Developers block environmentalist ballot plans

TALLAHASSEE - It may be one of the costliest ballot fights voters won't see at the polls this year.

Since 2004, a few wealthy environmentalists backing the Florida Hometown Democracy campaign had hoped to force public votes on big development decisions. But this winter, they ran into one of the more sophisticated opposition campaigns business groups in Florida have launched in years.

Associated Industries of Florida used a new law to revoke more than 18,000 valid voter signatures, after sending out mailers to those who signed it from former House Speaker John Thrasher warning Hometown would destroy Florida's "scenic beauty."

The Florida Chamber of Commerce raised $3 million through a political arm called Floridians for Smarter Growth to run a similar-sounding initiative petition and hire away Hometown's paid petition-gatherers. When the signature-gathering company Hometown hired upped what it paid to workers, so did the Chamber.

And in the weeks before the Feb. 1 deadline for counties to verify signatures - with county offices busily processing early voting and absentee ballots for Florida's Jan. 29 presidential primary - the Chamber's group flooded counties in five key congressional districts where Hometown was gathering signatures in South Florida, Sarasota, and parts of the Panhandle.

"Everyone got buried," said Volusia County Elections Supervisor Ann McFall, whose office got 3,000 signatures after Tuesday's primary from the chamber's group and another petition-group trying to ban gay marriage.

The main objective: match any counties where Hometown Democracy was dropping off signatures with an equal amount of their own, thereby slowing down the processing and ensuring their own amendment would make the 2008 ballot only if Hometown's did too.

"Clearly, there's a block and tackle strategy," said Chamber Vice President Mark Wilson, who oversees the business group's political operations.

It worked.

By Friday, Hometown fell 65,182 signatures short of the 611,009 needed to make the ballot.

Hometown co-founder Lesley Blackner, a Palm Beach land-use lawyer, said her group got bogged down when its signature-gathering firm quit late last year after the chamber-backed group had driven up the cost per-signature for her paid petition-gatherers.

Blackner conceded the people she hired as replacements submitted "some bad signatures" in the final rush "and it took me a while to catch on to that."

In the aftermath, the business-backed campaigns argued that Hometown Democracy failed to make the ballot for one overriding reason: voters didn't agree with it.

"The people just didn't support this," said Wilson, who pointed to other environmental groups like Audubon and 1,000 Friends of Florida that refused to support it.

Blackner, though, said the business groups changed the rules of the fight to suit their purposes.

"They really don't care about fair play," she said. "They will do anything to win."

Indeed, alarmed developers, home builders and business groups argued the amendment would throw sand in the gears of Florida's economy.

Business lobbyists won passage last spring of a new law that would allow voters to revoke their signatures on ballot initiatives up to 150 days after they gave them.

Development lawyers then successfully convinced the Division of Elections last summer to make the new the law retro-active, so signatures given 150 days before the law officially went on the books could be revoked.

Ion Sancho, the outspoken Leon County elections supervisor, said the changes made last year create "all kinds of problems" for supervisors, when signature groups game the system.

"This really is inappropriate to use the election laws and procedures and change them for one side to get a political advantage," said Sancho.

AIF's revocation push didn't make the difference in keeping Hometown off the ballot.

But it dropped Hometown below the required minimum amount of signatures in one Broward County Congressional district it previously had secured, leaving the movement with only 9 of 13 districts short of the mandate that signatures meet certain levels I half the state's districts.

"It's the way of the future," said AIF President Barney Bishop.

"What we did in these last four and half months is the first time anywhere in the country where there's been an organized effort to get people to revoke their signatures."

While hardly the first campaign to pit environmentalists fighting unbridled development against a business industry that preferred the status-quo, businesses unleashed a new kind of double-barreled assault.

And because the requirements for signature-gathering are based on turnout in the last presidential election, Hometown will likely need a lot more signatures if it hopes to make the 2010 ballot.

"Democracy requires a sense of fair play, and they play gutter politics," Blackner said. "I think we can get enough signatures to overcome them."

Aaron Deslatte can be reached at 850-222-5564, or at adeslatte@orlandosentinel.com.