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“We’re
trying to manage growth with an unmanageable statute. ... It’s a mess.
It spraawwwls.”
—
Tom Pelham
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Calling growth management ‘a mess,’ new DCA Secretary
Tom Pelham wants
a rewrite.
Twenty years after he took the job of making Florida’s
landmark
growth-management law work, Tom Pelham is back and ready for a do-over.
By this time next year, Pelham hopes, Florida will have a new growth
management law, or at least a giant first step, to replace the 1985 act
as well as the Santa Claus-sized grab bag of changes the Legislature
has passed since then.
“It’s badly in need of an overhaul,” says Pelham, who
heads the
Department of Community Affairs and held the same job under Gov. Bob
Martinez from 1987-91. “We’re trying to manage growth with an
unmanageable statute. ... It’s a mess. It spraawwwls.” Then he adds,
“There’s a big hunger out there among all the interests to come
together and try to reclaim the law and make it something workable.”
If the forces of “management,” as opposed to the forces
of
“growth,” play their cards right, their negotiating position in
Pelham’s next effort at consensus will be enhanced by the threat of a
citizen initiative called Hometown Democracy, now in the
signature-collecting stage. It would give voters a veto over any change
to the so-called comprehensive land-use plans. [See related article “Who’s
Lesley Blackner?”].
Developers are appalled at the prospect of democracy
run rampant if
Hometown Democracy gets on the November 2008 ballot. Even some groups
that want tougher growth management, like 1000 Friends of Florida, have
opposed the initiative because of the likely unintended and
counterproductive consequences. Local versions have emerged. The first
was approved last year in St. Pete Beach.
“It’s public frustration that has grown into a populist
revolution,” says Patrick Slevin, a former Republican mayor of Safety
Harbor who now runs the Slevin Group, a consulting firm that helps
developers work with citizen groups before they reach the point of
“Jerry Springer episodes at city hall.” People feel the process is
unfair and overindulges development. Slevin says business groups need
to respond to the “movement,” not just the ballot initiative.
“I think we can’t ignore that,” Pelham agrees. The best
chance of
slowing the initiative’s momentum is to produce a compelling
alternative that shows “we are taking growth management seriously.”
The question is whether Pelham and his boss, Gov.
Charlie Crist, can pull that off, and do it in time.
Pelham first of all wants to “restore the Department of
Community
Affairs as an effective advocate and positive force for better planning
for growth management in our state.” It’s an interesting word,
“restore.” Gov. Jeb Bush wanted deference to local governments and
embraced developer-friendly legislation.
This year, under Pelham’s leadership, various interests
unanimously
agreed on changes to the complex growth management legislation of two
years ago. The consensus bill (SB 800) loosened some 2005 standards
significantly. But it wasn’t enough for the House, where Speaker Marco
Rubio is a zealot on property rights and where future speaker Dean
Cannon comes from GrayRobinson, a powerhouse law firm for developers
and road builders. House proposals would have eliminated DCA review in
a large number of cases. Environmental groups, which had once again
joined a “consensus” proposal only to see legislative leaders ignore
it, pushed back. In the end, DCA would be merely “encouraged” not to
review fast-tracked smaller developments, and exemptions from DCA
review would be just “pilot programs.”
If Crist had wanted to really empower his DCA
secretary, honor the
consensus-driven process and set the tone for future legislation, he
would have vetoed the final legislation (HB 7203). But he signed it
without any press release, and no one reported it. Crist could still
recover the initiative for Pelham’s next negotiations with another of
his populist crusades seizing upon “the people’s frustration” along
with a personal commitment for tougher growth management. Platitudes
like “I’m an environmentalist” won’t get the job done.
'Let cities be cities'
Even without the political challenges, Pelham has a
monstrous task.
Nobody really has a good solution to handling 400,000 new residents a
year.
Pelham says the first priority is to protect
environmentally
sensitive areas. He wants to put a lot of focus on rural areas. He says
one of the big mistakes 20 years ago was focusing on where the
population was — “from the coasts inward and from south to north” —
rather than on undeveloped areas.
Then he wants to “not only let cities be cities, but
help them be
cities.” Higher population densities, for example, can support public
transit to relieve congestion or at least keep it from getting worse as
population grows. Under current rules, including the 2007 changes, it
will almost surely get worse. Pelham says more congestion will force
more public support for public transit, and transit will be more viable
economically with higher densities. But can public transit actually be
made a convenient, comfortable, attractive alternative?
“In between” rural and urban areas, Pelham says,
developments
should be “as well planned as possible to preserve as much of our
agricultural and rural character as we can.”
Some likely elements of Pelham’s rewrite:
» Different
regulatory processes for urban and rural areas and the places in
between.
»
Further changes in concurrency rules — rules supposedly synchronizing
new development and the infrastructure to support it. On the one hand,
they have unintentionally promoted sprawl, since developers go where
there’s less congestion, and the resulting sprawl “is the biggest
generator of congestion,” Pelham says. On the other hand, because the
infrastructure improvements have to be merely in a government’s 10-year
plan, developments are still finished long before infrastructure
improvements actually happen.
»
“Improve the local planning process” and have “better citizen
participation.” The question is how. Instead of public hearings, Pelham
was asked, wouldn’t citizens prefer to stay home with their families
and have public officials do their jobs well? Pelham chuckles at the
thought and basically says he can’t count on that. Slevin’s pitch:
Require developers to consult with affected residents even before
filing a development proposal. Developers could expect greater
certainty and faster turnarounds on permitting as a result.
None of that, though, deals with how to actually
evaluate
proposals, measure their economic costs and benefits and anticipate
aftereffects. And the elephant not even in the room is education.
The location and the quality of schools have been
largely free from
the growth-management process, though school sites were a half-hearted
element of the 2005 legislation. Build a school at the edge of town,
and plans for nearby developments will pour in. Trying to deal with
growth patterns without dealing with education quality (and equality)
is a fool’s errand. Pelham mentions education only when prompted in the
interview, though he then mentions crime and healthcare as other
considerations in trying to shift more development to existing urban
areas.
Growth management has many tributaries.
“I don’t know if he can do it all in one year,” says
Charles
Pattison, president of 1000 Friends of Florida. But a frustrated
electorate seems ready to act if Pelham and Crist fall short.
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