The fight over controlling Florida growth began as a war of ideas, pitting a wealthy environmental lawyer against businesses that want less control over development, not more.

It ended with a Tallahassee display of brute force.

Florida Hometown Democracy, the ballot initiative that sought to slow growth, fell 65,182 signatures short of the 611,009 needed to make the ballot, thanks in part to a double-barreled business lobby effort that changed state law and raised nearly $4million to crush it.

The tactics show how powerful interest groups with money at stake could wage war against future citizen petitions.

Associated Industries of Florida used a new law to persuade more than 18,000 voters to revoke their signatures, sending them mailers signed by former House Speaker John Thrasher warning that Hometown would destroy Florida 's "scenic beauty."

The Florida Chamber of Commerce raised $3million through a political arm called Floridians for Smarter Growth to run a similar-sounding initiative petition and hire away Hometown's paid petition-gatherers.

And in the weeks before Friday's deadline for counties to verify signatures — a time when elections offices were also processing early voting and absentee ballots for Florida's Jan.29 presidential primary — the chamber's group flooded key counties in South Florida, Sarasota and parts of the Panhandle, where Hometown was gathering signatures.

"Everyone got buried," said Volusia County Elections Supervisor Ann McFall.

The main objective: Slow the processing of Hometown signatures and ensure the chamber's own amendment would make the 2008 ballot only if Hometown's did too.

"Clearly, there's a block-and-tackle strategy," said Chamber Vice President Mark Wilson, who oversees the business group's political operations.

Hometown co-founder Lesley Blackner, a Palm Beach land-use lawyer, said her group got bogged down when its signature-gathering firm quit late last year after the chamber-backed group had driven up the cost per-signature for her paid petition-gatherers.

Blackner conceded the people she hired as replacements submitted "some bad signatures" last year "and it took me a while to catch on to that."

Had it passed in November, the initiative would have required that cities and counties allow the public to vote on changes to the comprehensive plans that are supposed to guide growth in a community.

In the aftermath, the business-backed campaigns argued that Hometown Democracy failed for one overriding reason: Voters didn't agree with it. "The people just didn't support this," said Wilson, who pointed to other environmental groups such as Audubon and 1,000 Friends of Florida that refused to support it.

Blackner, though, said the business groups changed the rules to suit their purposes. "They really don't care about fair play," she said. "They will do anything to win."

Indeed, alarmed developers, home builders and business groups had argued the amendment would throw sand in the gears of Florida 's economy.

So their lobbyists went to work and won passage last spring of a law that would allow voters to revoke their signatures on ballot initiatives within 150 days of their decision to sign.

Development lawyers then persuaded the Division of Elections to make the new law retroactive, so signatures given 150 days before it officially took effect could be revoked.

Ion Sancho, the outspoken Leon County elections supervisor, said the changes create "all kinds of problems" for supervisors, who now are required not only to validate signatures as they come but also to keep track of subsequent revocations.

"This really is inappropriate to use the election laws and procedures and change them for one side to get a political advantage," Sancho said.

Associated Industries' revocation push didn't make the difference in keeping Hometown off the ballot.

But it did drop Hometown below the required minimum number of signatures in one Broward County congressional district that it previously had secured. The law requires a minimum number in 13 of the state's congressional districts; Hometown wound up four short.

"It's the way of the future," Associated Industries president Barney Bishop said. "What we did in these last 4 1/2 months is the first time anywhere in the country where there's been an organized effort to get people to revoke their signatures."

Blackner said organizers would now push to qualify for the 2010 ballot. But because the requirements for signature-gathering are based on turnout in the previous presidential election, Hometown will likely need a lot more signatures.

"Democracy requires a sense of fair play, and they play gutter politics," Blackner said. "I think we can get enough signatures to overcome them."

Aaron Deslatte can be reached at adeslatte@orlandosentinel.com or 850-222-5564.