Firm guidance needed on roads, growth

By A TIMES EDITORIAL
Published June 25, 2007

When it comes to transportation and sprawl, Charlie Crist says one thing and does another. The governor signed a bill Tuesday making it easier for the state and private companies to build new toll roads. To ease concerns the law will encourage roads to nowhere, the governor accompanied the bill with a statement calling for better efforts to control growth. Yet that was the same day he signed another bill weakening the very laws that control development. Crist is sending mixed messages and managing one of the state's biggest challenges in piecemeal fashion.

HB 985 allows investor-owned companies to lease existing toll roads and build new ones. The state would get a cut. It also would double its bonding capacity, to $10-billion, for new toll projects. This cash-now strategy ensures the public freeways will further deteriorate as a dual transportation system takes root - one for people who can afford to bypass public roads and another for everybody else.

Adding capacity is fine, and toll roads, which meet a niche demand for speed, access and service, should be part of Florida's long-term transit solution. But this law does more than add capacity. It encourages new corridors where none exist and gives the state, through revenue-sharing, a financial incentive to push development into rural Florida.

Environmental groups had asked for a veto. But all the governor delivered Tuesday was a signing statement. He said existing roads were the priority, as was improving "the link between growth management and transportation." That is precisely what this law undermines. Joint ventures with developers could last 75 years, under contractual arrangements that could not only compromise the ability of state and local governments to make sound growth, transit and environmental decisions but lock in those mistakes for generations. The bill's legislative intent was clear: "Foster economic growth and development."

Signing statements cannot rectify statutory language a governor signs. Crist approved a bill that calls for "reduced state oversight" of local planning in some of Florida's urban areas. It creates pilot projects in Pinellas and Broward counties, and in Tampa, Jacksonville, Miami and Hialeah, to fast-track land-use decisions - moves that also counter the governor's stated commitment to growth management.

Crist needs to form a comprehensive policy on transportation and articulate his vision for how Florida should grow in the coming century. His mixed messages make planning difficult and risk alienating people on every side of the development debate.

[Last modified June 24, 2007, 20:30:07]