Amendment 4's Hidden Danger #1: It's Impossible to Create a "Lawyer-Proof" Ballot Summary that Describes a Comprehensive Plan in 75 Words or Less.
Florida Amendment 4 (also known as "Hometown Democracy") seeks to give Floridians a final referendum vote on all comprehensive plan changes. It may seem like a good idea to folks who are frustrated with sprawl and overdevelopment, but voting for it is like bringing a piece of furniture into your home that looks nice but is infested with bedbugs...it's full of hidden dangers that can make your home and town unliveable and are very difficult to exterminate once in place.
Amendment 4's biggest (and most hidden) flaw is that by requiring all comprehensive plan changes to go on the ballot, Florida election law requires that those comp plan changes (which often involve hundreds of pages of complex land use language) must be summarized in a ballot summary that is 75 words or less, which exposes cities to massive litigation costs due to ballot language challenges.
Why is trying to create a 75 word ballot summary of a comprehensive plan change such a problem? What's the big deal?
The problem is that it is impossible to adequately summarize hundreds of pages of land use changes into a 75 word ballot summary, and if Florida's cities are forced to undertake this impossible task, they will be vulnerable to costly lawsuits challenging those summaries as deceptive and incomplete...which is precisely what happened in St. Pete Beach.
In 2008, St. Pete Beach put proposed comprehensive plan changes on the ballot. We did this because in 2006, we made changes to our city charter which (like Amendment 4) required that future changes to our comprehensive plan must be approved by a vote of the citizens. So when we put our comprehensive plan changes on the ballot in 2008, Florida election law forced the city to summarize the 150 pages of changes into a 75 word ballot summary.
Here's what the comprehensive plan change looked like....150 pages worth.
On Election Day, 2008, our comp plan was approved by the voters of St. Pete Beach by an overwhelming majority vote. Happy Day, right? Wrong! After the comp plan was approved by the voters, St. Pete Beach was promptly sued by a resident who alleged that the city's 75 word ballot summaries were "rife with deceptive and misleading statements" and that they omitted "material facts." Ironically, the plaintiff alleges that the city's 75 words were deficient, but in his complaint he cannot even describe what is missing from the city's ballot summaries in less than 75 words!
The litigation that started in 2008 is still ongoing, and in 2010 alone St. Pete Beach has incurred over $200,000 in legal fees defending the vote of the people. By comparison, St. Pete Beach spent only $33,000 on litigation in 2001. Similar problems threaten all Florida cities if Amendment 4 passes, since all Florida cities will also be forced to undertake the impossible task of crafting 75 word ballot summaries of comprehensive plan changes that involve hundreds of pages of complex land use changes.
The problem with summarizing comprehensive plans in 75 words under Amendment 4 is that you just can't fit everything that everyone cares about into those 75 words. No matter how hard you try, there will always be someone who can file a lawsuit alleging that what is most important to THEM was left out, and that the ballot language was "misleading" or "deceptive" or "incomplete." And like a swarm of bedbugs, land use lawyers thrive by feeding on these legal vulnerabilities...with all Floridians suffering for it.
So why will fixing the problems caused by Amendment 4 be as difficult as exterminating a house full of bedbugs? The reason is simple: Amendment 4 is a statewide constitutional amendment. Once Floridians figure out how overbroad and damaging Amendment 4 really is, local cities won't have the legal authority to alter or modify the scope of Amendment 4's rules to suit the needs and desires of the local population.
By comparison, once St. Pete Beach's voters realized the mistake they'd made by adopting their Amendment 4-style rules, we repealed their broad scope in favor of a much more restricted set of rules...but we were able to fix our mistake because we had the power to undo the changes we'd made to our local city charter. But since Amendment 4 is a constitutional amendment, no Florida city will have the power to undo its requirements once it's been approved, even if a majority of the city's voters want to alter or repeal it.
So, just like a bedbug infestation, once Amendment 4 is approved, Floridians will stuck dealing with the vexing problems that come with it for a very, very long time.
