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Our growth rules still warm, but burial plotted
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 5, 2001 Allow me to pick on Pasco County, the first place I lived in Florida, for the greater purpose of talking about where the entire state is heading today. This was in 1982. I lived seven miles from work, in Port Richey. It took about 45 minutes to get there because U.S. 19, which was mostly four lanes, was always bumper to bumper. When it rained, because there was no drainage, everything flooded. The usual sequence went like this: rain and hail. Flooding. Mosquitoes. Frogs. Here is how you built something in Pasco County: A builder would carve up a piece of land along U.S. 19 and name it something like "Deer Creek" or "Fox Woods." He would build a bunch of crappy, inch-thick streets, designed to last about a month, connected to the main highway in exactly one place. You were supposed to build a sewer system, although one guy famously built a shell of a building, and ran a pipe to the gulf. All of this was okay because the Pasco County Commission said it was okay. The reasons the County Commission said it was okay were many and complicated, and went far beyond the fact that the chairman of that board was for sale, and later went to prison. The men who carved up west Pasco for a living held great sway with the County Commission. They were addressed respectfully in public meetings. Their lawyers, most of whom were connected to the commissioners through a twisted network of small-town ties, always won their zoning cases. In short, the story of Pasco County was pretty much the story of lots of places in Florida that cashed in their quality of life in return for cheap and easy growth. There were bribery scandals in Pinellas and Hillsborough, too. In fact, the feds once hauled off a majority of the Hillsborough commission. By the early 1980s, Florida was waking up to a terrible growth hangover. There were not enough schools, not enough roads, not enough sewers, not enough police, not enough anything. And the people, looking at their flooded lawns and crumbling curbless streets, began to cry out, saying, we were wrong, there is more to life after all than a $20,000 cinder block box, cheap taxes, a warm winter and a dirt-and-house-trailer golf course nearby. In 1985, the Florida Legislature did something amazing. It decided that when a county or a city allows unrestrained growth, it affects all of us. So the Legislature passed a law called the Growth Management Act. The most important part of this law was a doctrine called "concurrency." When a local government allowed a big new development, it had to make sure there would be enough schools, roads and other public services. If necessary, the developer himself would have to pay. How the developers hated it! They howled and cursed, but the local pols could not help them. Their big projects, called Developments of Regional Impact, had to fit into the plan. They had to pay for new kinds of things: turn lanes. Traffic signals. But the worm always turns. People forget why things are the way they are, and say: Darn these old rules! So in 1998, we elect a young Republican governor, a developer himself, who moved to Florida just about the time the state was waking up to its mistakes. And the governor says: Let's have a commission to get rid of these old laws! Anybody who likes them, or who says let's improve them instead of just throwing them out, is in favor of Big Government and is a Liberal. So he forms the Growth Management Study Commission. And you know what the governor's commission is recommending to the Legislature this year? It is recommending: Let's get rid of these state controls on growth! The local governments know best, after all. And I am thinking, this might be a good time to go buy some swampland in Pasco County, and name it "Deer Forest," or maybe, "Owl Lakes."
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