Is the party really over for developers?

Tom Pelham can ruin a good party.

Pelham, Florida's prophet of doom, shows up at gatherings of deal makers and their subservient politicians and sucks the fun out of the room.

Pelham, head of the Florida Department of Community Affairs, a k a the Secretary of Woe, was back at it last week, warning a state Senate committee that its days of unbridled exuberance were nearly over. He warned that the electorate, seething with frustration over uncontrolled development, was contemplating something terrible.

That something terrible would be the Hometown Democracy Amendment.

The very thought of HDA agitates developers, Realtors and their minions in elected office. The hated amendment -- if ever allowed on the ballot -- would require local governments to stick with their growth management plans -- unless voters approve changes.

FOLLOW THE PLAN

To most of us, that might not seem wildly unreasonable. We'd just as soon developers stick to the growth plans, which, after all, are about as restrictive as Aunt Mable's big red muumuu.

But local governments have come to regard the rules as empty words. Pelham notes that local governments in Florida altered their growth management plans 8,000 times in 2005. (The number reportedly reached 12,000 in 2007.)

Denuded growth management plans failed to keep the suburbs from sprawling with more homes than Florida had buyers. Or keep high rise condos (lately the home of Mr. and Mrs. Default) off the barrier islands.

Pelham seems to think the public isn't stupid. He warned that unless the state adopts something like the Citizens Planning Bill of Rights, his own proposal to slow the rape of growth plans, voters would embrace HDA.

Without some tepid enforcement of the rules, Pelham warns, the building industry will face that awful instrument of horror -- direct democracy. ''We need to get our planning house in order and regain the confidence of the citizenry,'' Pelham says on his agency's website.

But the big strategy against the Hometown Democracy Amendment, so far, has been to change the rules, disregard petitions, find astounding excuses to toss signatures and to run a faux petition campaign designed to clog up the verification process.

CHANGING THE RULES

Ion Sancho, the maverick Leon County elections supervisor, said Monday he has watched, amazed, as the rules for mounting citizen initiatives have been strategically altered just to subvert the Hometown Democracy Amendment.

''The HDA thought it was playing on one board while the game was secretly moved to another board,'' he said.

John Hedrick of the Florida Chapter of the Sierra Club, said Monday that HDA had enough valid names on its petition in time to place the initiative on the November ballot but just couldn't get the state to count them. He also rattled off new limits on constitutional initiatives he thinks were conceived mostly to keep HDA away from the voters.

So far, it has worked (although Hedrick thinks the courts could still put HDA on the ballot this fall). But Pelham is telling anyone in Tallahassee who'll listen that these nasty strategies won't be able to keep HDA off the ballot in 2010. Then the party's really over, the Secretary of Community Affairs warns.

The Legislature's response to their party pooper has not been promising. Mostly, there's been talk of just eliminating the Department of Community Affairs.