June 05, 2009
Gov. Crist changes his colors
By MARK LANE
FOOTNOTE
Gov. Charlie Crist has worked hard to get out from under his party's image as reflexively anti-environment. Until this week, it kind of worked.
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He sure didn't get any help from the Florida Legislature. The governor talked up green initiatives and the Legislature served up anti-environmental bills.
The Legislature refused to fund new bonding authority for the Florida Forever program, which buys up endangered land. The program will limp along on past bonding and curtail land purchases, at just the time when land is cheaper and landowners are more eager to sell.
House leaders tried to open up the Florida coast to oil and natural gas drilling. ("Call it 'exploration,' not 'drilling'!" political consultants urge.) And they tried to do it with a last-minute, no-debate measure sprung in the last 10 days of the legislative session.
And it sent the governor two bills aimed at re-establishing Florida's growth-at-any-cost planning policies.
Crist signed the first of the two on Monday. An act that did more to undo Crist's environmental credibility than anything since his embrace of off-shore oil drilling back when he was a potential vice presidential candidate
The growth management bill Crist signed would roll back requirements that developers help build new roads when they want to build developments that strain roadways.
The idea behind the original rule was for growth to pay for growth rather than allow new construction and hope future taxpayers will play catch-up.
This rule had an unintended effect, however. It encouraged builders to build in places where it's cheaper to build roads -- rural areas and the outskirts of towns.
This might have been fixed by narrowly exempting city areas and creating a new mobility fee system to create an alternate way to get developers to pay for the impact of their developments.
But no. The Legislature defined "dense urban areas" as just about everywhere within an hour's drive of a Starbucks and said anything goes in dense urban areas.
The Florida League of Cities estimates the bill's "concurrency exemption areas" (translation: places where you don't have to do anything about congestion) cover 80 percent of the state's population. The 1,000 Friends of Florida says 245 Florida cities qualify. The League of Cities estimates 220.
Chances are if you're reading this and didn't hear a rooster crowing in the background, it just got easier to build in your part of town regardless of the congestion that would create.
There's another bill the Legislature handed Crist that could really cement his reputation as a governor who talks greenish and governs sprawlish.
That bill would empower executive directors of water management boards to grant permits without hearing from water management boards and public.
No more of those messy public hearings with people criticizing each other. Just quiet approval without a lot of fuss.
It's all part of the Legislature's economic strategy of trying to ignite a new, unsustainable building boom in the face of a statewide housing glut and worldwide credit freeze-up.
It's bad growth policy and worse economics. And it reverts to the old mistaken belief that Florida is just one filled-in wetland away from prosperity.
The green governor has become the sprawl governor.