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Palm Beach Post Editorial, November 18, 2007

Still Florida's good friend

For 20 years, 1000 Friends of Florida has tried to keep this state from turning into one big subdivision. Formed after Florida passed the Growth Management Act in 1985, 1000 Friends has been Florida's watchdog over bad development.

The organization has lent its voice and money to dozens of fights over bad decisions. One was the plan to put The Scripps Research Institute at Mecca Farms in rural Palm Beach County. Scripps is now being built at Florida Atlantic University's Jupiter campus. 1000 Friends is opposing the proposal for rampant development in western Martin County. The group's latest report warns that growth will overwhelm the state by 2060 if development patterns continue. It has backed efforts to save environmentally sensitive land and farmland.

So, it means something when the 1000 Friends board, which includes a rare mix of managed-growth advocates and developers, opposes the proposed constitutional amendment that aims to give the public greater say over growth. The Florida Hometown Democracy petition, which the Florida Chamber of Commerce and developers are fighting to keep off the November ballot, calls for a public vote on every land-use change approved by cities and counties.

The result, the chamber predicts, would be chaos. The amendment could require hundreds of votes on a single ballot, even for minor growth issues. As chamber leaders acknowledge, however, their members would be directly affected, so they have a bias. 1000 Friends, which has no financial interest, offers a wider range of criticisms:

+ Land planning would turn into high-priced media campaigns favoring deep-pocketed developers.

+ Necessary but unpopular development, such as affordable housing, never would pass.

+ Proposals for more density in populated areas (potentially a good idea) would face a hard-to-beat, dedicated voting bloc while proposals for sprawl in remote, uninhabited areas (a bad idea) would have no built-in resistance.

+ There will be endless lawsuits, because Hometown Democracy leaves too much to interpretation.

Instead, 1000 Friends proposes working within the system to reverse years of sprawl. Among the group's ideas: Require developers to make sure that neighbors sign off on changes; ban last-minute changes to plans that thwart years of public participation, as happened with Palm Beach County's sector plan and the so-called Valliere amendment in Martin County; require supermajority votes for major land-use changes; require public trade-offs, such as land preservation, for density increases.

Florida Hometown Democracy, led by Palm Beach lawyer Lesley Blackner, doesn't believe that legislators will allow such reform. Ms. Blackner's distrust extends to 1000 Friends because of the developers on its board: "They've had 20 years. Has there been any growth management in Florida?"

Actually, the answer is yes, just not enough of it. As noted, the Florida Chamber is acting less on behalf of good government and more on behalf of its members. But 1000 Friends of Florida has been in the fight against bad growth long enough, and has enough victories, to know good ideas from bad ideas. Its refusal to embrace Hometown Democracy is telling.