Originally Published: 3 January 2009
The Daytona Beach News-Journal
In the current economic climate, few people are making money chopping up open space for rows and rows of homes.
But when Florida's economy rebounds, the bulldozers will be revved and ready to go. In the meantime, the state's still-powerful development industry has declared war on any attempts to set up roadblocks to growth. The chief target in their sights: Florida Hometown Democracy, which has proposed a constitutional amendment that, if approved, would require voter approval for any amendments to local comprehensive growth-management plans.
The Hometown Democracy proposal has problems. It would raise barriers to runaway, irresponsible development, but also could make it difficult for local officials to respond quickly to businesses that want to relocate to Florida and bring good jobs. Voters don't have the background to make the kinds of complicated land-use decisions that Hometown Democracy would force on them. But there's little doubt that its backers are acting with good intentions.
By contrast, the other side is fighting dirty. Last year, pro-growth forces paid John Thrasher, former speaker of the Florida House, to sign a bullying letter aimed at coercing voters to withdraw their signatures to put the Hometown Democracy initiative on the ballot. The three-page letter was a masterful exercise of near-deception, accusing Hometown Democracy of being a tool of big development (the I'm-rubber-you're-glue stratagem) while threatening higher tax and utility bills. But there was worse in the works.
In an apparent attempt to confuse voters, pro-development forces ginned up an alternative -- and deliberately misleading -- constitutional amendment to the Hometown Democracy proposal, dubbed "Smarter Growth." It purports to allow voter intervention in growth decisions -- but only if 10 percent of voters in a local jurisdiction sign petitions asking for a vote. And those petitions would have to be signed in the offices of city clerks or supervisors of elections, within a 60-day period. It's a nearly impossible hurdle to clear -- making a mockery of the proposed amendment's title "right to decide local growth management."
Last week, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that pro-development's proposal wasn't quite dishonest enough to strike from the ballot. Justice Charles Wells employed a circuitous logic in upholding the proposed amendment -- Smarter Growth is allowed to offer false promises of "rights," he wrote, because they aren't actually taking away existing rights. Justices Barbara Pariente and R. Fred Lewis came nearer to the mark with scornful dissents that accurately depicted the Smarter Growth language as "wordsmithing" and dismissed the petition as "misleading and deceptive."
The decision was a loss for Floridians, who deserve not to be lied to. But voters still have the opportunity to cut through the bloviation at the ballot box. And that's what they should do.
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