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CRITICS SAY FLORIDA PLAN WOULD CHOKE PROJECTS

By Dees Stribling

The public needs the power to arrest development, according to Florida Hometown Democracy. The New Smyrna Beach-based group is pushing for an amendment to the state constitution that would require a local referendum on every modification or amendment to any comprehensive land-use plan. Currently, city and county officials make these decisions.

The move would lead to a plethora of referendums that would choke development, say retail developers and others in the state’s commercial real estate community. “There are about 12,000 plan modifications in Florida every year,” said Seth Layton, a Sanford, Fla.-based vice president of Kimco Realty Corp. and ICSC’s Florida state director. “If Floridians had to vote on dozens or even hundreds of plan changes in their home county, it would be impossible to vote conscientiously on each one.”

Florida Hometown Democracy sees the matter differently. The group dismisses the contention that plan amendments would overwhelm state ballots, calling it “a ridiculous scare tactic.” The organization’s Web site says: “Florida Hometown Democracy will stop the growth machine from proposing outrageous comp plan amendments. … The number of comp plan amendments that actually make the ballot will [thus] be significantly reduced.”

To get the amendment on the ballot in November 2008, the organization needs 611,000 signatures on a petition, and it needs to have those by the end of January. At present the group has about half of them, according to press reports. “No one I’ve talked to thinks this is going to be on the ballot,” said Jeff Liggett, a Florida real estate broker and the president of TreasureCoast.com, a news and information site. “It might have some die-hard supporters in the anti-growth community, but most people can see the trouble it would cause.”

Layton is less sure. “The idea is alluringly simple,” he said. “And if you ask people in a certain way, they’d say, ‘Sure, I’d like to have a vote in putting in a Wal-Mart down the street.’ But the devil is in the details, which no one is talking about. A lot of plan changes are fairly small matters, at least to the general public, but they’re important to the business or property owners involved. Planning commissions have the time to deal with these matters.”

To counter Florida Hometown Democracy and keep the proposed amendment off the ballot, various business interests have formed the Foundation for Preserving Florida’s Future, which is challenging the legal validity of some of the signatures on the petition. “Under the amendment, planning would become expensive, time-consuming and ultimately impossible to predict,” he said. “It would be a disaster for Florida real estate.”