Amendment 4At first glance, Amendment 4 seems just the ticket to stop the suburban sprawl that's oozing out from Florida's urban centers. It would require local governments to put all changes to their comprehensive development plans to a public vote. The intent is to give residents control over local land-use decisions because elected officials have done such a poor job of it.
But there are significant drawbacks. If the amendment, called Hometown Democracy, is approved, taxpayers would have to pay the costs of holding an election every single time a city or county land-use plan is changed. That could add up to a lot of money that would be better spent on other government services.
While Amendment 4 is meant to rein in developers and politicians who cater to them, not all land-use changes are promulgated by builders. City and county planners often propose changes to protect a tract of land or upgrade outdated rules to reflect a community's demographic and economic changes. Do taxpayers really want to foot the bill every time a planning department decides to update a land-use plan?
The unintended consequence of Amendment 4 would be well-funded campaigns by deep-pocket developers to persuade voters to approve land-use changes by touting, say, how many jobs a new project would create. Local governments are severely limited in how much they can spend to counter developers' arguments, tilting the playing field in the voting booth.
Amendment 4's passage would also stymie the necessary evolution of land-use plans, the blueprints of how a community should grow in smart, sustainable ways. These plans need flexibility, not rigidity, to reflect community changes over time. Local governments simply won't want to go to the frequent expense of asking voters to approve every plan amendment, so plans could stagnate and stop reflecting a community's evolving profile.
We have long fought against land-use decisions that simply encourage sprawl and make taxpayers pay for new roads and classrooms that construction demands but doesn't finance. While Amendment 4 purports to be the solution to politicians' bad land-use decisions, it isn't really. It will cost taxpayers an undetermined amount of money over time and hinder the urban-planning process.
The Miami Herald recommends NO on Amendment 4.
