Originally Published: 1 August 2007
The Tampa Tribune
To understand the public frustration over how Florida's developers have bent growth rules to their advantage, take a look at the Rural Lands Stewardship Program.
Passed by the Legislature in 2001 as a limited pilot project to protect farmland and wildlife areas, stewardship zones have become a shortcut for savvy landowners to build new cities in remote areas while protecting little or nothing.
Tom Pelham, secretary of the state Department of Community Affairs, is right to crack down on applications under the new law. It's the state's duty to make sure the Legislature's worthy objectives are realized: to stop sprawl, preserve rural character, prevent development of environmentally significant land, and promote commercial and residential growth in appropriate areas.
If major landowners continue to get all they are asking for under the program, they'll corner the market on dense development in some rural counties, and leave tracts that the program was intended to protect vulnerable to future sprawl.
Schemes such as this are why voters are signing a petition for a referendum on a constitutional amendment called Hometown Democracy.
If passed, it would require local voter approval before any changes could be made in a local growth plan. It could make development difficult or impossible in many areas.
Supporters of the referendum accuse Florida's leaders of putting more value on future residents than current ones, who often get stuck paying the bills for growth. But holding elections on every land-use change would, as Pelham understands, 'throw the state into chaos,' with devastating consequences for the economy.
You don't have to be for Hometown Democracy to appreciate the frustration of its advocates. The rural stewardship law is a case in point. It was approved in 2001 to encourage a few pilot projects of at least 50,000 acres each.
After no one applied, the law was modified to make it more appealing. Its pilot status was dropped. The threshold was reduced to 10,000 acres. Projects within the approved zone were exempted from the rigorous review required of other large developments of regional impact.
Now the applications are pouring in from swamps and ranch lands. The sudden interest may be because the rules were relaxed, but more likely it's to get approval before the Hometown Democracy vote next year virtually freezes growth.
Once a stewardship area is set up, growth can occur outside most local and state restrictions. Under the change, selected environmentally sensitive areas are designated 'sending' areas and are given development credits far in excess of what is allowed elsewhere in the county. Areas where new towns are to be built are called 'receiving' areas. Developers buy and transfer credits from a sending area to a receiving area. How the valuable credits are awarded is a complex process that typically requires the assistance of expert consultants.
In theory, one landowner is given an incentive to preserve land while another is encouraged to build houses. But until all the credits are used up, which can take many years or might never happen, the owner of a 'sending' area can opt out of the program and develop the property at whatever densities were originally allowed, typically one unit per five acres.
So the community may well end up with a city in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by sprawling developments and the loss of most of its natural land - everything the law was designed to prevent. So much for stewardship.
Pelham is trying to stop the abuse, but lawmakers need to reform a planning effort that has gone off track.
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