Rampant growth needs citizen controls

According to your Aug. 12 editorial, "Chaos at the polls," Florida Hometown Democracy will mean the end of the world. Catastrophe will rain down simply by giving voters a veto over comprehensive land use plan changes that have been approved by a city of county commission.

The editorial was chock full of hysterical verbiage like "anti-growth zealots," "bedsheet ballot," "serial job killer," and "vote on everything." Reading it, I couldn't help but think of Mark Twain's apt observation: "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

 

Florida Hometown Democracy's principle nemesis, the Florida Chamber of Commerce, met with this paper's editorial board. It's too bad that the editorial board did not bother to call me, or anyone else at Florida Hometown Democracy, before it drank the chamber's Kool-Aid. Let me perform a little CPR and set the record straight.

 

Representative democracy?

 

The editorial says that we live in a representative democracy and our elected officials vote on comprehensive plan changes after careful study. If we don't like the way they vote, then we kick them out of office during the next election.

 

Response: We live in a system of mixed direct and representative democracy. Voters are called to vote on taxes, bond issues, etc. If we the people can handle taxes, we can handle growth.

 

The law is clear that comp plan changes are political decisions that should not be granted unless the public interest is advanced, or at the least not harmed. So what happened? Over the years the growth machine, that special marriage of local government and the development industry, hijacked and redefined the public interest to mean keeping the development machine going. There's so much money at stake, and all they need is a few votes on the commission to make the next bundle. That's why they're so terrified of Florida Hometown Democracy.

 

Your editorial says campaigning will replace "careful representative democracy." Well, over in Palm Beach County where I live, two county commissioners have been indicted in the past six months for carefully and quietly selling their votes on land use changes to the tune of many millions of dollars. Their corruption only came to light during bitter divorce battles. It made me wonder about all the commissioners who get away with corruption. We'll never know. The point is that too many commissioners have been doing a great job of representing the developers, but what about the rest of us? Let's have a loud, public debate in a campaign over the merits of growth instead of backroom deals!

 

Vote on everything?

 

Your editorial predicts a "200-item ballot" when Florida Hometown Democracy becomes law. This tricky deception promoted by the chamber and the development machine requires immediate outing.

 

First, if your local commission is approving lots of comp plan amendments every year, then your comp plan is completely broken and corrupt. Plans don't mean anything if they are constantly changed. When the Growth Management Act was adopted in the mid-1980s the original intent was that comp plan changes would be few and far between. What happened? When commissions hand out comp plan changes like candy, developers go wild.

 

Now you know there shouldn't be so many comp plan changes in the first place. Under Florida Hometown Democracy, voters will have a veto only over those comp plan changes that survive commission approval. You will see a dramatic reduction in outrageous, speculative proposals. Most developers will learn to live with the plans, which was what they were supposed to do in the first place.

 

Serial job killer?

 

The editorial also says Florida Hometown Democracy will destroy Florida's economy because construction will grind to a halt. If the editorial board had contacted us, it would have known that in 1999 a planner added up all the comp plans in all of Florida's cities and counties and calculated that enough housing had been authorized by all the plans to accommodate over 101 million people! Currently Florida has about 20 million people. The study was eight years ago. How much new growth was authorized during the boom? Add that in.

 

The truth is that even if the voters turn down every proposed comp plan amendment (which I doubt), we still have enough future growth for over 80 additional million people. Under Florida Hometown Democracy there will be plenty of construction jobs.

 

If you, like so many Floridians, are sick of the status quo of government of the developer, by the developer and for the developer should go to www.floridahometowndemocracy.com or call 866-779-5513 for petitions to help put this historic reform on the 2008 ballot.

 

Lesley Blackner, an attorney, is president of Florida Hometown Democracy Inc