senate bill 360 hampers citizen rights

The colossal effort by our Legislature to undo growth management -- Senate Bill 360 -- was quietly signed into law recently by Gov. Charlie Crist. (Does he even comprehend the state he leaves us with when he flits off to greener pastures?)

Our life quality, natural heritage, rural communities and the overall best interests of the Florida populace were frittered with one stroke of the pen. Laws written to benefit a few -- the developer class -- while crippling ordinary citizens' ability to seek redress for inappropriate projects in their communities seem un-American.

Eliminating oversight and road concurrency enables what amounts to modern-day robber barons running roughshod over the landscape. There is no beneficent "public purpose" to environmental carnage. If "build build build" were the elixir for our ills, we would not now be in the fix we are, since hyperactive construction in Florida has sired 300,000 moldering residential structures nobody wants.

What management we had was weak. Crist's enthusiasm for green building to defend SB 360 is insulting. "Green" isn't razing all natural vestiges that sport that color. We need not just smart light bulbs and storm resistance, but saved panther habitat, rare pineland communities, endemic floral associations and corridors that empower these beleaguered natural features and creatures to weather the human tide for posterity -- in perpetuity.

Under the guise of Innovation Way, Orange County plans dense housing developments in its last verdant swath in the Upper Econlockhatchee region. Central Florida already has 91,000 homes standing empty. With no checks on local officials' decisions, no Department of Community Affairs review of projects in areas patently rural but now classified under 360 as "urban" -- hence, no sprawl restrictions whatsoever -- we face ecological havoc and living hell for residents.

Just as the Mayans drained their resources and dwindled from Earth, Floridians stand to suffer from developers strong-arming to effect a government by and for their privileged few that sells the rest of us down the river.

More than ever, we need Florida Hometown Democracy to put some say-so in the hands of residents on their communities' futures. If officials won't defend Florida's biological survival, then residents must by resisting the existing self-serving oligarchy.

Bills that hamstring or neutralize the DCA or citizen participation in and commentary on government actions that impact their lives and the state's ecology are not in our best interest. A veto would have been a more apt gesture by "the people's governor."

Rebecca Eagan of Winter Park is a wildlife conservationist.