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For a better Florida

Growing pains

By DAN DeWITT
Published February 27, 2005

	Previous coverage: Board exams Seven-year itch Those pesky amendments

BROOKSVILLE - Twelve years ago, the St. Lucie County Commission approved a subdivision on 164 acres in a rural part of the county.

The state Department of Community Affairs, which is responsible for reviewing such decisions, determined the project was just the kind of sprawl prohibited by the 1985 Growth Management Act. A state hearing officer agreed.

Then the issue went before then-Gov. Lawton Chiles and the Florida Cabinet. They overruled the hearing officer, and Chiles castigated Community Affairs leaders for asking him to consider such a trivial matter.

"It totally demoralized the department," said Charles Lee, senior vice president of Florida Audubon. "From that day forth, the agency has basically tucked into its shell and has done little to pursue responsible growth management."

Chiles wasn't the only governor to undercut growth management. Most other environmentalists say DCA's real retreat has happened under Gov. Jeb Bush, as the state has dramatically reduced the number of developments it denied. One of the law's architects says growth management actually was doomed back in the 1980s, when then-Gov. Bob Martinez, who had built a strong DCA, dropped his support of a sales tax on services that would have helped pay for the infrastructure of growth. Whoever is to blame, Floridians are overwhelmed with problems the landmark act was supposed to prevent:

* Commuters crawling to work in predawn traffic jams.

* Portable classrooms lined up like bee boxes behind schools.

* Local sales and gas taxes passed in a desperate attempt to keep up with the ballooning cost of public services.

* Bulldozers clearing an estimated 500 acres of pasture and forest per day for new development.

"The political will has never been there to either pay for the infrastructure or say no to developers," said Peter Wallace, a St. Petersburg lawyer and former House speaker who helped write the bill.

Senate President Tom Lee of Brandon, a Republican and a home builder, has come to the same conclusion the state's Democratic leadership did in 1985: For all of its economic benefits, growth is overwhelming Florida.

Fixing the problem will take money, says Lee, who has made growth management his top priority for the 2005 Legislature.

Lee said the state might reward local governments for good planning decisions - as it does high-performing schools - or buy development rights from landowners. Certainly, he said, Florida needs to spend more on public facilities.

Bush says he supports Lee's plans. "People expect roads, water and schools as a fundamental part of their community," Bush said. "It is time that we address these issues head on."

The 1985 law was inspired partly by alarm over environmental damage from careless local planning, said John DeGrove, DCA secretary at the time.

But, like Lee, leaders at the time also were trying to address what they called the "infrastructure deficit," estimated at $53-billion in a 1987 study that reached a familiar conclusion:

"Florida is a state with jammed highways, polluted natural resources, struggling schools, poorly paid teachers . . . neglected children, inadequate health care and a declining quality of life."

The growth management act was designed to staunch the bleeding with "concurrency," another buzzword of the era. This required local governments to provide roads, parks, law enforcement and utilities or to stop projects that could not be served.

Democratic Gov. Bob Graham supported the bill. So did newspapers and many business leaders. It was approved by wide margins in the Legislature.

"All the stars had to be in the right place," said then-Senate President Harry Johnston. "It was monumental at the time."

Passing the bill turned out to be the easy part.

Tom Lewis Jr., DeGrove's successor, had to write the rules to put the law into action. These have since been criticized as too complex and bogged down by minor planning considerations.

Lewis defended his work recently, saying a previous attempt at growth management, in 1972, failed because of a lack of firm requirements.

Another common complaint about one of his decisions is more valid, he said. Because of pressure from local governments, Lewis excluded schools from the law, which has meant many schools are overcrowded as soon as they open. It's his biggest regret as DCA secretary, Lewis said.

Both of these issues are addressed in a new proposal by the Department of Community Affairs that would add schools to the list of required public facilities and redirect the agency's attention to preserving large, environmentally valuable areas of the state.

"DCA needs to get out of the business of reviewing a 7-Eleven in the middle of an urban area," Charles Lee said.

To DeGrove, Lewis' actions were minor compared to those of former Republican Gov. Bob Martinez, who took office in 1987.

Martinez's record on growth management is exemplary in some ways, DeGrove and others say. Martinez appointed Tom Pelham as DCA secretary and supported Pelham's strict enforcement of the new law as local governments wrote their comprehensive plans. These plans were intended to shape future growth and, despite frequent amendments, even skeptics agree they have had lasting benefit.

But Martinez also withdrew his support of the services tax, which was passed by the Legislature in 1987 and applied to enterprises such as newspapers, advertisers and law firms. This tax would have raised $1.3-billion its first year, a figure that would have grown rapidly with the expanding service economy.

In response to the vociferous tax opponents, Martinez reversed course and successfully persuaded the Legislature repeal the tax in late 1987.

"That was the worst public policy decision ever made in the history of the state," DeGrove said.

It killed any hope of extra money to close the infrastructure gap, DeGrove said. The repeal also undermined DeGrove's plan to funnel more money to local governments that managed growth responsibly.

"That would have been a huge carrot," DeGrove said.

Though Martinez agrees that some of the service-tax revenue would have gone to new infrastructure, he says it was never linked to growth management as closely as DeGrove says. Also, Martinez said, the services tax was replaced by an additional 1-cent increase in the state sales tax.

"There's been no shortage of revenue since the 1980s," said Martinez, now a lobbyist for the Carlton Fields law firm in Tampa.

All this talk about money misses an essential point, said environmental lawyer Richard Grosso, former assistant general counsel with DCA.

Containing far-flung development saves taxpayers the expense of building miles of roads and utility lines and adding patrol cars, fire stations, parks and schools, Grosso said.

"That's the big lie, that growth management costs money," Grosso said. "The real fault here is political leadership."

Chiles ran for governor as a proponent of growth management, so many environmentalists were disappinted by his distaste for its bureaucracy and stunned by his decision on the St. Lucie development. But this did not debilitate the agency, said his DCA secretary, Linda Shelley.

"I didn't change in the way I made decisions. . . . I wasn't going to take my football and go home," she said.

Through most of the 1990s, the department struck down an annual average of 15 percent of proposed changes to local comprehensive plans.

That number dropped to less than 3 percent during Bush's first term. Steven Seibert, Bush's first DCA secretary, said this reflects his preference for negotiating issues.

"We did an awful lot of dispute resolution," said Seibert, a former Pinellas County commissioner.

Bush said he believes "locally elected officials should have the responsibility to make decisions and to accommodate the growth they approve."

Environmentalists, however, argue that's just an excuse for the state to turn its back on growth management.

Bush and the Republican-led Legislature dramatically cut the agency's funding and staffing levels. Under Seibert, DCA approved several large, environmentally irresponsible developments, such as Nocatee in Duval and St. Johns counties, environmentalists say.

The state accelerated the construction of turnpikes, including the Suncoast Parkway, that opened vast rural areas to development. More recently, Bush has pushed for the construction of the Scripps Research Institute - which he calls a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we have to seize" - though one proposed site is in rural Palm Beach County on the edge of the Everglades.

Under Bush, DCA's objections to development could usually be satisfied by documentation rather than substantial planning changes, said Lesley Blackner, an environmental lawyer from West Palm Beach.

"The government has turned a blind eye," said Blackner, "and the whole process has become a paper exercise."

Blackner also suspects Tom Lee and Jeb Bush are more interested in dismantling the growth management law than reforming it.

Lee is a home builder, and Bush was in the development business. The lead fundraiser in both of Bush's gubernatorial campaigns was Al Hoffman Jr., the recently retired CEO of WCI Communities Inc., one of the state's largest developers. St. Joe Co., the state's largest private landowner and another of Bush's supporters, donated the property on which DCA built its Tallahassee headquarters in 1996 - far from the urban core, and right next to a new St. Joe housing and office development.

Bush has backed even the company's most controversial plans, including building a new airport near Panama City.

"All the decisionmakers are controlled by the growth industry," Blackner said.

Others are more optimistic, saying Bush is more committed to controlling growth.

The governor has repeatedly pushed for school concurrency. Last year, he vetoed a bill that would have allowed some farmers to develop their land without the oversight of local government. He advocated and later signed a bill that protected the headwaters of the Wekiva River from the growth advancing north from Orlando.

Tom Lee seems to understand an original justification for the Growth Management Act, said Charles Pattison, executive director of 1,000 Friends of Florida: Unrestrained growth will cripple Florida's economy.

"Growth management is in his economic self-interest," Pattison said of Lee.

"As a (builder), what he's really doing is selling a quality of life. And he can't sell it if the environment is screwed up and the roads are clogged and the schools are no good."

[Last modified February 27, 2005, 00:13:19]