GROWTH

This article states that "by 2000 there had been more than 100,000 exemptions made to local government growth plans in Florida, and only four of those were challenged by the state. The growth plans are diluted. They have no teeth to them, " Belleville said.

These "exemptions" are comprehensive plan amendments. Exemptions or amendments, whatever you want to call them, were supposed to be rare and difficult to obtain when the Growth Management Act was passed in the mid-1980's.

Now look where we are. City and county commissions just can't SAY NO to developer driven demands for ever increasing density. Comp plans can't work to control growth if they are easily amended.

You know the solution:

Florida Hometown Democracy.

Let the voters decide if they want ever more density crammed down their throats.

Sprawl can take it all, author says.

Author a hit at responsible-growth forum.
By Jamie Page
jpage@news-press.com
Originally posted on January 16, 2007

            Fifteen years ago, Bill Belleville had an old Florida Cracker farm house, accessed by dirt road and surrounded by nature. Now it's consumed by a mall and a large multifamily development.
            So Belleville, who is from Sanford, has a message for Lee County: "Don't roll over, and let the politicians think it's OK. You have to be constantly vigilant" to protect Florida from sprawl.
            He even wrote a book about it — "Losing it All to Sprawl: How Progress Ate My Cracker Landscape," and was invited to the Responsible Growth Management Coalition's annual meeting Monday night to talk about it. He told them how unregulated growth is quickly taking over the unique history and landscape of old Florida, and he has chronicled the loss in his book.

Perhaps it's telling that out of the 30 stops throughout Florida where Belleville is giving his talk, Monday's session at the Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre in Fort Myers was the most requested. The Fort Myers/Cape Coral area and the Naples/Marco Island area are among the top 10 fastest growing metro areas in the country.
"I have talked to people who have been here three generations and those here for three years and both are bothered by the loss."

            Belleville, an author and documentary filmmaker, painted a verbal picture of old Florida's natural landscape that existed not so long ago, contrasted with the statistic that Florida loses 20 acres of natural land an hour to development.
            "It's always a worry that these things are happening faster than we think," said Dave Urich, president of the Responsible Growth Management Coalition (RGMC). "It's disappointing in a way because it's so true about how much has changed in Florida. Too many of the old-timers just took pictures of the old buildings but didn't do anything to save them."
            Urich, 73, first saw Florida at age 6, and moved here in 1974. The RGMC that Urich heads helped establish the Density Reduction/Groundwater Resource area, which includes lands that have been set aside to limit urban sprawl and provide greenspace, habitat and groundwater recharge. Water supply is one of the top concerns for Floridians.

Belleville said an agriculture extension agent once told him that the bad news to all the rampant growth is eventually, "you'll be drinking reclaimed sewage, the good news is you'll have plenty of it."
By 2000, there had been more than 100,000 exemptions made to local government growth plans in Florida, and only four of those were challenged by the state. "The growth plans are diluted. They have no teeth to them," Belleville said.

Commissioner Ray Judah said he was "inspirational."
"Despite all the growth in the state of Florida, we still have a lot of natural places that we need to provide responsible stewardship over and preserve more of these places before they vanish forever," Judah said. "There's no question as a collective body the policy makers need to be more in tune with the wild, natural parts of Florida in order to provide better stewardship of our resources."

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Daytona Beach News Journal

Height, growth and denial come to a boil in Ormond Beach

Florida's city governments tend to be engines for development. They are that way by custom, history, law, inclination, habit and simple gut-reflex.

Sure, a town might occasionally refuse to permit a subdivision in a place that's reliably underwater in August or turn down the occasional battery-reprocessing plant next to an elementary school. But such exceptions are done only in the name of basic health, safety and promoting more growth down the line.

When presented with people who want to limit growth in some way, most Florida city governments instinctively react first with uncomprehending denial. Then with anger. The negotiation and acceptance stages depend entirely on election results.

Ormond Beach is still in the denial phase. Expect anger by September.

A citizens group, prodded by the recent condo boom, came up with enough signatures to force a vote on whether to put a 75-foot building-height cap in Ormond Beach's city charter.

Ormond Beach already has a 75-foot building-height cap in its land development code. But in most Florida cities, a land-development code may be reliably rewritten whenever a guy in a suit shows up in the commission chamber with a lawyer, architect's drawings and PowerPoint presentation.

It used to be that a guy with a suit coming up to a microphone and talking vaguely about lawsuits would be sufficient. But Ormond Beach believes in something called smart growth, so full-color architect's drawings are necessary.

Like the Daytona Beach City Commission when it encountered public unhappiness with its build-to-the-sky Vision Plan, the majority on the Ormond Beach Commission is in denial about this issue. They dismiss height-cap advocates as a small, unrepresentative collection of naysayers, usual suspects, bellyachers, tree-huggers, gadflies, whiners and their pathetic dupes who ---- Don't Know the Facts.

Not to mention, the very worst thing a Florida city official can call people -- no-growthers.

So, instead of putting the thing on the ballot as the law required and instead of responding with a more flexible alternative to take wind out of the sails of the height-cap movement, the city sued to prevent a vote.

And when people started showing up at city meetings to complain, the commission did the only thing you can do when dealing with a Vocal Minority: Discourage them from vocalizing.

The city moved public comment to the end of the commission meeting, which is often about the same time as Jay Leno's opening monologue.

Earlier this year, the commission forbid members of the public from bringing up the same issue more than three times.

When you shut up a Vocal Minority, they become just a regular ol' minority. Which in some minds means you've won the debate.

And if you keep them from voting, you've already won the election.

Except a circuit judge ruled the city had to comply with that silly ol' state law about citizen referendums. Except that by doing these things, the city energized the group seeking the height limit and angered previously unaffiliated members of the Vocal Minority.

Last week, the commission complied with the judge's order and put the height cap on the November ballot. But it also moved to appeal the judge's order in hope of invalidating the vote should it go the wrong way.

For nothing makes a Vocal Minority more insufferable than when they turn out to be a majority.

Please download from our website and SIGN THE PETITION ! http://www.FloridaHometownDemocracy.com

FHD, PO Box 636, New Smyrna Beach, FL 32170-0636.