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Council lists the state's worries

The Florida Council of 100 shares results of an eight-month study with Gov. Bush and the men who would replace him.

By TOM ZUCCO and CRAIG PITTMAN
Published February 8, 2006

If the Florida Council of 100 has its way, the state's elected officials will take a hard look at affordable housing, coal and nuclear energy, globalization, and a struggling education system.

A report issued Tuesday by the Council, a bipartisan group of statewide business leaders that has been advising the governor since 1961, laid out the results of an eight-month study to determine the critical issues the state will face in the coming years. Among the findings:

The state has record low unemployment (3.4 percent), but poverty levels remain high and income levels remain low compared with national averages.

Floridians pay lower than average prices for gasoline, mostly because of the state's geographic location. But electricity prices have been rising rapidly, the result of a high reliance on natural gas and oil-fired power plants.

Florida's rapid growth has put a serious strain on its infrastructure, particularly its highways and schools, and on the state's environment.

The state's real estate boom has outpaced the state's growth rate of household income levels, significantly affecting affordable housing. From 1996 to 2004, the average price for a house in Florida rose 70 percent, 20 percent higher than the national average. In the meantime, Florida's average household income ($39,000) remains lower than the national average ($44,500).

Property insurance premiums in Florida are high and likely to rise further. Before the 2005 hurricane season, Florida had the third highest property insurance rates in the nation.

While there has been substantial improvement in elementary education, the middle and high school systems lag significantly behind national averages. Florida's university system has improved in some areas, but it awards far fewer bachelor's and post-bachelor's degrees than other states. In addition, none of the Florida's universities has an engineering program in the nation's top 49, and none ranks among the top 104 liberal arts schools.

Most of this is not new to Floridians, who in recent years have been stuck in traffic, battered by hurricanes, and bewildered by soaring property insurance, utility bills and property taxes.

By bringing these issues to state leaders now, the Council hopes to keep Florida's record growth intact.

Council members on Monday spent several hours briefing Gov. Jeb Bush and the four candidates hoping to succeed him - State Sen. Rod Smith of Alachua and U.S. Rep. Jim Davis of Tampa, both Democrats, and Attorney General Charlie Crist and Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher, both Republicans.

Details of those conversations were not disclosed, but Miami businessman Charles Cobb, who chaired the task force that compiled the report, said everyone was receptive.

"In the main," Cobb said Tuesday, "they agreed these were the broad issues."

The council also addressed issues of rising health care costs and tort reform. But education, affordable housing and energy were among the central themes.

"Our housing costs for middle income people in the state is becoming of crisis proportions," said council chairman Peter Rummell, CEO of the St. Joe Co., a Jacksonville-based developer. "We are losing companies and some are deciding not to come to Florida because of our high cost of housing for middle- and upper-income people.

"This is a major problem, but it's important to realize these are issues against a background of 31/2 percent unemployment.

"A lot of things are going extremely well."

Cobb said Florida is too dependent on expensive fuels and should look at coal and nuclear energy as alternatives.

A number of coal plants have been proposed in various parts of the state, and all of them have proven controversial. For instance, in November, after an 11-hour, all-night meeting, the St. Lucie County Commission unanimously rejected Florida Power & Light Co.'s bid to build a coal-fired generating plant.

Commissioners and residents worried about mercury and other pollutants that would come from the plant's two 500-foot smokestacks.

"This technology is not what the community wants," St. Lucie Commissioner Doug Coward said.

Two other coal plants are at the blueprint stage: a $1-billion, 750-megawatt facility for Putnam County, proposed by Seminole Electric Cooperative, and a $1-billion, 800-megawatt plant in Taylor County proposed by Jacksonville-based JEA. Protesters in Taylor County handed county officials lumps of coal during a Christmas protest against the plant, which would provide power to customers in Tallahassee.

Coal has long been regarded as a far dirtier fuel than natural gas. In 1999 the Environmental Protection Agency sued seven power companies burning coal for violating the Clean Air Act. One of them was Tampa Electric Co., which quickly settled the suit and agreed to pay a $3.5-million fine and spend $1-billion switching to gas and cleaning up its plants.

But damage to natural-gas pipelines from Hurricane Katrina pushed up prices for the cleaner-burning fuel.

No new nuclear plant has been built in the United States in three decades. But Progress Energy, whose Florida utility dominates West-Central Florida, plans by March to pick a site for its second nuclear plant in the state. Progress already operates one nuclear plant at Crystal River in Citrus County, and three others in the Carolinas.

One of the more controversial parts of the report deals with water regulation. "Overall the state has sufficient water," the report states, "but it needs to invest in distribution and would benefit from a statewide governing body."

That statement refers to a report the Council of 100 produced in 2003 that called for Gov. Bush to appoint a seven-member statewide water commission that would "identify water stress areas and designate water supply service areas" and then reroute supplies to meet demand.

News of the proposal sparked an outcry in water-rich but development-poor North Florida, but it turned out that other parts of the state had no appetite for it either.

Critics warned that quenching the thirst of one region with water from another could spark a statewide version of the Tampa Bay water wars of the 1980s and '90s. Environmental groups called for limiting growth in areas where the water supply is inadequate, rather than piping it from a rural source like the Suwannee River.

When state senators held a series of public hearings across the state on the Council of 100 proposal, they found few supporters. The last hearing, at rural Chiefland High School, drew an estimated 1,000 people, some wearing T-shirts declaring, "Our Water is Not for Sale," and toting signs that proclaimed, "Not one ... drop!"

Bush initially called the water redistribution proposal "provocative" and scolded its many critics. But after the public outcry, he announced in early 2004, an election year, that it was effectively dead because "there needs to be a few years of conversation."

In Tuesday's conference call with reporters, Rummell corrected a reporter who asked why the council was bringing this particular proposal back again.

"It's not really a proposal," he said. "It's just an issue that's been surfacing."

If the state's population continues to boom, he said, "then water, at least in some places, is going to be an issue."

Tom Zucco can be reached at zucco@sptimes.com or 727 893-8247. Craig Pittman can be reached at craig@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8530.

[Last modified February 8, 2006, 01:14:12]