Daytona Beach News-Journal (FL) - Sunday, July 12, 2009
A little more than five years ago three people asked to meet with The News-Journal editorial board to kick around a provocative idea for curbing Florida's then runaway growth. Provocative? The constitutional amendment Lesley Blackner of Palm Beach, Ross Burnaman of Tallahassee and Barbara Herrin of New Smyrna Beach outlined that day seemed cataclysmic and wholly untenable. They called it the Hometown Democracy Amendment. But after overcoming enormous hurdles, including several perniciously erected barriers by legislative lackeys of Florida's growth machine, their citizens initiative has made it to next year's general election ballot as Amendment 4. The change in the state constitution would, in essence, give voters direct veto power over every major land use change approved by local governments.
We will not support Amendment 4, though our sympathies lie with its authors' intention to restore sanity to Florida's comprehensive planning and loosen developers' steely grip on this state. Amendment 4 is unlikely to achieve those goals. It instead could make a bigger mess of community planning. It would reduce what has at least been a negotiated permitting process between developers and professional public planners to an up-or-down gamble between developers and their opponents, with too many ofFlorida's natural assets and the livability of Florida communities at stake.
And then there's the sheer volume of requests for comp plan changes, many of them routine and all very technical, that voters would have to consider on their general election ballots. For example, Volusia County had five proposed comp plan documents pending state review through the first half of this year, but it had 17 in 2007, when the economy was better. DeLand had five pending through June, and 10 overall in 2007. Trying to determine which comp plan change would be beneficial to a community and why would be confusing to many voters.
Hometown Democracy advocates say the amendment will deter requests for changes to comp plans. But since developers would have to fund ballot campaigns to support their proposed change anyway, it is more likely they would seek even more ambitious land-use changes, offer few compromises to government planners and take their chances at wooing elected officials and voters on the short-term economic promise of their projects, while downplaying the long-term negative impacts on natural resources and infrastructure. After all, the developers are generally better financed and lawyered to mount such campaigns. Just look at their shameful but aggressive and well funded attempt to make the 2010 ballot with a countermeasure to Amendment 4 that would require elections on comprehensive plan changes only if 10 percent of voters travel to the elections office to request a vote.
If developers could have their way under the Hometown Democracy Amendment, then why aren't they supporting it? Because no one knows the minds of voters. And why risk having to fund ballot campaigns for each comp plan change when the state's growth machinery, well oiled by the Legislature, hums to their advantage come high times or recession?
In the editorial board's meeting with Blackner's group, they acknowledged that their chances of moving a grassroots initiative to ballot would be a long shot. (Certainly it was that. Blackner would later personally donate $1 million to keep the five-year petition drive going.) But we shared their enthusiasm that the effort alone might be enough to goad Floridians, and their leaders, into an honest conversation about growth and how to manage it in the greater public interest. That conversation was hijacked by the growth machine and its complicit Legislature, who even in this spring's session gutted the 1985 Growth Management Act. Voters have good reason to be angry and disillusioned. No wonder many who were previously skeptical of the Hometown Democracy initiative now say they'll support it. But Amendment 4 is the wrong response.
In Blackner's own words, "There are lots of laws on the books that could protect our beautiful state - if the power brokers wanted it that way." Power brokers or not, those laws are there to be enforced and expanded, too, if the voters want it that way. They have but to elect local officials with the guts to say no to bad development plans and legislators willing to have that honest conversation about growth. Fat chance? If voters can't accomplish that, there's little hope they would be any more successful at managing growth wisely through the ballot.
Amendment 4
*BALLOT TITLE: Referenda Required for Adoption and Amendment of Local Government Comprehensive Land Use Plans.
*BALLOT SUMMARY: Establishes that before a local government may adopt a new comprehensive land use plan, or amend a comprehensive land use plan, the proposed plan or amendment shall be subject to vote of the electors of the local government by referendum, following preparation by the local planning agency, consideration by the governing body and notice.
