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Cover Story - Growth Planning
Who's Lesley Blackner?
Meet the woman whose ideas are hated by every business group in Florida.
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'Ill-conceived'
Their amendment is simple and seductive. No more would elected officials have to reconcile opposition to sprawl with opposition to high-density condo canyons. No more would they need to juggle citizen demands for small with a desire to grow the tax base. Voters would allow or stifle growth as they saw fit.
The amendment's simplicity is also dangerous, Blackner's opponents say. Tallahassee lawyer and former Department of Community Affairs Secretary Linda Loomis Shelley, the speaker in October who called Blackner's brainchild "the worst idea I ever heard," says the amendment would allow local voters to nullify state decisions, such as 2005 mandates on school concurrency. She also points out that comp-plan changes can run to hundreds of pages of data and analysis that voters would never see on the ballot.
"Lesley, I'm sure, is an excellent lawyer, and I know Ross is as well," Shelley says, but their plan is "ill-conceived." (Shelley, incidentally, doesn't remember a standing ovation for her criticism of Hometown Democracy. "Maybe a few approving nods," she says. Another person there remembers the speech overall being very well-received -- not just the relatively short portion relating to Hometown Democracy -- and a few people standing to clap.)
Developers, builders and business groups complain that Blackner's idea would halt job creation, school construction and road improvements. Growth would stall as both major and minor land-use plan changes awaited the next referendum. Blackner's handiwork would drive up risk and carrying costs for developers -- with new-home buyers, consumers and businesses paying the price. She ignores why we have representative democracy and would create land planning based on emotion rather than deliberation, they say. Additional consequences: Decision-making gridlock and intercity fights over unpopular uses such as a new jail. Says Wayne Bertsch, political affairs director of the Florida Home Builders Association, Blackner would enshrine "NIMBYism (not in my back yard) in the Florida constitution. They certainly are no-growthers," Bertsch says. "It's going to positively slow down the economy."
Adds Mark Wilson, Florida Chamber executive vice president, "This doesn't have anything to do with your hometown or democracy. This has to with environmentalists using our constitution to shut down jobs."
Terrified of Blackner's idea, builders, developers and others spent $3.1 million to get voters in November to approve Amendment 3, which requires proposed amendments to earn 60% of the ballots cast to make it into the constitution. Designed to thwart Blackner and similar initiatives, it passed 58% to 42%.
All sides agree, however, that 60% is an attainable threshold for Blackner if she gets Hometown Democracy on the ballot. And that's why business groups see their top list of problems now as hurricane insurance, taxes and Lesley Blackner. Though her organization consists of little more than herself, Burnaman and some other volunteers, Florida has a history of rich individuals and out-of-state groups bankrolling signature collections for initiatives. Blackner and Burnaman have used one signature-gathering firm already but "not at the volume we would like," Blackner says.
If they can surmount the signature gap, they're hoping to tap into some perceived public dissatisfaction. A poll for the Leadership Florida group last year found that 52% of respondents felt their local governments weren't managing growth effectively. The poll and the recent election losses of various local incumbents who were seen as pro-growth show an undercurrent of anti-growth sentiment in Florida, says Susan MacManus, a University of South Florida political science professor.
If Blackner finds a benefactor willing to fund a signature-gathering firm, "the chances of it getting on the ballot are very strong, and if it goes on the ballot, it will take a lot of money to defeat it," MacManus says.
