennar Homes, Inc. (now known as Lennar Homes, LLC). Anyway, Easton is the Mortgagor (signing for the Land Trust) and also signing as the Mortgagee (hard to figure out these transactions). This property is part of the development of Regional Impact (DRI), Parkland. The entire property was purchased for $64,895,670 in October 2004. Lucky it is classified as AG land. The large parcel, 590 acres, only was taxed at $27,069 ($45,000 exemption) - a bargain. Easton got the property from Lunsford Richardson, Jr. -- the Vicks VapoRub heir?

This month Armando Guerra foreclosed on a parcel of land, lot 9 of Eureka Ranches (SW 188 Street and SW 185 Court, Homestead) for $476,295.48. The land was purchased from Guerra (as a trustee for a group of investors) for $838,000 in March, 2005.

The need for financial reform, a case study in Miami: Lennar and LNR ... by gimleteye

More than two years after Wall Street's closest brush with death since the Great Depression, taxpayers, investors and voters are still waiting for the kind of bare knuckles Congressional action like the Pecora Hearings in the 1930's that resulted in federal legislation creating basic firewalls within the banking industries. (For more on this, read Pam Martens' terrific piece in Counterpunch, "The Most Vital Ingredient in Wall Street Reform Goes Missing".) This morning's Miami Herald shows the cracks in the wall: on the one hand reporting the Rooms-To-Go economy as showing new signs of life, and on the other, Miami's closest connection to the Wall Street crisis: LNR, managing nearly $22 billion in troubled commercial backed mortgages.

Lennar and LNR were founded by the Miller family in Miami whose good works and contributions include generous gifts to the University of Miami School of Medicine and other local charities (except, naturally, for the environment). Both companies reach far beyond Miami's parochial politics. Yet, the scope of our current economic crisis frames both the parochial politics and the massive scale of mortgages pooled a thousand times from a hundred thousand places across the nation.

Lennar is one of the nation's largest production homebuilders. Its serial projects in South Florida to move sprawl outside the Urban Development Boundary (Parkland, Florida City Commons) provoke the ire of conservationists struggling to protect national parks. To Lennar and Wall Street, these tempests amount to less than rounding errors on the corporate balance sheet. (click, 'read more')


Small as they are, those rounding errors do add up. They add up to deforming democracy. The distortions at County Hall through land use zoning and permitting facilitates a well-mannered segregation of citizens from their government, the peddling of influence by the lobbyist corps and the engineering cartel puts ordinary voters at a further distance. In Miami-Dade, Florida's largest and most politically influential county, every effort at reform of the land use pattern that wraps up sprawl and overdevelopment has been thwarted and suppressed, despite the economic collapse. One county commissioner, Joe Martinez, directly benefited from an insider transaction on a lot owned and platted originally by Lennar.

Production homebuilders form their own cartel across the nation, teaming up with local players, partnering in land aggregation for example or the intermediate stages of large-scale development that wrap up millions of dollars in fees and influence peddling at the lowest rungs of government related to zoning and permitting and councils. Commissioner Martinez, for instance, obtained his lot for his dream house from a builder and former president of the Latin Builders Association who teamed with Lennar in one of its subdivision developments. (The local Lennar vice president, Anthony Seijas, is the recent past president of the Latin Builders and now an executive in a Lennar subsidiary specializing in distressed real estate acquisitions.)

The Miller family through partial ownership of publicly traded LNR also invests in another side of the development equation; gambling the arbitrage between distressed debt and its value as a "workout" asset. In playing both the long and short sides of the development equation on a national scale these shareholders have a unique play in the financial markets. That play, however, is not agnositic. It is based on optimism that growth of construction and development, in huge increments and pools of mortgages measured in the hundreds of millions, will never stay down for long.

The time release depression has allowed companies like Lennar and LNR to hold out for sunnier days--which will likely end up being measured years from now--, unlike consumers and small businesses. Lennar and LNR are part of a network of large financial institutions that lobbied expensively and extensively for the prerogatives of the "free market" over many decades. A provision supported by the Obama White House in 2009 legislation allows homebuilders to write off current losses-- billions-- against profits during the building boom. LNR, like most of Wall Street, is surviving through an accounting rule change recently approved by Congress that gives the nation's largest financial institutions (ie. the issuers of debt owned by LNR and owed by Lennar) the flexibility to price their balance sheets as though a 30 to 50 percent devaluation of assets has not occurred.

This is not the place to argue whether the mark-to-market rule -- had it been enforced-- would have resulted in 25 percent unemployment throughout the United States, but there is no question that the fundamental characteristic of the time-release depression is precisely to allow the big recipients of debt to stagger along until humpty dumpty is put back together again. That's Plan A. s problem is, there is no Plan B.

If Congressional hearings on financial regulations only reinstitute the firewalls that once protected depositor institutions from speculative investment banks, the opportunity to cure the deep, underlying distortions of democracy that have grown out of the dependence of the economy on collateralized debt and other forms of financial derivatives will be missed. It is critical not just to regulate the markets for that debt, to provide for clear transparency in valuations, but also to integrate the growth of communities and balance in favor of taxpayers so that power and wealth is not so concentrated behind closed doors.

These closed doors mesh with Wall Street's. It is said we can't open them, because otherwise we risk another Great Depression. Where we are, today, may get us there-- only slower. The mainstream media is proving an unreliable guide for a time-release depression. One can't build an economy of Potemkin Villages based on Rooms-To-Go advertisements without a day of reckoning. That goes equally for the overdevelopment of downtown Miami-- a sinkhole for billions of collateralized mortgage bonds-- as for suburban sprawl near the Everglades and the billions of taxpayer dollars to correct past mistakes.

Collier County Commission set to vote on future use of Everglades Jetport, today ... by gimleteye

I don't like doing it: getting in a car and driving across Tamiami Trail to spend a whole day in Collier County to sit through a county commission agenda on changes to the local growth management plan, in order to comment against a plan that would allow off-highway vehicles into the Everglades adjacent to the old Everglades Jetport site. The change-- scarcely noted by the public-- was requested by the Parks and Recreation Department and Miami-Dade Aviation, probably egged on by county commissioners in Miami-Dade who delight in antagonizing citizens who have made it difficult for them to change the Urban Development Boundary in West Dade to satisfy their campaign contributors. (Cf. Pepe Diaz, Natacha Seijas, Joe Martinez, et al.)

But I am going to do it. I volunteered to be conservation chair for the group founded by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Friends of the Everglades who forty years ago formed around the battle (successful!) to stop the Everglades Jetport. In an email, Joe Browder-- an Everglades activist who was deeply involved in the Jetport issue at the time-- wrote, "The only responsible action now is for the U.S. to condemn the jetport site, and make it part of Big Cypress National Preserve... Dade County is displaying such contempt for the values of Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve as they relate to the old jetport site that it is clear that the county cannot be trusted to manage the land in ways that are consistent with the National Park Service's responsibilities. Given Dade County's earlier proposals for oil drilling and rock mining, their discussions with the Colliers about oil development, and their failure to develop an ORV proposal that provides even minimal protection for Big Cypress National Preserve, it's pretty clear what Dade County is really doing: cooperating with the Colliers to develop an industrial and commercial center at the jetport site, to help provide an economic base for the Collier's plans for extensive, panther-threatening housing development in the Big Cypress."

There is more. Development interests in Miami-Dade who want to push the Urban Development Boundary past Krome Avenue, like Rodney Barreto, Sergio Pino, the directors of US Century Bank and investors in the massive development called Parkland, want to build a constituency for more development, more people, more motorized access into the Everglades. They might even put a Lowe's Home Improvement right at the edge of the UDB, willing to fund another incursion against the Everglades. What a great plan: get a CDMP amendment passed two hours from Miami so practically no one from Miami will be involved and then take the battle to Tallahassee. Another fine example where Amendment 4, Florida Hometown Democracy, would help: if voters were educated and had a chance to decide if it makes sense to put off road vehicles in the middle of the Everglades, how do you think they would vote?

No economic recovery until "true value" is more than smoke and mirrors ... by gimleteye

The Miami Herald published an excellent report on Sunday, "Miami-Dade tax notices likely to spark appeals by homeowners." (Sunday August 16, 2009). The report notes our blog and points we have raised concerning the M-D Property Appraiser, Pedro Garcia, who fails to include foreclosures in property assessments. In recent posts I have questioned why Florida's most populous county understates the extent of harm to property values in the worst economic bust since the Depression. One reasons I proposed: that the true extent of real estate market declines would put enormous additional pressure on government budgets. Garcia responds to the Herald, "We don't talk to the commissioners. We don't talk to the mayor or anybody. I was elected to establish the right value on Miami-Dade properties and that's what I have been doing since day one. Nobody has called me or told me what numbers they need,'' Garcia said." Garcia also tells the Herald that foreclosures aren't included because "foreclosed homes are almost always stripped of appliances and fixtures or otherwise vandalized. Consequently, they do not reflect the true value of better-kept homes in the neighborhood."

Here is an interesting concept: true value. We are not used to it, in Florida. The snatch-and-grab development that accounted for most economic growth in the state depended, to a very large extent, on mispricing risk: risk to communities and to taxpayers from unfunded mandates of growth that are built-in to the massive, industrial-scale land development projects. Put another way: if Florida's wetlands could speak for themselves, they too would be in foreclosure: "stripped and vandalized" of what gives them-- and us-- true value. The price for routinely miscalculating risk-- and embracing Chamber of Commerce values of growth-at-any-cost-- defies imagination. The place to begin is true accounting.

The stock market is up nearly forty percent from its lows earlier this year, which means that the net worth of most Americans who do not trade daily but have been holding 401K's and other equities are still down twenty five percent or more from their highs. There is good reason for ordinary Americans to believe that the stock market fluctuations benefit primarily financial institutions trading mainly for their own (shareholders and executives) accounts. It is that feeling of sea-sickness, of real indebtedness, that accounts for flu-like symptoms in consumer confidence.
Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis, "Brace for a wave of foreclosures, the dam is about to break" cites a statistic as riveting as the one reported by the Herald last week, that 49 percent of mortgages in Florida are underwater. With nearly a trillion dollars in residential property value, Floridians have a 94 percent loan to equity ratio.

If Florida was a bank, it would have been shut down by the Feds a long time ago.

This brings me back to the point about "true value". Earlier this year, Congress approved new rules that allow banks to hide true value by not "marking to market" the debt represented by mortgages and other forms of debt of questionable value. Were they required to do so, many more banks like Colonial and Bank United, would be forced to shut down. The next story by The Miami Herald or the New York Times should investigate which speculators and bank shareholders are being given "holidays" from debt repayments because the banks, themselves, are not being held to the true value of their capital ratios by federal regulators. (cf. US Century Bank)

The Obama administration made a strategic judgment that Americans need to see "green shoots" in the overall economy and that public morale after 8 long years of George W. Bush needed propping up. In this respect, top economics advisor Larry Summers has poorly served the White House. Long before our national economy visibly cratered, I argued that the avoidance of true cost accounting of growth has been a nasty game with devastating results to taxpayers and the public interest (read our archive, 'housing crash'). This manifested first in Florida, where the origins of the economic crisis showed through matching Wall Street greed to local and state politics synching the gears of the Growth Machine. Contrary to the belief of perpetrators, the outrageous oversupply of development was not because it was "what the market wanted" or "lending practices": it was what generated the most fees and commissions and executive compensation to the principal actors.

There will be no recovery until true value is established and a new foundation for consumer confidence.

EYE REPORT: Planned Road Improvements Lead to More Taxpayer Subsidized Sprawl. By Geniusofdespair & Gimleteye.

When you are trying to figure out development trends that benefit land speculators who crashed the economy, look no further than planned road improvements. Large scale development projects must solve the problem of "transportation concurrency". Endless games are played by lobbyists and so-called transportation planners to create rationale and formulas showing how the expansion of roadways at the fringe of suburbia solves the problem of moving prospective, new as well as old residents through new and existing communities. County commissioners (like Joe Martinez and Pepe Diaz and Natacha Seijas) beholden to their campaign contributors involve themselves in the minute details to transportation and roadway issues in order to lay the rails for majority approval of new developments outside the UDB. This like jig happens all over the county (like Lowe's or Beacon Lakes, to cite just two).

We get to see the jig at public hearings as part of the zoning process by local government. Lawyers making $750 an hour and planners and economists and other consultants get up in the speaker's pit with charts and Powerpoint presentations that overwhelm the few members of the public who purposefully offer counter-arguments to more suburban sprawl. Often, the speculators pay for rent-a-crowds to pack the commission chamber. They have no clue what they are doing there, beyond the box lunch and bus ride downtown. When Joe Martinez asks: "would all supporters of this project rise"; they dutifully stand up from their movie quality armchairs and sit down again once this irrefutable evidence of community support is demonstrated for the cameras.

There are two roadway projects that are in different stages of approval at County Boards who serve at the behest of the County Commissioners. These projects were conceived well before the housing market crash: putting down infrastructure to move hundreds of thousands of commuters around Miami-Dade takes years of planning and land buying. Both activities put developers, speculators, and government officials in virtual 24 hour Love Motels for Growth.

Both of these roadway "improvements" will give wind to Lennar's 1,000 acre mixed-use mega-development, Parkland, and to the Krome Gold partners who own hundreds of acres nearby. We've written a lot about Parkland and Krome Gold: check our archive. Their owners are the same big-time lobbyists and developers whose domination of local zoning councils and elected officials helped grease the gears of the Growth Machine that caused the housing bubble and, now, collapse.

It was reasonable to expect that many of these project would have drowned of their own weight and costs with the implosion of the nation's banking industry. But the Federal Reserve and US Department of Treasury have created "rescue" interventions that allow banks (and investors) the time to tread water with their speculative investments while the rest of taxpayers are gradually waking up to their liabilities-- in the form of rising taxes-- to fund the same government operations that allowed these manipulators to drive our quality of life and the economy into the ditch in the first place.

The tens of millions in speculative investments in Krome Gold and Parkland are now assets buried amidst trillions of dollars committed by US taxpayers that will make sure bad projects never die. Now that the "stimulus" funds are flowing, they are flowing as Eyeonmiami suspected they would in ways that will benefit the speculators. Far from being cleaned out, as they should have been, the speculators are lurking in the shadows for their return. In no small respect, this is also what is behind the effort to erase the Florida Department of Community Affairs: let local governments, ie. the Miami-Dade County Commission, "determine" concurrency requirements. It is the final realization of the Bush Doctrine: that local elected representatives are the best place to center regulatory power and authority. In fact, it is about using the current economic emergency to feather the nests of the land speculators. As the bumper sticker goes: if you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.

First, they need the roads. Hit on the the two aerials at left and you can see that both of these new planned roadways end at Parkland; thousands of new housing units planned in a region that is now surrounded by ghost town suburbs, many of which were also built by Lennar.

The MDX says about the 836 Expansion: "…the project is envisioned as a limited access expressway that will represent a physical barrier to discourage urban sprawl farther into the Everglades." What a crock of shit. It will do the exact opposite. From time to time, the South Florida builders have mumbled about using Krome Avenue as an "inviolable" border for growth that could only be breached for instance by the unanimous vote of the County Commission. It is a card that is lazily played when it seems that maybe the Growth Machine won't get its way, and the retracted when it does. The public has every right to be furious. When the widening of Krome Avenue was under mediation, authorized by the state and supervised by a mediator sympathetic to the Growth Machine, the County Commission rejected an agreement forged by its own planners with environmentalists that Krome widening would never be used to justify new population growth.

MDX is in the process of preparing a concept report to evaluate the feasibility of the 836 extension. The extension is known as MDX Project No. 83618. MDX wants to include this in the 2025 Master Transportation Plan. Cost? Who knows.

For the 157 Avenue expansion the County has to purchase 16 parcels from 152 Street to SW 184 Street as a "Public Necessity." The purchase was approved by the CITT on May 28th. The MDX website reports that the agency "Will complete a Concept Report in early 2009 to evaluate the potential of a new transportation corridor extending SR 836 to SW 136th Street in West Kendall with provision for an urban buffer". According to Tere Garcia of MDX: This potential project was identified when a needs assessment was done as we started to update MDX's Long Range Plan in 2007. We follow the same cycle as the MPO. The Concept Report being prepared is a very preliminary planning document being prepared to assess need. This document is still in draft form and in review. As soon as its completed we will post in our website as we do all our studies.

Here is the truth. The Miami-Dade land speculators care about only one thing: rescuing their net worth from investments that are now worth ten cents on the dollar or seventy cents. The difference will be worked out depending on getting their friggin roads.

Miami Herald finally reports the implosion of suburbs ... by gimleteye

It took the Miami Herald a while, but the newspaper finally got around to reporting the ghost town subdivisions in the outer reaches of South Dade: "Real estate bust turns South Dade suburbs into modern ghost towns". It covers some of the same grounds as the AP story published two months ago: "Disaster: Homestead, FL. hit by foreclosures".

That AP story featured our blog, (when the story was finally printed in the Herald, the part about our blog was redacted) and the relentless criticism we have leveled against the political infrastructure that propelled Miami's suburbs into farmland and wetlands. (See: "Paving Paradise", by St. Pete Times writers Matthew Waite and Craig Pittman.)

The Herald story touches on some of the key players in the housing debacle, Silvio Cardoso, Sergio Pino and Caribe Homes, without mentioning their role in deforming the purpose of local government to pushing through zoning decisions that so clearly resulted in massive destruction of the south Florida landscape and economy.

The Herald editors wouldn't have had to stretch far to link the ghost towns to financial instruments -- ie. mortgage backed securities that are referred to as "toxic debt" in an endless stream of reporting on bank failures (BankUnited) and a crippled economy.

Throughout the 1990's, I pressed the Herald to write about the Miami-Dade southern suburbs, in the far western and southern reaches of the county, and the sham economic growth they represented. The flip side of that story is the destruction of the Everglades, of Florida Bay, and Biscayne National Park. For the most part, the Herald was and remains mute on making the connection.

The Herald has been sitting on this story for more than a decade, because powerful advertisers in the newspaper-- from furniture suppliers (Rooms-To-Go, Carl's Furniture) to Sprawling Subdivision XYZ (Lennar, Caribe Homes: just read the paper!) are so important to the paper's bottom line. Any implicit criticism of the suburban sprawl model elicits howls of protest from advertisers, like Pino and the clatch of downtown lawyers who represent the Growth Machine.

Even in the context of today's story, note of Pino, of Lennar's Parkland, and of the Builders Association of South Florida is antiseptic; isolated and segregated as though the main feature that Herald readers have to learn is how to read between the lines.

The biggest economic crisis since the Depression was caused by ginning up instant-grow suburbs in farmland and wetlands through zoning changes lubricated by law firms (cf. Greenberg Traurig), local elected officials, tying in big engineering firms (Post Buckley), road paving and rock mining contracts, with Wall Street financiers and the home grown wealth destroyers (BankUnited): all pulling down billions in fees and commissions and compensation before the parade stopped. Why should this be the subtext of the story, and, not the story itself?

I will give the Herald credit for mentioning Lennar's Parkland project, now in the form of a state permitting process (DRI) that the Florida legislature wants to kill off and that Gov. Crist may sign into law (SB 360). Parkland is exactly the kind of "growth" that carbon copies failure on the future, expecting a different result.

The author of today's Herald story was one of the investigative reporters in the outstanding 2008 Herald series, "Borrowers Betrayed", that would have won a Pulitzer if the publisher and editor had unchained the reporters and allowed them to chase the corruption of mortgage fraud up the political food chain to Tallahassee and Washington, DC and into government policies that used the "ownership society" to front for the biggest Ponzi scheme in US history. It is mostly a story about powerful Republicans who are now trying to re-brand themselves.

The Miami Herald had the biggest story spanning two centuries in its grasp and let it slip away.

Republicans in Florida Legislature: dumber than dirt ... by gimleteye

An all-out effort by citizen's groups is being generated, to call legislators and save the Florida Dept. of Community Affairs. Last year, the pro-growth-at-any-cost legislature cut the DCA budget to the bone. This year, they want to be sure that the only people left standing are the ones who sweep the floors at night.

This issue bears directly on Miami Dade's zoning issues (read, powerful Republican campaign contributors) outside the Urban Development Boundary. Like Lennar's Parkland et al. and Sergio Pino, Rodney Barreto, and their partners in Krome Gold. Is there anything these interests and their lobbyists won't do to salvage their bad investments by hijacking our government?

In a meeting last night involving budget negotiators, the House Offer #1 to the Conference Committee on Transportation and Economic Development Appropriations proposed a $1,000,000 reduction to DCA’s general revenue operating budget.

If passed, this would mean the elimination of 15 to 20 of DCA’s already depleted professional planning positions.

This action appears to have been taken as a result of Secretary Pelham voicing his strong concerns over the House’s modification and adoption of SB360 as well as SB362 which would substantially weaken growth controls, promote sprawl and encourage inappropriate development in rural areas. 1000 Friends joined with the Governor’s Office in applauding Secretary Pelham for speaking out on these bills as drafted.

Here is what Secretary Pelham wrote:

"SB362 and HB/CS/CS/SB360 contain numerous provisions which will substantially undermine Florida ’s growth management laws. Among other things, these provisions open up the state’s major rural areas to unchecked development, and eliminate transportation concurrency and the DRI review process in major portions of the state without providing any alternative means of addressing transportation and other extrajurisdictional impacts.

"After careful evaluation of SB362 and HB/CS/CS/SB360 and the many concerns raised about these bills, the Department has concluded that the bills do not constitute good public policy and will seriously undermine Florida ’s growth management laws. Therefore, the Department opposes SB362 and HB/CS/CS/SB360."

Please call immediately the House and Senate Conferees listed below preferably or your local Representative and Senator to oppose this outrageous and unwarranted effort to gut DCA and growth management.

Senate Transportation and Economic Development Appropriations --
Senator Fasano, Chair, 850-487-5062, fasano.mike.web@flsenate.gov
Senator Hill, Vice Chair, (850) 487-5024, hill.tony.web@flsenate.gov
Senator Diaz de la Portilla,(850) 487-5109, portilla.alex.web@flsenate.gov
Senator Dockery, (850) 487-5040, dockery.paula.web@flsenate.gov
Senator Gardiner, (850) 487-5047, gardiner.andy.web@flsenate.gov
Senator Smith, (850) 487-5112, smith.chris.web@flsenate.gov
Senator Storms, (850) 487-5072, storms.ronda.web@flsenate.gov

House Transportation & Economic Development Appropriations -
Glorioso (Chair), (850) 488-0807, rich.glorioso@myfloridahouse.gov
Evers (Vice Chair), (850) 488-8188, greg.evers@myfloridahouse.gov
Gibbons (Democratic Ranking Member), (850) 488-0145, joe.gibbons@myfloridahouse.gov
Bovo, (850) 487-2197, esteban.bovo@myfloridahouse.gov
Brise, (850) 488-4233, ronald.brise@myfloridahouse.gov
Carroll, (850) 488-5102, jennifer.carroll@myfloridahouse.gov
Drake, (850) 488-4726, brad.drake@myfloridahouse.gov
Gibson, (850) 488-7417audrey.gibson@myfloridahouse.gov
Horner, (850) 488-8992. mike.horner@myfloridahouse.gov
Hukill, (850) 488-6653, dorothy.hukill@myfloridahouse.gov
Long, (850) 488-6197, janet.long@myfloridahouse.gov
Ray, (850) 488-4388, lake.ray@myfloridahouse.gov
Schenck, (850) 488-6641, rob.schenck@myfloridahouse.gov
Steinberg, (850) 488-0690, richard.steinberg@myfloridahouse.gov

Rundown of Environmental Issues We Are Facing. By Geniusofdespair

Here is a quick rundown of What we are facing on the environmental front:

1. Nuclear and Coal Technologies Need to be Removed from the Renewable Portfolio:
These two technologies will take away funding for development of real renewable energy sources like solar and wind. This week there were important State Senate Committee Hearings on SB 1154 and it will be important to be vocal on this issue.

2. Biscayne Bay Aquatic Preserve:
At least $10 million for water managers to buy endangered Biscayne Bay wetland is gone, and more than $140,000 has been slashed from the Coastal and Aquatic Managed Areas program. As Laura Reynolds (Tropical Audubon) sees it, Biscayne National Park's fragile ecosystem is suffering a slow "death by a thousand cuts." (Hit read more).

Without management, the Bay will degrade. For example boat propeller scarring in shallow sea grass areas of the bay is a problem in the preserve. Boaters disregard markers and just plough through the flats. Eventually, these scars erode and become trenches. For history buffs, who could forget the FP&L debacle of the 1960’s, when hot water was dumped into Biscayne Bay by the Company from their nuclear reactors. Large areas of sea grass and masses of marine organisms – both plants and animals – were killed.

Action: Press county and state officials to protect the bay and South Miami-Dade's fresh water supply.

3. Growth Management -- Bill SB 360 (there is no set number for the House bill yet):
It would exempt entire urban service areas from transportation concurrency if they have densities of at least 1,000 people per square mile, but that includes sparsely populated parts of those areas, notably in Miami-Dade County. The bill also in the densely populated areas eliminates additional state permitting requirements for large projects, known as developments of regional impact (DRI), and streamlines other permitting.

"You will be eliminating a lot of the controls on sprawl," said Sen. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach. "So rather than actually promoting in-fill and promoting smart growth, which I think is the goal of the bill, you'll actually be doing exactly the opposite in an area like Dade County." The Senate passed the bill 32-8 with Gelber among those opposed. The bill is at the House, where a similar measure includes a provision to abolish the Department of Community Affairs and transfer its duties, including growth management regulation, to the Department of State.

History again: In the early 1980’s a number of houses were built without permits, West of Krome, in wetlands (in the vicinity of Chekika State Park which is now included in Everglades National Park). In spite of the illegal building and expanding sprawl, the inhabitants were allowed to stay, and Miami Dade County citizens paid for their flooding problems. Finally the Army Corps had to buy many of the homes with millions of our tax dollars. This flood prone neighborhood became known as the 8-½ Square Mile area. This constant expansion of development West has eliminated habitat for birds, deer, panther and many other species including Brad Pitt (just checking to see if you have zoned out).

Action: Call the following Representatives, Esteban Bovo, Juan Carlos-Planas, Richard Steinberg, Oscar Braynon, David Rivera, Ron Saunders, Anitere Flores and tell them that you do not want reduced State oversight of local Comp Plans and Developments of Regional Impact nor do you want the Dept. of Community Affairs to stop or reduce it’s growth management oversight.

4. Administrative Hearing on Lowe’s Home Improvement Store and Brown Application:
We are still awaiting ruling from the Hearing Judge on the two application to move the Urban Development Boundary. Attorneys Richard Grosso and Robert Hartsell of the Everglades Law Center and Miami Lakes Mayor Michael Pizzi all were interveners on the side of the Dept. of Community Affairs against Miami Dade County. Yes, you heard it, your County tax dollars are being used fighting the State of Florida --- helping these two developers. Thank you unreformable majority and Rebeca Sosa.

5. Parkland DRI (Lennar’s mega development, 960 acres, on the other side of UDB near Tamiani Airport):
It is moving ahead. Why are they moving ahead? Because they say they want to be well positioned when the economy turns around. No action at this time, but stay alert on this one. The Bill 360 mentioned above, would abolish State of Florida oversight on Parkland.

6. Rock Mining Near Biscayne National Park:
Turkey Point Nuclear Power plant needs to raise the grade to expand and build two more reactors. They need enormous amounts of fill and it is feared that they will excavate near the park, causing saltwater intrusion and endangering our water supply. Also Cemex had a permit application last year to mine 26 million cubic yards on 200 acres very close to the park, at Florida City Quarry. Rock mining near Biscayne National Park will seriously affect water quality in the Park. This is one obvious problem. There is no doubt that marine life in the park will be detrimentally impacted, counter to the Park’s Management Plan.

General action: write to the Governor about all these issues. Express your concern for the future of the environment in Florida.

Tallahassee and the Florida legislature on gutting growth management: DUI ... by gimleteye

It is a very poorly kept secret: how Miami-Dade state legislators vanish like smoke, once a year, to a place called Tallahassee. No one knows what goes on there, except for a few journalists given insufficient space to detail the rape and pillage that passes for governance. (please click, 'read more')

That suits the lobbyists and deal-makers just fine. Its part of the grand charade and persuasion game that perpetuates government by special interest.

The most cynical and worst bills making their way through the Republican Legislature-- unmarred by a Democratic minority-- is the effort to neuter the Florida Department of Community Affairs, including eliminating the state review process that has halted the movement of the county Urban Development Boundary for major developments.

SB 360 is headed to the Senate Ways and Means Committee today. If you have a moment, pick up the phone and call a few Senators: tell them what a disaster SB 360 is for Florida and for Miami-Dade.

I wonder what Governor Charlie Crist makes of this fiasco, in light of his stated opposition to Florida Hometown Democracy. In 2007, Crist said, "the hometown democracy amendment would limit the ability of local officials to make important decisions for their communities, and would lead to unnecessary delays in permitting for new business opportunities." But clearly, picking up where it left off in the last session of the legislature, Miami-Dade state legislators are urging those decisions to go directly to local elected officials. Anyone reading this blog or paying even the slightest attention knows that the worst thievery of the public interest, in respect to zoning and development, occurs right under the blissful gaze of city and county commissioners.

It doesn't make it any happier, that the Florida legislature is making the best case for Florida Hometown Democracy, that would give voters the choice whether comprehensive development plans should be amended or not. Here's an OPED from the Orlando Sentinel, that has consistently shown far more backbone that the Miami Herald on matters related to unsustainable growth. Its point could be equally said of Miami-Dade, where the only conceivable support for eliminating the Florida DCA are the supporters of Parkland. (Sergio Pino, Rodney Barreto, Ramon Rasco, Miguel De Grandy, et al. Read our archive feature, under "Parkland" and "Krome Gold", for more information.)


We're dying from plague of vacant buildings, homes

Mike Thomas
COMMENTARY
March 17, 2009
This is like watching an emphysema patient try to cure himself by smoking more.

Florida is dying from a spreading plague of vacant homes, vacant stores and vacant offices. And up in Tallahassee, the solution offered by legislators is more vacant homes, more vacant stores and more vacant offices.

Their cure for the economy is another whopping dose of everything that got us into this mess.

I don't know whether they're corrupt, stupid or simply so embedded in the Culture of Concrete they can't think outside that tiny box.

The pressure to pave permeates the Florida Capitol like skunk stink.

I once supported the Hometown Democracy referendum — which would allow citizens to vote on changes in growth plans — to protect the environment.
Now I support it to protect the economy.

Florida has 300,000 empty homes and condos, enough to put a roof over the head of everybody in Orange County.

This resulted from developers throwing them up nonstop, feeding a speculative market that had careened out of control.

The number of empty homes only will rise. Florida set another foreclosure record in February — more than 46,000 houses are now going through the process.

This spills over into the rest of the economy. It is why you see all those closed storefronts. Strip malls are vacant. Across the street from the Sentinel in downtown Orlando, an entire row of new retail space is empty. Office-vacancy rates nearby are shooting up.

Florida faces a massive and growing glut of empty space of all kinds.

And yet our state leaders say we need more concrete shells. They say the Department of Community Affairs has to go because it's just too burdensome on developers. They say growth laws are too restrictive, an amusing claim if you've ever driven around the region on the beltway. Development feeds an army of lobbyists, law firms, home builders, speculators, lenders, brokers, real-estate agents and so on. Florida is a state that grows for a living. And now that it isn't growing, the special interests in Tallahassee aren't making a living. Desperation is the result.

Making this all the more egregious is that for the first time in the history of counting people in Florida, we did not grow last year.

Florida has stagnated — an idea once as unthinkable as snowstorms in Miami. And according to the state demographers who track the data, we are going to stay stagnant for at least three more years.

So, pray tell, where are the people to live in the new homes, shop in the new stores, work in the new offices? We will need years of growth just to fill what we have.

And so every new building adds to the glut. Every home they build lowers the value of your house.

But give us more.

At the current sales pace, it would take 18months to sell all the homes on the market in the Orlando area.

But give us more.

Compared with January 2008, the median home sale price in January of this year fell 59 percent in Fort Myers, 39 percent in Fort Lauderdale, 39 percent in Miami, 41 percent in Sarasota, 33 percent in Metro Orlando and 33 percent in Tampa Bay.

But give us more.

Code-enforcement departments across Florida are swamped with complaints about overgrown yards, green pools, vagrants and vandals. Empty homes are dragging down neighborhoods and becoming crime magnets, destroying lifetime investments.

But give us more.

The same people who would give you more will say — with a straight face — that Hometown Democracy will destroy the state's economy by limiting growth. They say you aren't capable of managing growth, so leave it to the professionals. Leave it to them.

Well, we can see where that has gotten us. Do you really think that people who are put in political office by the hand of growth are going to bite it?

On the Idiocrats opposing Florida Hometown Democracy ... maybe you'll like it better, from the New York Times ... by gimleteye

The curse of production homebuilders and their influence on local politics is wreaking havoc across political, social and environmental landscapes in Florida. In many ways, the principals are still acting as though it is 2005: muscling their way through zoning and permitting changes at the county like Lennar's Parkland or a new Lowe's (both, beyond the edge of the county's urban growth boundary), or, trying to eviscerate growth regulations at the state capitol, or, trying to steer stimulus dollars from the Obama administration's initiatives, as though pouring tax dollars down a black hole is the way to get the nail guns going.

Now, with a lot of free time on their hands, we hear that the Chamber of Commerce and Associated Industries in Sarasota are withdrawing support for a candidate for local political office because that individual supports Florida Hometown Democracy, the citizen's movement to change the Florida constitution.

In "Sarasota business leaders cut ties with candidate", the Sarasota Tribune reports that city commission candidate Terry Turner, who had been strongly supported by business groups, found himself abandoned because of his $200 contribution to Florida Hometown Democracy. What Florida Hometown Democracy proposes, when it qualifies for the 2010 ballot, is to give power of the direct vote on changes to local development master plans.

By lashing out at others, Florida's business organizations avoid confronting their own culpability in the financial and economic mess unfolding across the landscape; propelled by their manipulation of "free markets" to build a vast oversupply of housing. These gears mesh directly with Wall Street excesses that rained billions in wealth to the confections of securitized debt. There will be no day of true reckoning until the accounts are settled.

We've said this for years, but maybe you'll like hearing it better from the New York Times' editorial page today, commenting on the bereft landscape of California's Inland Empire that resembles in key respects the forlorn suburbs and local economies in Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Broward, Collier and Lee Counties... to name just a few. (For the full editorial, click 'read more')

The gut reaction by Florida's Chamber and Associated Industries against Florida Hometown Democracy is ridiculous but also, in light of the economic collapse around us, the kind of misdirection of time, energy and money that deserves serious rebuke.


February 20, 2009
EDITORIAL OBSERVER
A Sinking Feeling in the Inland Empire

By LAWRENCE DOWNES
About all that’s left in the Mountain View subdivision in Perris, Calif., is the mountain view. Construction has stopped. There are tidy streets and sidewalks, but the lots above the curb cuts are just dirt. The KB Home sales office is closed. A sign taped to the door directs you down the road to Palomino where homes are still available “from the mid 100’s.”

If you want to grasp the foreclosure crisis in all its ungraspable immensity, you’d have to take in the whole country. But Perris is a good nutshell. It’s a town in the Inland Empire — where Los Angeles’s commuter sprawl meets San Diego’s. The area once prospered as a citrus wonderland, but lately its economy has been built on bedrooms: empty boxes of stucco and Spanish tile that people filled with dreams of the good life in the Golden West.

I drove around Perris this month with organizers from the Alliance for Homebuyer Justice, a project of the Laborers’ International Union of North America. The union has been organizing construction workers who built the boom and homeowners who bought into it, both of which have been left exposed and helpless by the disaster.

Like other parts of the Sun Belt, the Inland Empire was supposed to be immune to a housing downturn. But the bomb went off here, too. Housing prices in some places have collapsed 60 percent to 70 percent. Unemployment is more than 10 percent.

Perris was essentially a company town for corporate home builders. Now parts are a living foreclosure museum, with subdivisions tracing the staggering arc of boom and bust. Some still gleam. Others lie stained and rotting in the desert sun. And some, like Mountain View, are frozen, half-built: accidental monuments to mass delusion.

The housing meltdown has spawned an epidemic of blame, much of it heaped on homeowners who agreed to loans they shouldn’t have. But look closer in places like Perris and you can see how easily greed preyed on hope, how builders, lenders and marketers worked together and used high-pressure sales pitches and impenetrable piles of paperwork to push bad loans on unsuspecting buyers.

One union organizer, Chris Young, showed me mortgage documents for several homeowners who got in over their heads. Like many home buyers in this heavily Latino region, they were given the hard sell in Spanish. They said they were promised affordable, fixed-rate loans, but the buried details in the papers, in English, told another story.

They were stunned to learn that 10 years of payments would go only toward interest, and that impossibly huge balloon payments lurked down the road.

Rosa Valdez said that she found out a year and half after closing on her house that she had signed on for 10 years of paying nothing to principal. Her second piggyback mortgage requires 179 monthly payments of $608.52, followed by one payment on March 1, 2021, of $61,490.69. Laura and Carlos Naranjo’s day of reckoning is March 1, 2022, when they will have to write a check for $43,365.78.

Such exotic loans might have worked in a fantasy world of perpetually soaring home prices. But here on earth, a reckoning has come due.

In Riverside, pawnshop shelves are bursting with abandoned construction equipment: reciprocal saws, nail guns and drills. Not far from downtown Perris, with its lovely library and little restaurants, a tour of abandoned, rain-stained stucco houses shows how quickly, and badly, a failed suburb grows old.

Empty houses were marked by plywood and spray-painted graffiti tags. Mr. Young said many banks don’t bother with “For Sale” signs anymore. Investors have flipped cheap homes into rentals: starter slums. I watched a white pit bull lead two ragged mutts on a feral march through empty yards and driveways.

An agent’s flier sent us to 2047 Cherrytree Drive: four bedrooms, two-and-a-half baths, 1,356 square feet. In 2004, it sold for $247,500. A year and a half later, it went for $325,000.

Now it’s listed at $98,000.

I left town wondering what the Inland Empire might look like when the disaster passes, when places like Mountain View are finally built — or bulldozed. After the illusion evaporates, what will remain? What parts are real?

The people, of course, the families with young children who I saw overflowing the Spanish Mass at Corpus Christi Church in Corona. And the orange groves, trees bursting, spilling fruit onto the cold February ground.


Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
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Can we please bulldoze the builders off the political map? ... by gimleteye

Developers are using the financial crisis as an excuse to deregulate!

The Idiocrats are hoping to do what they could not finish during the disgraceful terms of former Gov. Jeb Bush: dismantle growth management regulations in the state of Florida. You don’t have to be a cross-eyed economist to know that the collapse of real estate markets is due to a vast over-supply of existing residential and commercial space meeting up with a tidal wave of foreclosures.

That's not the reality the builders want to hear. Why? It puts off the recovery to the balance of the free market. To find a new equilibrium according to the laws of supply and demand could take years, even a decade, to work out. So while a trillion dollars is going to seek to redress the sins of hundreds of trillions that exploded from artificial manipulation of the "free market", the builders in Florida have another plan.

Jeb's former appointee and mouthpiece, Rep. Trudi Williams, R-Fort Myers, tells the St. Pete Times: "We've got to get permits going and flowing... We need to make some incentives for people to revitalize our economy."

So how would the builders get the nail guns going, the particle board flying off pallets, the plumbing supplies dropping off storage racks? By beheading their totemic enemy: regulation. Regulation that impedes the "free market". That would be the same free market that they cannot abide when it comes to balancing vast over-supply they caused with demand that they helped to artificially inflate.

For decades, critics of growth-at-any cost policies were thrashed by Florida’s public officials; from local city commissions to county commissions and the state legislature. Branded elitist. “I’ve got mine’ers”. Tree-huggers. Champions of big government. (Gee, that worked out well, didn't it?) At public hearings, growling antagonists culled from NASCAR dads, Century 21 brokers and moms who just wanted a nearby mall were summoned to do their dirty work. And if that didn’t do the job, SLAPP suits and new prohibitive legislation kicked in the balance.

Now there’s a new card in the deck: if you can’t shrink government, destroy it from within and use public dollars to fill in the next bubble accruing to wealthy builders who fund political campaigns. And kill growth management.

“The economic analysis we have received suggests impact fees, concurrency rules and DRI (Development of Regional Impact) requirements ‘impede economic development’, said Don Gaetz, a Niceville Republican and longtime Miami businessman. Added Select Committee Co-Chair Jeremy Ring, a Margate Democrat: “We’re not turning back the clock. We’re creating a more streamlined process.” (Miami Today, February 12, 2009)

Critics of Florida’s reckless growth know that former Gov. Bush and his compliant legislature didn’t need to eliminate regulation, or the Florida Department of Community Affairs (the state agency that supposedly regulates growth) to neuter its work. In fact, the simple revolving door of lobbyists, industry, and public office did it quite well, thank you very much.

If you were a state regulator or government scientist, at any time in the past decade, you didn’t need The Miami Herald to reveal that more than 10,000 convicted felons were welcomed into the mortgage business by the state’s Office of Financial Regulation. That “many of those felons went on to perpetrate dishonest deeds and victimize gullible citizens” was simply another day at the office; unleashing the free market on a state that needed thousands of new residents a day to grow.

“Today there's a new wave of growth in the Sunshine State: Ghost suburbs. They're springing up from one coast to the other -- block after block of vacant, foreclosed homes, or houses that were built but never sold," reports Carl Hiassen. (“Reaping the fruit planted by Greed, Miami Herald Feburary 14, 2009) Most of those ghost suburbs are in the last ring of development that encouraged land speculators to wildly invest in the leap-frog to the next tranche of open space and farmland.

In defiance of reality, St. Lucie County just gave Lennar—the Miami-based production homebuilder— a development agreement to put 325 homes on about 156 acres, drawing heavy criticism of course. Its concession was for a three year permit, instead of five. Only a hundred miles away, in Miami-Dade, Lennar is pressing for permitting of four thousands homes called Parkland that won’t break ground until 2014. Lennar’s regional vice president, Anthony Seijas, was recently named president of the Latin Builders Association in Miami, the most corrosive influence in Florida politics. “We are fortunate to have Anthony assume this leadership responsibility at this time of flux and transition,” the LBA press release says. “His executive experience and relationships will serve the LBA and community well”.

The president of the South Florida Builders Association, Ashley Bosch, tells Miami Today, “a number of local development projects had been viable in the recent past but are no longer after awaiting a length local and state Development of Regional Impact review.”

This is simply the working-out of the Republican change philosophy advocated by free-marketeers who turned the economy into an IED in the first place.

For the Cato Institute, anti-regulation drummer Randal O’Toole expressed it clearly enough a year ago: “I am sick of everyone blaming the breakdown in the credit and housing markets on subprime loans,” says D.C.-area homebuilder Michael Hill in the Washington Post. Subprime mortgages were only a symptom of the real problem, which is unaffordable housing. But what made American housing unaffordable? Hill is silent on that question, but University of Washington economist Theo Eicher knows the answer: land-use regulation.”

In promoting this nonsense, O’Toole represents the Idiocrats whose zeal masks fraud as virtue, selective adoration of the free market, self interest as the highest good, and the demonization of regulation. (For the most acerbic news report, yet, illustrating how Florida's legislators are pushing us toward a Depression, read in its entirety the St. Pete Times article below.)

According to President Obama yesterday, “we are all going to pay for the mortgage crisis” even though only a few are responsible. Now, we are all in the same leaky boat. It’s the patriotic thing to do, to man the oars next to the dunces who threw away the life-preservers because they weighed too much.

The Wall Street bankers facing scrutiny gave up their private jets for a day and still do not cop to blame because in Congress they are still not facing their critics. If this economic calamity had happened in the 18th century all their heads would have been on pikes.

Is more growth the solution?

By Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite, Times Staff Writers 

Published Monday, February 16, 2009

Florida legislative leaders want to make it easier to get permits to destroy wetlands, tap the water supply and wipe out endangered species habitat, all in the interest of building houses, stores and offices.

They say streamlining the permitting process will get the economy moving again.
"We've got to get permits going and flowing," said Rep. Trudi Williams, R-Fort Myers. "We need to make some incentives for people to revitalize our economy."
But opponents, ranging from Audubon of Florida to the Florida League of Cities, say making permits easier to get ultimately would hurt the economy and the environment.
State officials estimate more than 300,000 Florida houses are vacant. Why add more, asked Audubon's Eric Draper.

"We do not believe the current environmental regulatory structure is the root cause of our economic problems," agreed Kurt Spitzer, who lobbies for the Florida Stormwater Association. "The problem with the Florida economy is declining home prices and tightening credit."

The groups pushing for looser permitting include such politically powerful entities as Associated Industries, the Florida Home Builders Association and the Association of Florida Community Developers.

"We need to be creating conducive conditions for more growth," said Frank Matthews, who lobbies for the builders and developers. "You know what the Florida economy is based on. It's an article of faith that those houses will one day be occupied. (The recession) is not going to last forever."

Associated Industries president Barney Bishop has been passing out a booklet headlined "Economic Stimulus Package 2.0." It prioritizes something called "Regulatory Relief," which says, "Policymakers must look at reductions in regulatory red tape as a way to stimulate business activity.''

Bishop pointed to impact fees that local governments charge developers to help pay for roads, schools, sewer lines and other public facilities for new residents. He suggested a temporary suspension of those fees, as well as easing the challenge to such fees in the future.

Senate Bill 630, sponsored by Sen. Mike Bennett, R-Bradenton, would block local governments from collecting impact fees on new development through 2012. Another Bennett bill, Senate Bill 360, calls for eliminating most state growth-management review of big, new developments proposed for Hillsborough County and a host of other cities and counties around Florida.

The home builders, meanwhile, want to reduce the number of agencies that have a say on development permits. Matthews called it "less overlap, less duplication."
Take endangered species habitat, he said. Right now a federal agency, the U.S. Fish and Widlife Service, as well as the state's Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and various local governments all get to comment on permits regarding destruction of that habitat.

"We like the idea of having a single regulatory body in charge of a single subject matter," he said.

The same goes for Florida's wetlands. Wiping out wetlands requires a permit from the state that says the project won't harm water quality, and another from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that says it's in the public interest under the Clean Water Act.
However, those agencies rarely reject a permit, which is why Florida lost an estimated 84,000 acres of wetlands to houses, stores, roads and parking lots between 1990 and 2003, according to a St. Petersburg Times analysis of satellite imagery.

The state's wetlands permitting criteria have failed to halt pollution from fertilizer-laden stormwater runoff, which has spurred toxic algae blooms in the St. Johns River and other waterways. Last month U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials announced they would impose new, tougher runoff restrictions because the state's criteria weren't working.

Some counties such as Hillsborough have their own wetland rules that are more stringent than the state or federal regulations. The builders have tried before to pre-empt those local rules.

"We're hoping we can move the ball forward a little more," Matthews said.
Williams said she was charged with pushing regulatory reform by former House Speaker Ray Sansom.

Sansom's ties to a Panhandle developer and a community college led to a grand jury investigation and his ouster from that post this month. But Williams said she and other leaders are still pursuing a rollback in regulations.
Williams, an engineer who has worked for some of Florida's biggest developers, chairs the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Committee, which has a scheduled workshop today. The agenda lists one item for the two-hour meeting: "Workshop on streamlined permitting issues."

Williams said she wants to hear other people's ideas for speeding up permits, but she has a few of her own. For one thing, she said, she'd like to see the state water managers make it easier to get permits to take large quantities of water for new development.

Williams said she would also like to see the state wetlands permitting process cut in half. State law now requires approval or rejection of a permit within 90 days or the permit is automatically approved. She suggested cutting that to 45 days. A Times analysis of state permits found that in 2003 the average processing time was 44 days.
Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.