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A Times Editorial
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 2, 2000
Chris Corr, a prominent developer whom Gov. Jeb Bush appointed to his Growth Management Study Commission, took on the job thinking, as he told this newspaper, that there wouldn't be time to do "much beyond tinkering with the present system." Corr added, "But I do know that if we did nothing else but change the attitude of the bureaucrats, then it could all work."
If anyone's attitude needed changing, it was his. To Bush's credit, he did a pretty good job of that when he addressed the members at their second meeting last week. The governor made it plain that he doesn't expect them to settle for tinkering, that growth -- not the bureaucracy -- is the problem and that they should think big.
The "livability of our communities is at stake," he reminded them, and he assigned growth management an urgency second only to education.
The primary reason growth management has failed, some experts say, is that the law's demand for "concurrency" steers developers to suburban or rural acreage where the roads are not yet overcrowded and school needs can be satisfied after a fashion by setting aside land to build them. This is, of course, urban sprawl. Thereafter, new schools and new roads tend not to be built, with predictable consequences to quality of life. Developers' lobbyists have a point when they say they shouldn't get the sole blame for that.
The problem, Bush noted, is that developers want to build where it costs them the least, which is usually also where it costs the public the most to extend services. But what if developers could be encouraged to build where public costs would be lowest? As the governor said, inner cities already have sewer systems, utilities and transportation networks in place. Why not use incentives, he asked, to steer development there?
Bush didn't specify what incentives he had in mind. But he did say he had the commission in mind when he vetoed legislation to prohibit new school impact fees and curtail them in the 15 counties that now levy them.
"I want to have the impact fee issue on the table for you to talk about," he said.
Bush's references to fees and incentives suggest the possibility of using differential impact fees to steer development back to urban cores. That may or not follow, but if the commission fails to produce creative new approaches to growth management, it won't be because it didn't have the opportunity.