From the Orlando Sentinel
by Aaron Desllate
After Florida's business lobby poured tens of millions in campaign cash into electing Republican supermajorities to the Legislature last year, its top wish was clear: dismantling state oversight of the once-massive development industry.
More than a month before Billy Buzzett took over as Florida's top growth cop in January, lobbyists for some of the state's biggest developers already had outlined a game plan to make it easier for large-scale projects to spread across the rural and exurban landscape, according to public records released by Gov. Rick Scott's office seven months after the Orlando Sentinel requested them.
"Beyond removing some of the regulatory impediments, is there a planning function that will promote the efforts to make our state more attractive to businesses?" one of the lobbyists wrote to Buzzett, a former developer with the St. Joe Co., on Nov. 24.
Charles Lee And the emails show those lobbyists largely wrote the bill lawmakers wound up passing in May: a 190-page dismantling of Florida's growth-management act that dramatically limits the state's role in overseeing growth and makes it harder for citizens to challenge future development plans.
In one fell swoop, Florida shifted gears from development cop to corporate salesman.
"They were very persuasive," says Buzzett of the lobbyists.
In the months since the growth rewrite passed, outside consultants have labeled it "the most far-reaching reorganization of state agencies in more than two decades."
The Florida Department of Community Affairs, the agency tasked with settling disputes over sprawl and environmental degradation, will go away Oct. 1.
Half its 60 urban planners will be laid off, and the other half shunted into the governor's new job-creating Department of Economic Opportunity — where they will be renamed the Community Development division and have little power to intervene in growth-management fights.
Already, the new law has forced the state to drop out of eight lawsuits over contested growth plans, from a mining operation in Lee County to the massive, 23,000-home Farmton project planned for Volusia and Brevard, and Orange County's 6,343-home Innovation Way East development, which includes 2.2 million square feet of research, office and retail space.
"We don't believe the state should be dictating to local governments whether to put a gas station on a corner or not," said Doug Darling, who will helm the new state agency, adding: "The governor's vision is not to go hog-wild on development. The governor's vision is for regulatory certainty."
Ironically, the architects of the growth-policy sea change were two lobbyists nicknamed the "Thelma and Louise" of growth management, who each had helped usher in Florida's once-heralded era of comprehensive growth planning three decades ago.
Nancy Linnan, a former assistant DCA secretary under Gov. Bob Graham, now lobbies for the St. Joe Co. and the developers of The Villages. In January and February, emails show, she helped lead a group of lobbyists called the "growth leadership team" for the Florida Chamber — which sank $5.5 million into last year's elections — that conceived and wrote the bulk of the language that House staff ultimately grafted into the bill in early March.
"It's still a pretty scary new day, but you had to let local government grow up," Linnan said. "Now you don't have DCA to kind of hide behind anymore."
Her partner was fellow land-use lawyer and Associated Industries of Florida adviser Linda Loomis Shelley, who had been DCA secretary under Gov. Lawton Chiles and general counsel to Graham when Florida's growth act was passed in 1985.
In January, they presented their plan to House Speaker Dean Cannon, a Winter Park Republican and former land-use lawyer who had frequently quarreled with the agency. He called it "spectacular" and put the weight of his office behind it. Although some Democrats and environmental groups objected, Republican supermajorities in both chambers steamrolled the opposition.
"This Legislature did not need a consensus. And the train was leaving the station," Shelley said. "Either you got on board with your ideas and got them onto the train, or you waved goodbye as it left."
That "train" was powered by a confluence of earth-shifting developments in recent years.
Florida's business lobby had invested millions of dollars to defeat Hometown Democracy — an amendment on the November 2010 ballot that would have required voters to approve changes to land-use plans — and wanted to prevent local governments from putting growth-plan changes to public votes in the future. The new law does that.
At the same time, large landholders and Republican lawmakers were furious with DCA and its former secretary under Gov. Charlie Crist, Tom Pelham.
Though Pelham's agency had approved 94 percent of all new plan amendments that had come in the door since 2007 — giving the OK to 1 million new homes and 2.7 billion square feet of new commercial space — he also put the brakes on several large projects, such as Farmton.
Shelley is a lawyer for Miami Corp., which owns the 59,000 acres of timber and wetlands west of Interstate 95 in Volusia County where developers hope to build Farmton, a new city of 50,000 people, during the next five decades. A hearing will be held this month in a 2-year-old challenge to the project by the Sierra Club and local environmentalists; Pelham is expected to testify.
In the future, DCA will be allowed to step in only if "important state resources or facilities" — a phrase Shelley and Linnan wrote — are affected, although the law does not define what those are. Instead, it will be up to courts, administrators and ultimately the governor and Cabinet to decide on a case-by-case basis.
During last year's campaign, Scott lambasted the agency for "killing jobs," and Republican lawmakers — joining developers to oppose the Hometown Democracy amendment also on the ballot — used equally harsh language.
"Sensing an historic opportunity," Pelham wrote this summer in an American Bar Association article, "the development lobby in the state capital went to work."
The developers' legislation "rolled through the legislature like a tsunami, with little deliberation, few changes, and virtually no concessions to other stakeholder groups," he wrote. "When the storm subsided, the damage was almost incalculable."
The reform's House sponsor, Rep. Ritch Workman, a Melbourne Republican and mortgage broker, called that characterization insulting because the House held three workshops and more committee hearings on the bill, which was amended considerably.
"I dedicated hours to this bill," Workman said. "From Sierra Club to Linda Shelley's group, the Florida Chamber … no single group was completely happy with this bill."
But the plan moved so fast, lobbyists for the Florida Association of Counties complained to Cannon's office in early April that they couldn't keep up. Local governments had wanted the ability to let smaller and poorer local governments opt for more-stringent state review, but the changes never made it into the bill.
"Evidently, in committee last week we had 16 late-filed amendments that were a surprise to [the counties]. The amendments did not include a local option provision for small counties," FAC lobbyist John Wayne Smith wrote to Cannon's chief of staff on April 4. "FAC is not opposed to growth management reform and I will be getting with Chair [Ritch] Workman to discuss what happened or what broke down in our communications."
When passed in 1985, Florida's growth law was the toughest in the nation. It required cities and counties to create long-range "comprehensive" growth plans to fight sprawl and environmental destruction, including requiring developers to help pay for roads and schools that would be needed to serve their projects.
But through the years, developers argued the law became an employment act for planners, engineers and land-use lawyers while losing focus on results. Twenty-six years after the reform, many local governments had built up their own professional staffs to evaluate growth plans and didn't need state review.
But critics say the sweeping changes were fueled by misinformation and outright lies about the law. And, they say, it's now anyone's guess how Florida's eventual growth will take shape.
"The whole premise to attack DCA was a canard," said Charles Lee, with Audubon of Florida. "If it was related to the need to do this for new jobs and economic activity, the numbers show conclusively it was a big lie."
Next Sunday: How the new growth law is changing Florida's landscape.
adeslatte@tribune.com or 850-222-5564. Follow him on Twitter @adeslatte
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/politics/os-growth-management-gutting-20110904,0,5700643,full.story
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