“We’re trying to manage growth with an unmanageable statute. ... It’s a mess. It spraawwwls.” — Tom Pelham

Calling growth management ‘a mess,’ new DCA Secretary Tom Pelham wants a rewrite.

Twenty years after he took the job of making Florida’s landmark growth-management law work, Tom Pelham is back and ready for a do-over. By this time next year, Pelham hopes, Florida will have a new growth management law, or at least a giant first step, to replace the 1985 act as well as the Santa Claus-sized grab bag of changes the Legislature has passed since then.

“It’s badly in need of an overhaul,” says Pelham, who heads the Department of Community Affairs and held the same job under Gov. Bob Martinez from 1987-91. “We’re trying to manage growth with an unmanageable statute. ... It’s a mess. It spraawwwls.” Then he adds, “There’s a big hunger out there among all the interests to come together and try to reclaim the law and make it something workable.”

If the forces of “management,” as opposed to the forces of “growth,” play their cards right, their negotiating position in Pelham’s next effort at consensus will be enhanced by the threat of a citizen initiative called Hometown Democracy, now in the signature-collecting stage. It would give voters a veto over any change to the so-called comprehensive land-use plans. [See related article “Who’s Lesley Blackner?”].

Developers are appalled at the prospect of democracy run rampant if Hometown Democracy gets on the November 2008 ballot. Even some groups that want tougher growth management, like 1000 Friends of Florida, have opposed the initiative because of the likely unintended and counterproductive consequences. Local versions have emerged. The first was approved last year in St. Pete Beach.

“It’s public frustration that has grown into a populist revolution,” says Patrick Slevin, a former Republican mayor of Safety Harbor who now runs the Slevin Group, a consulting firm that helps developers work with citizen groups before they reach the point of “Jerry Springer episodes at city hall.” People feel the process is unfair and overindulges development. Slevin says business groups need to respond to the “movement,” not just the ballot initiative.

“I think we can’t ignore that,” Pelham agrees. The best chance of slowing the initiative’s momentum is to produce a compelling alternative that shows “we are taking growth management seriously.”

The question is whether Pelham and his boss, Gov. Charlie Crist, can pull that off, and do it in time.

Pelham first of all wants to “restore the Department of Community Affairs as an effective advocate and positive force for better planning for growth management in our state.” It’s an interesting word, “restore.” Gov. Jeb Bush wanted deference to local governments and embraced developer-friendly legislation.

This year, under Pelham’s leadership, various interests unanimously agreed on changes to the complex growth management legislation of two years ago. The consensus bill (SB 800) loosened some 2005 standards significantly. But it wasn’t enough for the House, where Speaker Marco Rubio is a zealot on property rights and where future speaker Dean Cannon comes from GrayRobinson, a powerhouse law firm for developers and road builders. House proposals would have eliminated DCA review in a large number of cases. Environmental groups, which had once again joined a “consensus” proposal only to see legislative leaders ignore it, pushed back. In the end, DCA would be merely “encouraged” not to review fast-tracked smaller developments, and exemptions from DCA review would be just “pilot programs.”

If Crist had wanted to really empower his DCA secretary, honor the consensus-driven process and set the tone for future legislation, he would have vetoed the final legislation (HB 7203). But he signed it without any press release, and no one reported it. Crist could still recover the initiative for Pelham’s next negotiations with another of his populist crusades seizing upon “the people’s frustration” along with a personal commitment for tougher growth management. Platitudes like “I’m an environmentalist” won’t get the job done.

'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.