Supporters of Amendment 4 / Florida Hometown Democracy have repeatedly claimed that while Amendment 4 requires all comprehensive plans and comp plan changes to be put to a vote at "the next regularly-scheduled election", the proposed Amendment 4 "does not require special elections."
This is not true.
The city of St. Pete Beach, Florida learned this the hard way. In 2006, St. Pete Beach adopted Amendment 4 - style land use regulations that require all comprehensive plans and all comprehensive plan changes to be put on the ballot. St. Pete Beach's regulations and Amendment 4 are functionally identical because both require a referendum vote of the people before approval of all comprehensive plans and comprehensive plan changes.
St. Pete Beach residents soon learned that Amendment 4 - style rules DO require special elections, even though the literal language of such regulations does not appear to require them.
How is this possible?
The answer is simple. If a city's next regularly-scheduled election has no contested candidate races, then, as a result of Amendment 4, the only item that would be placed on the ballot would be the comp plan/amendment.
Ordinarily, if a city has no contested candidate races, the city saves money because it doesn't have to hold an election. Under Amendment 4, if a city has no contested candidate races, but if it does have a comp plan or comp plan amendment, then the city is forced to make a choice: either it refuses to put the comp plan/amendment on the ballot, (thus waiting for the next regularly scheduled election in hopes that there will be a contested candidate race), or the city must hold a special election in which the only item on the ballot is the comp plan/amendment.
St. Pete Beach has learned this is not a remote, rare or unique possibility because it has had no contested candidate races in 2009 and 2010, BOTH of its past TWO "regularly scheduled" elections. Like most cities, the cost of an election is significant: in St. Pete Beach an election costs roughly $20,000. County-wide elections can cost $1.0 million.
If St. Pete Beach had had a comp plan/amendment in late 2008 or early 2009, it would have had to either pay to hold a special election to put it on the ballot, or defer to the next "regularly scheduled" election, hoping that the next election would have a contested candidate race that would require holding an election. If St. Pete Beach had waited until 2010, it would have faced the same problem again, since the 2010 election was also uncontested. Thus, the only way to avoid the continual delays would be for the city to pay to hold the "functional equivalent" of a special election.
Fortunately for St. Pete Beach, we did not have a comp plan/amendment to put on the ballot, but if we did, our Amendment 4-style rules would have forced us to pay to hold a special election. In fact, in March, 2010, St. Pete Beach did hold an election in which the only item on the ballot was a change to the city's community redevelopment plan.
Of course, the alternative to paying to hold a special election is to simply do nothing...to let comp plans/amendments sit, to subject them to continual delay. A cynical observer might well wonder whether this is a result that would actually please the anti-development folks, but I choose not to view this debate through such a tainted lens.
Instead, I simply want all Floridians to realize that they should not take at face value the claims of Amendment 4 supporters who are assuring Floridians that their proposed constitutional amendment will not cause their cities to incur the cost of special elections, because, as St. Pete Beach learned, that claim is simply not true.
