Amendment 4 on Florida’s November ballot will, if adopted, require voter approval before local governments can change their comprehensive land-use plans, the blueprints they use to guide future development, densities and so forth. There are so many things wrong with this amendment it’s difficult to know where to start.
So let’s begin by stating the obvious: Amendment 4 is intended to be a growth killer. Its backers include environmental groups that put a premium on scaling back growth. It would kill growth by killing development. And by killing development, it would kill jobs. If there’s one thing Florida doesn’t need as it tries to climb out of a deep, ugly recession, it’s a constitutional mandate that will strangle development and jobs. How would Amendment 4 do that? By requiring that any change in a local comprehensive plan — a change to accommodate a new shopping center, for instance, or a new hotel, or a new school — be put to a public referendum. This ballot-box bureaucracy could choke vital projects. Voters might reject a long, complicated list of proposed changes rather than plow through all the verbiage, and who would blame them? “It would not be uncommon for voters to face 200 or 300 minor plan revisions on a single ballot,” Chad Hamilton, board chairman of the Greater Fort Walton Beach Chamber of Commerce, warns in the current issue of the chamber’s Coastlines publication. Mr. Hamilton also refers to a Washington Economics Group study that concluded Amendment 4 could cost Florida 260,000 jobs and reduce the state’s economic output by more than $34 billion a year. Supporters of No. 4 shrug off those projections and say it’s important to give voters the final say on growth. That’s sugarcoating it. What No. 4 would do is give one group of people the power to veto the property rights of another group of people … and to stall Florida’s economic recovery in the process. Vote a resounding NO on Amendment 4.
