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Growth Management
Act II
Calling growth management a ‘mess,’ new DCA Secretary Tom Pelham wants a rewrite.
'Let cities be cities'
Even without the political challenges, Pelham has a monstrous task. Nobody really has a good solution to handling 400,000 new residents a year.
Pelham says the first priority is to protect environmentally sensitive areas. He wants to put a lot of focus on rural areas. He says one of the big mistakes 20 years ago was focusing on where the population was — “from the coasts inward and from south to north” — rather than on undeveloped areas.
Then he wants to “not only let cities be cities, but help them be cities.” Higher population densities, for example, can support public transit to relieve congestion or at least keep it from getting worse as population grows. Under current rules, including the 2007 changes, it will almost surely get worse. Pelham says more congestion will force more public support for public transit, and transit will be more viable economically with higher densities. But can public transit actually be made a convenient, comfortable, attractive alternative?
“In between” rural and urban areas, Pelham says, developments should be “as well planned as possible to preserve as much of our agricultural and rural character as we can.”
Some likely elements of Pelham’s rewrite:
» Different regulatory processes for urban and rural areas and the places in between.
» Further changes in concurrency rules — rules supposedly synchronizing new development and the infrastructure to support it. On the one hand, they have unintentionally promoted sprawl, since developers go where there’s less congestion, and the resulting sprawl “is the biggest generator of congestion,” Pelham says. On the other hand, because the infrastructure improvements have to be merely in a government’s 10-year plan, developments are still finished long before infrastructure improvements actually happen.
» “Improve the local planning process” and have “better citizen participation.” The question is how. Instead of public hearings, Pelham was asked, wouldn’t citizens prefer to stay home with their families and have public officials do their jobs well? Pelham chuckles at the thought and basically says he can’t count on that. Slevin’s pitch: Require developers to consult with affected residents even before filing a development proposal. Developers could expect greater certainty and faster turnarounds on permitting as a result.
None of that, though, deals with how to actually evaluate proposals, measure their economic costs and benefits and anticipate aftereffects. And the elephant not even in the room is education.
The location and the quality of schools have been largely free from the growth-management process, though school sites were a half-hearted element of the 2005 legislation. Build a school at the edge of town, and plans for nearby developments will pour in. Trying to deal with growth patterns without dealing with education quality (and equality) is a fool’s errand. Pelham mentions education only when prompted in the interview, though he then mentions crime and healthcare as other considerations in trying to shift more development to existing urban areas.
Growth management has many tributaries.
“I don’t know if he can do it all in one year,” says Charles Pattison, president of 1000 Friends of Florida. But a frustrated electorate seems ready to act if Pelham and Crist fall short.
