SHARE:
Law Of Unintended Consequences
Now that problem may be fixed. A new provision, called TCEAs (Traffic Concurrency Exception Areas), will be a major boon for cities as well as developers. Everybody wins with this important innovation. John Healy, an administrator with the Department of Community Affairs (DCA), which oversees the Growth Management Act, uses a recycling analogy to explain the benefits of TCEAs. Without the provision, he says, "we end up throwing away urban land." By allowing infill to take place, we "recycle these urban areas."
TCEAs began catching on with local governments last year. They exempt new developments from the traffic concurrency requirement if they are within an urban area. So far, the local governments that have set up TCEAs are: Fort Lauderdale, Lauderdale Lakes, Tallahassee, Pensacola, Daytona Beach, Dade County, Pompano Beach, Hollywood, Hallandale, Davie and Dania. Other cities and counties will follow this trend this year.
A prime example of a place that badly needed TCEAs is Broward County. Broward's name for areas that did not meet transportation concurrency requirements was "Deferral Zones." In these zones, which covered most of the land in eastern Broward, no new development was allowed. Developers who wanted to invest in rehabilitating urban areas were stymied, and not surprisingly, many aging neighborhoods in Broward continued to decay. Now, however, development may proceed unhindered by road concurrency restrictions in the area east of Florida's Turnpike. Fort Lauderdale's downtown was already exempt, but the new, broader exemption will open up more than 10,000 acres for infill development or redevelopment. Developers have been champing at the bit to convert houses into doctors' offices or business offices and to build townhouses on Sunrise Boulevard. Central and northwest Fort Lauderdale and downtown Hollywood will certainly see major increases in development and redevelopment activity.
The City of Ocala is working with the DCA, the branch of the state government that administers growth management issues, to establish a TCEA that would encompass its downtown and parts of the State Road 200 corridor. Although there are some issues to be settled about which areas along SR 200 to include, it looks as if this will succeed.
Pinellas County had applied for a TCEA along U.S. 19, but its application did not meet all of DCA's requirements, so the county is now working with DCA toward a "long-term concurrency system" that would be backed up by a DOT traffic study designed to address issues in that region. This effort may also involve Pasco County.
The increase in urban population and traffic allowed within TCEAs will compel local government to spend more on mass transit. To fund this, some cities have raised impact fees on developers, who then do their best to pass the cost on to their customers.
There is a danger, of course, that over-reliance on such impact fees will once again foil the intent of the Growth Management Act by creating an incentive for developers to build outside of urban areas. TCEAs are a good idea but, if not properly administered, they could provide still another sad case study in the law of unintended consequences.
Bradley F. Hunter is owner and president of the Power Hunter Group, Deerfield Beach.
