State: Gate open to growth, critics say

As a community plans to replace forest and farmland with subdivisions and shopping centers, it assures the public that the state will watch every step.

"They have to look at it and approve it," said Brooksville council member Mary Staib. "And if they don't, it has to go back to the drawing board."

But critics say the state is stepping back from its role as the guardian against sprawling development. As evidence, they point to statistics from the state Department of Community Affairs, which must approve proposals from local governments to change their comprehensive plans.

Through most of the 1990s, the department struck down an annual average of 15 percent of such proposals, which serve as blueprints for development. Since the beginning of 1999, when Gov. Jeb Bush took office, the average per year has been just 2.3 percent.

Land use activists say the numbers are the clearest sign yet the Bush administration is working to undermine the 1985 Growth Management Act, the law that required local comprehensive plans and gave the Department of Community Affairs, or DCA, the power to enforce them.

"They really have, in my mind, abdicated their responsibility," Tom Reese, an environmental lawyer from St. Petersburg, said about the department. "They came in with the idea of local government control and ignored the realities of what that can mean and that led to the Growth Management Act in the first place."

Charles Pattison, executive director of 1000 Friends of Florida, agreed: "The emphasis has switched from strict compliance to a more deferential attitude."

But Sonny Timmerman, the director of the DCA's Division of Community Planning, said the figures don't indicate a failure to supervise growth, just a different approach.

"We're trying to work with (local governments) informally in advance so we minimize this finding of not in compliance. That creates a lot of headaches for everyone," Timmerman said.

"Technical assistance has been a big issue for Gov. Bush," his press secretary, Elizabeth Hirst, wrote in an e-mail. "He believes we should work with a community to get it right on the front end."

A reduced role?

Shortly after Bush took office, his new DCA secretary, Steve Seibert, wrote a report that advocated reducing the state's role in local planning.

A bill to accomplish that was introduced in the Legislature in 2000. Though it failed, most of its aims have been accomplished by cutting the department's funding and by generally encouraging it to go easy on regulation, Reese and others said.

Last year the DCA wrote an internal memo stating its intention to cut in half the number of plan reviews. Bush has led by example, environmentalists and local officials said.

He has pushed to spend public money for infrastructure to support St. Joe Co.'s ambitious developments in the Panhandle. Last year he voted, with the majority of the Cabinet, to allow the building of a long-dormant 2,400-house subdivision on a Lake County hilltop called Sugarloaf Mountain.

"I don't think that vote would give anyone in the Department of Community Affairs any confidence" to challenge sprawl, said Hal Turville, mayor of Clermont, which is near Sugarloaf.

Funding for the division that supervises local planning has dropped from $8.9-million in 1995 to a projected $6.4-million for the upcoming fiscal year. The number of staffers has declined in that time from 89 to 68.

Timmerman said the department needs less money because it has become more efficient and so have the local governments it supervises. Cities and counties are less likely than they once were to submit plans that need a drastic overhaul. His department can allow them to handle reviews of smaller projects that have little impact.

"Ten or 12 years ago, many of these governments didn't have nearly the planning staff they have today," Timmerman said.

Also, he said, his department has held on to as many planners as possible while cutting administrative workers. Of the eight positions eliminated most recently, only one was a planner, he said.

But Turville said less money necessarily means a less effective agency.

"If you are not funded adequately," he said, "then I think your demise is pretty much predictable."

Remaking the landscape

The results of DCA's approach are beginning to change the landscape throughout the state, said Reese and Richard Rosso, general counsel for the Environmental and Land Use Law Center in Fort Lauderdale.

They listed the following examples:

The department's policy of limiting reviews to major projects has come at the expense of the Florida Keys, where small projects are chipping away at the health of its fragile ecosystem. "It's death by 1,000 cuts in the Keys," Rosso said.

The department is supporting a massive rewrite of the Martin County comprehensive plan, widely regarded as one of the best in the state, to allow large increases in commercial development.

In Pasco County, the state approved a comprehensive plan amendment to allow the building of Connerton, a 15,000-unit development on 8,000 acres of pasture in central Pasco County far from any established shopping areas or urban services.

In St. John's and Duval counties, the DCA has granted approval for the 14,200-unit Nocatee development. Like Connerton, it includes its own town center. "Nocatee will create a massive new city three times the size of the city of St. Augustine," says the Sierra Club Web site. "(It) threatens to push sprawl far into the region's open space and sensitive wetlands."

Timmerman said the DCA considers the pattern of these new developments, not just their size.

Connerton is an example of new urbanism, he said. It is designed as a compact, self-contained town that can provide its own services, which will reduce the impact on the surrounding community.

"(Connerton) is state-of-the-art in planning," he said. "It encourages walking trips, bicycling trips and shortens car trips. It's not just a subdivision. It is not just houses."

The DCA has the flexibility to allow innovative developments, he said, but the state's growth law has strict rules the department must follow.

But Rosso said such approvals show how easily that law can be manipulated.

One of the primary principles of the Growth Management Act was to establish limits on the total amount of land local governments could set aside for residential and commercial development. Comprehensive plans are supposed to allow enough space for anticipated population increases but not enough for speculation.

To get Connerton through, however, the county created a new category for so-called new towns, Reese said. That effectively allows Pasco County to add large areas of residential and commercial land though the department had previously found it has plenty of both.

One part of the Growth Management Act, however, is very strongly written, Rosso said. That is the section that gives great legal weight to the Department of Community Affairs' decisions.

That means once the department gives its approval for projects, they are almost impossible to challenge. So when the DCA backs bad development -- as he said it has increasingly done -- it becomes a force to protect sprawl rather than control it.

"What DCA says, goes," Rosso said. "It's almost worse that they are involved rather than having local control."

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Lucy Morgan

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