Growth management changes explained

In the first week or so after the 2009 regular session of the Florida Legislature ended, there was a fair amount of editorial carping across the state against the growth management bill passed by both houses but yet to be signed by Gov. Charlie Crist.

The Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners passed a resolution calling on the governor to veto the bill. There was other flack from other quarters from those saying the bill caves in to developers, literally giving them a free ride on transportation.

The criticism - ahead of the governor signing the bill, which was expected as this column is being filed - led Sen. Mike Bennett (R-Bradenton), the bill’s chief sponsor and ram-rod during the session, to release a five-page explanation and defense of the legislation.

Bennett says his legislation will “stimulate growth and encourage economic development.”

The new law “promotes growth in dense ‘urban’ areas by removing the state mandated cost of transportation concurrency and the duplicative development of regional impact (DRI) process with those areas.”

Dense areas are “designated urban service areas within counties and cities with a minimum population of 5,000 having at least 1,000 people per square mile.”

Bennett says its time to admit that transportation concurrency has been a failure. It’s a failure because it’s unfair and encourages sprawl.

“When a new doctor’s office or drug store cannot afford to pay to mitigate its impacts on the main road that is already congested from existing traffic, it may move away from the urban center encroaching on less dense areas where the roads have not yet reached their level of service capacity and where it, therefore, does not have to pay transportation concurrency costs,” Bennett said.

“Curbing urban sprawl is a major goal of Florida’s growth management strategy. Focusing growth in urban areas reduces vehicle emissions and decreases costs associated with expanding infrastructure into outlying areas.”

Bennett said his bill does not preclude local governments from passing ordinances and adopting fees if glitches occur because of the bill.

“The bill does not require local government to place the burden of transportation on the general tax base,” Bennett said. “It will be up to each local government to decide who should pay the price for roads. Developers only ‘get a pass’ from state required transportation concurrency mitigation, not local fees and assessments.

“The hope is that by removing unworkable or duplicative regulations, when the economy begins to rebound, the state of Florida will not be standing in its own way.”

Bennett says his bill will both promote economic development and be a boon to good planning.

Florida roads some of the best

You take your good news where you can find it these days. A nationwide survey finds that Florida’s roads are some of the best in this nation. This knowledge may comfort Floridians as they sit in traffic jams this summer with the AC redlining.

The study was done by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials and found that Florida has the third-best roads in the nation after only Georgia and Nevada. Roads were judged on such standards as being free of pot holes, jarring bumps and cracks. Florida benefits from the absence of freezing and thawing cycles that bedevil more northern states.

Jacksonville, Orlando and the Tampa Bay Area all got high road quality marks for urban areas with more than 500,000 residents.

On the down side, the association said the nation’s road are deteriorating quickly and keeping them in good repair would require more than twice as much as is being spent to maintain them.

Energy mandate stalls

More good news for all Floridians is that Senate Bill 1154, the one that would oblige Florida utilities to produce 20% of their electricity with the use of “renewable fuels” by 2020, did not pass during the regular 2009 session of the Florida Legislature. Such a requirement would dramatically increase the price of energy in Florida and would almost certainly deliver no environmental improvement.

Renewable fuels are such as wind, solar, and bio-mass, the kind of fuels that tickle the fancy of environmentalists but which don’t exist except in trifling amounts and would be very expensive to use with the technology that exists now and for the foreseeable future.

Crist is trying to push the Florida Legislature down this ill-considered path in the name of saving us from the ravages of carbon-caused global warming. Alleged man-caused global warming (aka “climate change,” “the climate crisis,” et al.) and the attendant catastrophes that are supposed to follow in its path will one day be shown to a political hoax using and abusing science to promote it. But the global warming industry has been very successful in promoting its fairy tale. So opportunistic politicians like Crist, who almost certainly know better, will milk political points from it by proposing expensive “cures” to this non-existent problem.

I’d like to be able to report that Florida Legislators hooted down this very bad idea. The truth is the idea was considered but then withdrawn at the last minute because some objectionable items, including close offshore oil-drilling, were attached to the renewable fuels legislation, making it unpalatable. But the idea is liable to return.

During the session there was much debate on forms of rebates, write-offs, and subsidies that various interests wanted to off-set the increased costs of generating electricity with very costly fuels. Utilities, the Public Service Commission, business groups, environmentalists all entered the fray. It wasn’t a pretty sight. The bottom line is that generating electricity with boutique fuels costs more, many times more, than generating electricity with fossil fuels. And all the rebates, write-offs, and subsidies in the world won’t change this.

Kermit was right. It isn’t easy being green. It isn’t cheap either. In this case, it wouldn’t even be cleaner.

Oddly, business and real estate groups have not shown much interest in this issue. Perhaps they should. If legislation like this gets though and Florida energy prices go through the roof (sun roof?), the industry could wake up one day with yet another way in which Florida is not competitive with other states.

At the national level

While energy nonsense got very little traction in Tallahassee this spring, we need to keep an eye on Washington where a leftist administration and Congress are having some success in pushing a carbon cap and trade bill that, if passed and signed into law, would turn energy decisions throughout the economy over to the federal government.

Under a cap and trade program, politicians and federal government would decide how much carbon-based energy the entire economy could use, would rations its use, and would auction off chits from those who don’t use all their allotments to those who would like to use more. The money would flow to the federal government.

If the above looks faintly like the way the late but not lamented Soviet Union used to do things, that’s because it is. Moving to this command and control approach to the most vital component of our economy, energy, would be the biggest change in the way our country works in its history. It would be a huge step, among many smaller steps being taken now, toward socialism. The certain result would be a severely lowered standard of living and the other negatives that have ever followed upon increases in government power, not the least of which would be loss of personal freedom and corruption.

Once again this horrific step is being contemplated in the name of saving us from that fictional threat, global warming.

If we assume for the moment that global warming is a real threat and we need to dramatically cut our carbon emissions over time (and nothing remotely close to this has been demonstrated), let’s see a show of hands of those who believe the federal government (think Katrina) is competent to ration energy through the largest, most dynamic, and most complex economy the world has ever seen. Who thinks there would not be wholesale fraud in reporting carbon emissions? Who believes politicians and government bureaucrats would not use the incredible power this program bestows on them to reward their political friends and punish their enemies?

Again, business and real estate groups have not been in the forefront in raising the alarm about this potential abomination (The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 - for those who would like to write their members of Congress). Some real estate groups aren’t even following it. It’s time to take a hard look at this one. When Comrade Energy Regulator is at your manufacturing plant, your shopping center, your apartment complex, or your office building to tell you how much energy you can use, it will be too late.

Larry Thornberry is a Florida Real Estate Journal contributing editor.