Lack of growth plan concerns very few

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By MARTIN DYCKMAN

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 16, 2000

TALLAHASSEE -- As a Marine general, Bob Milligan could expect straight answers. As Florida's comptroller, he can't.

At Tuesday's Cabinet meeting, Milligan asked David Struhs, the secretary of environmental protection, whether letting two companies lay fiber-optic cables in Florida's Atlantic waters would make it harder to establish a specific corridor for such cables in the future.

A corridor could minimize the risk of damage to sea grasses and coral reefs, so Milligan had a good question. But beyond saying that it was an "interesting question," even an "excellent" one, Struhs couldn't or wouldn't say yes or no. "I think the answer is yes, or darn near," said Milligan, who gave up in exasperation after his fourth attempt to get Struhs to say so.

An even better question would have been why it is taking the state by such surprise, this late in the digital age, that the marine cable business is booming, that perhaps Florida should charge fees, and that a conservation corridor might be needed. But for some conservationists making a fuss, no one would know. Who's in charge of state planning?

Everyone, and no one. Florida's planning process is a colossal farce.

A Comprehensive State Plan fills 22 single-spaced pages, but you probably couldn't find one pol in a thousand who knows where to find it (Chapter 187, Florida statutes) let alone what it says about education, health, public safety, natural resources, or anything else.

Each agency is required to maintain and update its own -- but only its own -- plan to justify its budget. The process accomplishes nothing else.

"We don't know where we're going. There's not a vision for Florida," says Steve Seibert, the secretary of community affairs, who calls the comprehensive plan "a sham" because it's not prioritized.

This is how much of a sham it is: Legislative committee staffs analyze each bill up for hearing. They are required to address certain obvious questions such as the potential costs to state and local governments. Since the House's cultural revolution a few years ago its staff has also been required to run an ideological check list as to whether the bill supports less government, lower taxes, individual freedom, personal responsibility and family empowerment. But no one ever asks how the bill might fit or conflict with the state plan. No one wants to know.

Last year, for example, the Legislature shut down state inspections of worker safety at private businesses, leaving that to the feds. This year, it left state and local workers unprotected by anyone. Conveniently, no staff report pointed out how those actions were at cross purposes with section (6)(b)2d of the Comprehensive Plan, which stipulates that "Every employer shall provide a safe and healthful workplace."

"It's been a decade since I've had to encounter it for anything," a legislative staffer remarked last week. "It it were relevant to what's going on, we'd all have it on our desks."

The only planning that seems to matter these days is how to win -- or at least not lose -- the next election.

Florida once was led by people with longer visions. I am indebted to Lance deHaven-Smith, associate director of the Florida Institute of Government at Florida State University, for the following history.

When Reubin Askew was governor (1971-1979), the Legislature passed a comprehensive planning act but the document that resulted was so impossibly long and detailed -- thousands of policies in two volumes -- that Askew did not send it back to the Legislature for adoption.

The current plan was adopted in 1985, during Bob Graham's term, but with a crippling amendment requiring that its goals and policies "shall be reasonably applied where they are economically and environmentally feasible, not contrary to the public interest, and consistent with the protection of private property rights." To make it even more useless, legislators insisted that the plan "be construed and applied as a whole," with no goal or policy "applied in isolation" from the others. The plan was intended merely to be a "direction-setting document," providing "long-range" (but toothless) policy guidance for the state.

Despite that, it produced what seemed to be promising results. In 1987, a commission chaired by banker Charles J. Zwick calculated that the state would have to raise an additional $52.9-billion over the ensuing decade to meet the plan's goals. That motivated the Legislature and Graham's successor, Bob Martinez, to adopt the most significant tax reform in Florida's history, an extension of the sales tax from goods to services. But they were motivated right out of it when the media and other special interests pitched a giant fit.

Planning then took a hiatus until Gov. Lawton Chiles established the Florida Commission on Government Accountability to the People -- GAP, for short -- to keep track of how well Florida was faring in nearly 270 benchmark statistics such as wages, poverty, juvenile crime, infant mortality and wildlife habitat. As soon as it could, naturally, the Legislature got rid of the GAP commission.

The state plan continues to gather dust. So does the report of the Zwick Commission, perhaps the most lyrical document ever produced at public expense.

"The dreams we share for Florida are like the stars themselves, shining in the night sky," it concluded. "We can't touch them. But we can see them. And if, like the navigators who sailed with that first of all Florida's dreamers, Ponce de Leon, we use the stars of our dreams to guide us, then we will find our destiny as a state."

How can we follow our stars, when we can't even follow a plan?

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