Vote on growth in 2010

As much as I wanted to vote for Ron Paul to poke a stick in the eye of establishment politicians, I wanted to vote for Florida Hometown Democracy more.

After all, Mitt Romney hasn't built a strip mall in my favorite patch of forest, but local elected officials have. Our city commissions never saw a housing subdivision they didn't like, no matter how big, how far away from town or how many untouched acres it ate up.

So imagine how delicious it would be to strip city and county councils of the authority to approve development, to repudiate their callous handling of Florida's precious lands.

Imagine is all we can do.

Hometown Democracy won't be on the ballot.

It missed getting the 611,009 signatures it needed by 65,182. Or so the department of state says. It still hasn't posted how many verified signatures the group turned in.

Considering the uber-powerful alliance out to stop Hometown Democracy, you have to question if the petition can make it into the ballot box. It's simple and subversive -- it would require that residents, not commissioners, decide what gets developed where.

If Floridians got a chance, they'd pass it.

Critics don't deny it. That's why they fought so hard to keep it out of our hands.

The state's largest industries from construction to tourism aligned against it, raising almost $4 million to quash the effort. They said that Hometown Democracy would stop development, tank the economy and turn Florida into a place fit only for nursing homes and alligators.

And they got lawmakers to go along.

In the four years since the Hometown Democracy movement surfaced, the Legislature cracked down on petition groups, limiting where they can go and how they can be paid. It allowed opposing camps to try to get supporters to revoke their signatures and applied it retroactively to target Hometown Democracy's backers. It got voters to require petitioners to collect their signatures six months earlier and to pass their measures by 60 percent rather than a simple majority.

The big business interests fielded a similar-sounding initiative, got 18,000 Floridians to take back their support for Hometown Democracy and hired away its signature gatherers.

You wonder what they'll do to stop Hometown Democracy from going to ballot in 2010.

You wonder, too, if it's worth it. You wonder if putting every development decision up to voters doesn't give deep-pocket developers an advantage. They have money to advertise and concerned residents don't. They have access to promote their projects through chambers of commerce and Kiwanis clubs and residents don't.

But Florida's system for protecting open land is a travesty. City and county council members are swayed by developers and their influential backers long before a formal vote. Unless an angry group of residents shows up with a lawyer, it's a foregone conclusion commissioners will approve the development, whatever it is.

That's why so much of Florida looks like it does -- run down and run over.

If Hometown Democracy passed, at least developers would have to make their case to the public. Sometimes they'd win, sometimes they wouldn't. No matter what, residents would have the final say.

That's better than what we've got now.

So it takes another two years before Hometown Democracy appears on my ballot. It's going to be one sweet vote.

pamela.hasterok@news-jrnl.com

-- Call Hasterok at (386) 681-2223