Bush plans looser guide for growth

The current curbs on development don't work well, many agree. But critics worry that changes will be for the worse.

By JULIE HAUSERMAN

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 25, 1999

TALLAHASSEE -- Gov. Jeb Bush's administration is embarking on a monumental rewrite of Florida's Growth Management Act, and officials may even toss out the rules that have guided development in every Florida county for 14 years.

The rewrite quietly began a few months after Bush took office this year, with an internal draft "white paper" written by top officials at the state's land planning agency, the Department of Community Affairs.

The internal report says the 1985 Growth Management Act, which aimed to deal with clogged roads, shoulder-to-shoulder condominiums, endless strip malls and mushrooming subdivisions, hasn't lived up to its promise. State officials say it's time to try a new approach.

When the law went into effect 14 years ago, it forced every Florida community, for the first time, to write a comprehensive plan to guide growth. The state got new veto power over local development decisions.

Many counties passed laws that made developers help pay for roads.

But now, Bush and Steve Seibert, a former Pinellas County commissioner who is secretary of community affairs, say the state should back off a bit and let local governments have more control in shaping development.

"I know that I'm making a lot of people nervous," Seibert said. "I think we can trust local communities to make their own decisions. There is an arrogance at the state level that we know how to do it better. "I look around and I don't care whether it's a homebuilder or a Sierra Club member, they tell me that our current system is broken. DCA has a billion rules that everyone has to comply with. Maybe we have to back off of some of those rules and focus on things that are truly of compelling state interest."

The growth management rewrite is just one of many minirevolutions going on at state agencies since the Republican governor took control. At the Department of Children and Families, the Bush administration plans to transform the state's social services network by having private, non-profit groups run foster care, adoption and mental health services.

Bush has emerged as a moderate on many state issues, but he has long been a supporter of the private property rights movement, whose conservative backers hold up growth management laws as an exceptionally heavy-handed form of government.

During his career as a Miami developer, Bush was on the receiving end of growth management rules. Environmentalists worry that he will use his power to turn back years of hard-won development controls.

"Tell them to chill out," Bush said last week.

But even some prominent voices in Bush's own party say it is folly for the new Republican administration to think about cutting back on state oversight of local planning. Floridians are still paying, they say, for bad decisions that local governments made before the state became the top development cop.

"It's a bona fide conservative position to say: Let's get the flinty-heads from Tallahassee out of our local government's worry zone," said Nathaniel Pryor Reed of Jupiter Island, a prominent Republican environmentalist who worked for President Richard Nixon and has served as an environmental adviser to numerous Florida governors. "But in a state that's terribly ecologically sensitive, that's not a very wise decision. To make comprehensive planning really work, there has to be a review process with veto power at DCA and the governor and Cabinet level."

When the state enacted the Growth Management Act in 1985, Reed and others formed a non-profit group, 1000 Friends of Florida, to make sure government held firm on the new law.

"As long as there are county commissioners who are more interested in helping developers than they are in protecting the environment," Reed said, "we're not going to get anywhere."

Tom Pelham, a respected land-use lawyer who was community affairs secretary under Republican Gov. Bob Martinez, agrees:

"I go around the state and I still shake my head at some of the things local commissions do: ignore their plan, violate their plan again and again. It may not be that there's anything wrong with what's on paper. It may be that these laws are being ignored."

State Sen. Jack Latvala of Palm Harbor, the Republican majority leader, said he, too, is wary about taking away state oversight.

"If I had my way, I'd tighten it down," Latvala said, pointing to the gaudy jumble along U.S. 19 through Pasco and Pinellas counties as one example of development without proper controls. "I just don't know how we can keep putting shopping centers and apartment complexes in where we don't have the infrastructure."

Ultimately, any decisions about growth-management rules will be made by the Legislature. But the Bush plan will carry a lot of weight, especially since the administration doesn't expect to unveil its new proposal until 2001. By that time, the state's term-limits law will have ousted many experienced lawmakers. In 2001, there will be almost no one left in the Legislature who was there in 1985 when the original act was passed.

"Trying to educate a new set of legislators about what growth management is about is not something that is going to be fun to do while you're trying to rewrite the growth-management law," said Kelvin Robinson, a lobbyist for the Florida League of Cities.

Initially, the Bush administration held its plans for a growth-management rewrite pretty close to the vest. The internal "white paper" was done without any public comment, which rankled many outsiders who were accustomed to the public commissions that Florida has convened over the years to study growth management.

Now, though, Seibert is pledging to seek advice from Floridians. The first step is a complicated, 38-question survey that asks about the arcane details of growth management. The survey, which Seibert warns will take an average of 30 minutes to fill out, will be available to the public on Nov. 1 on Community Affairs' Web site (http://www.dca.state.fl.us). After officials review the survey, they plan to hold public workshops around the state next spring.

Meanwhile, the state's developers are pushing for a simpler, more predictable system. Bush briefly discussed the issue in a recent meeting with the Florida Home Builders Association, said Richard Gentry, the group's executive director.

"The state will employ the carrot and stick to somehow stop sprawling development," Gentry said. "As someone who is likely to get hit with either the carrot or the stick, obviously, I'd like a lot more carrot."

Wade Hopping, who also lobbies for developers, said he'd like to see the state speed up the process, in part by limiting citizen challenges.

"We've really got people who've almost made a career out of making these challenges (to development) to the comp plan," said Hopping, who used the growth-management act himself this year to fight a group that wanted to put a tai chi center in his Tallahassee neighborhood.

Environmental lawyer Casey Gluckman was one of a handful of people who helped write the 1985 act, and she has worked on subsequent revisions. She says the biggest failure has been that "citizens just have an almost impossible task to enforce the law as it is."

"There are a lot of citizens who care about their communities and don't want them to turn into what I call the red-and-yellow plastic sign jungle with bumper-to-bumper traffic," Gluckman said. "Has the Growth Management Act worked? No. Show me a mall that's been denied. Show me a big developer who has made major campaign contributions who has had his project denied. Show me a road extension through sensitive areas that's not been built. There are pitifully few examples."

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