March 28, 2024

Growth Management

The Growth We Want

A high-tech workforce wants great communities along with good jobs.

Neil Skene | 9/1/2005
SILICON DREAMS: Florida is not going to become the next Silicon Valley by offering mediocre schools and congested roadways.When it comes to attracting more high-tech businesses to Florida, maybe we should listen to a rocket scientist.

"It comes down to what is the quality of life in the region for the people you want to attract. The time they spend not at work has to be OK," says Michael D. Griffin, a physicist recently appointed by President Bush to head the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

"You want to be a place that attracts the kind of workforce you're looking to have -- scientists, engineers, technicians," Griffin told Gov. Jeb Bush's new commission on aerospace in July. "Those are people who want good schools for their children. They want reasonable access to housing, decent roads to commute on." Added this one-time California resident: "There almost is not enough money to pay me to move back to L.A. because of the commute."

That's not rocket science. But achieving it is. One of Gov. Bush's top goals is attracting more high-tech industry, like aerospace and biotech, with its well-educated, well-paid employees. The state also is straining to finance and manage population growth that is outrunning public services. Both can be done. But the job isn't easy, and it now falls mostly on the shoulders of local elected officials, whose work to date is leaving a lot of people increasingly dissatisfied.

The job begins with a clearer view of what we need to achieve. "Quality of life" is more than a sales slogan highlighting beaches and weather. Professionals who can choose to live almost anywhere won't pick Florida just because it's cheap. Low taxes, sun and sand certainly don't characterize the Route 128 tech corridor in Boston.

Secretary of State Glenda Hood, a former mayor of Orlando, recently offered her view of a "quality community" as one like her neighborhood in Orlando. It has sidewalks and a big park, public transportation two blocks away, a neighborhood center four blocks away. It has historic preservation, itself "an economic engine." Her list for a great community went on: Roads without congestion, green spaces and tree canopies, clean air and water, housing "for all income levels," a downtown hub, safety, job diversity, an education system that can prepare people for productive lives, "activities and events for families and children," vibrant arts and culture, and "citizen involvement."

"People value lifestyles over jobs today," she said.

Unfortunately, Hood's description doesn't sound like most of Florida, or even most of Orlando.

'Marginal stuff'
Schools matter a lot. Silas Baker, an aerospace engineer who came to Cape Canaveral during the 1960s and now is a member of the Florida Space Authority board, says he and other young engineers and scientists back then "wanted our kids to go to a decent school, and we weren't going to put up with any of this marginal stuff. This Brevard County school system has been one of the best in the country ever since. It's the same thing if you go to Silicon Valley, if you go to Los Alamos, if you go to Route 128 in Boston, the Triangle in North Carolina -- go to any of these areas where you have an emphasis on science and creativity and entrepreneurship, you'll find that the entire community benefits because those people who have their kids in these schools will demand the best."

Florida's new growth-management law restricts development when there aren't enough classrooms under construction. But nothing in the law requires well-qualified teachers.

Florida's deputy chancellor for teacher quality, Pamela Stewart, told a group of school leaders recently that Florida will need 29,604 more teachers by the 2006-07 school year -- 40% of that because of the class-size amendment, 10% simply because of growth. (The rest is turnover.) About 122,000 science students and 153,000 math students will have teachers "out of field," not fully qualified to teach those subjects.

We're not going to become the next Silicon Valley that way.

My kids' almost-new high school has lots of advanced placement classes. But if you want to try for valedictorian, you'd better not take arts or music or drama. They aren't AP courses that carry extra weight in a grade-point average, so even an A hurts your class rank. We are inundated with talk about "family values" and the need for flags in classrooms and the ghastly pop culture, but we encourage our best students to skip the arts. When you think of how many math whizzes also have a deep appreciation for music, this approach fails even the test of crass economics.

Bush's school-quality initiatives seem to be making a difference, but raising the proportion who can squeak by on the FCATs isn't enough. If we're going to make our schools what Sy Baker and others think they need to be to attract top-notch professionals, we're going to have to pay more attention to the students bound for doctoral degrees, the rocket scientists of tomorrow.

Schools are just part of the schema, though. When Bush's department heads put on a road show last spring to support the growth-management proposals, Laurie McDonald of Defenders of Wildlife showed up at the Tampa meeting to declare that "the problems and opportunities are huge."

'Not a level playing field'
It's going to be up to local governments to pursue the opportunities, not just finance the problems. If they don't have imagination, the opportunities will be lost.

Developers know what they want. They can negotiate their way out of the "concurrency" restrictions and pass along the costs. But for public officials, it's not paint-by-number. Counting infrastructure components won't get the job done. Public officials have to be tough-minded and clear-eyed about what they want.

"It's not a level playing field," Gainesville Mayor Pegeen Hanrahan said during a conference sponsored by the Florida Public Interest Foundation in July. "On one side (of a public hearing) are people who have been working eight hours a day as nurses and teachers and construction workers, and on the other side are people with degrees in law and engineering who have been working all day at good salaries to come up with why this (development) should be approved."

The outcome is determined by elected officials who also lack the focus, experience and knowledge that developers bring to the table. For some officials, of course, the spirit is simply weak. But there are public officials all over the state who want to make the best decisions for their communities.

They face questions like these: How should costs of infrastructure be allocated among old and new residents? How do you rethink development patterns and urban design so that you reduce the need for infrastructure, which moves goods and people and services over the increasingly long distances as residential areas sprawl into the countryside? How do you measure the economic costs and benefits of new businesses seeking various subsidies, and how do impact fees affect the competition for new businesses? What happens to "affordable housing" if we raise taxes and impact fees? Can impact fees be used to steer development not only to certain areas but to certain kinds of development? What growth is undesirable, and how do we stop it? How do we make commercial areas beautiful and easy to navigate?

During that road show in Tampa, Community Affairs Secretary Thaddeus Cohen said the growth-management law represents "a moment in our history when we can do a great thing." It is indeed. But it won't be easy. Or cheap.

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