Originally Published Sept. 28, 2009

 

Developers are rushing to city and county commissions across Florida for permission to build more homes on rural land, despite a deflated real estate market and a crashing wave of foreclosures.

In Palm Beach County alone, landowners are filing papers for rights to build as many as 1,590 new homes on six large tracts of mostly vacant land - from old polo fields west of Lake Worth to parts of drive-through zoo Lion Country Safari near Royal Palm Beach.

This batch of development petitions, due for a county commission vote in November, is shaping up to be one of the largest in recent years.

Those approved will be bundled and sent to Tallahassee for review by the state agency that manages growth, the Department of Community Affairs. The number of bundled requests has soared this year, with as many coming in through June - 410 - as in all of 2007.

Public and private sector land planners say developers are trying to beat the clock before the November 2010 statewide vote on the Hometown Democracy proposal, a state constitutional amendment that would require local voters, in addition to city or county commissioners, to approve changes to communities' long-term growth plans.

"I think they are understanding that there is a sense of urgency to making some decisions about how this will impact their land," said Karen Bentz, co-founder and president of Land Design South, the West Palm Beach planning firm representing three of the six landowners going before the county commission in November. These three involve the polo fields west of Lake Worth.

Landowners working to get ahead of the proposed constitutional amendment may nonetheless face a tougher-than-usual state review. Florida, which welcomed an average of 1,000 newcomers per day just a few years ago, may now be losing residents, and demographers are adjusting population projections downward. Plus, the dismal real estate market has state planners taking a closer look at "needs analysis," in which landowners must show a need for the increased housing.

The importance of the needs analysis recently was reinforced in a closely watched case in which Gov. Charlie Crist and the state Cabinet unanimously denied one landowner's appeal to build 800 homes on 400 acres of horse country northwest of Ocala, said Tom Pelham, secretary of the Department of Community Affairs. Two women who run a neighboring horse farm defeated the proposal, arguing that Marion County had a 45-year supply of land approved for home building.

The Hometown Democracy proposal, which will need 60 percent of the vote to pass, would create an even tougher - some say impossibly tough - hurdle for developers. It would essentially give a community's voters veto power over land use decisions, such as whether to reclassify farmland for residential use or to increase development density on a property from 1 to 12 units per acre.

For landowners there is no reason to delay, since land use changes, unlike building permits, do not expire. The change alone can multiply the value of land, although the process is neither fast nor cheap. Making a large-scale change to a community's growth plan, or comprehensive plan, can take a developer 18 months, with the cost of attorneys, planners, engineers and fees running around $100,000.

Still, the Palm Beach-based author of the Hometown Democracy proposal, Lesley Blackner, who spent nearly four years and $1 million gathering signatures and pushing to get the amendment on the ballot, said the current system is corrupt and broken. She blames the speculative bubble that burst in 2006 in part on local governments' failure to halt unnecessary development.

She calls today's crashing property values and rising local taxes the "double hangover" of those mistakes. As evidence, she pointed to the recent imprisonment of three former Palm Beach County commissioners and two former West Palm Beach city commissioners on corruption charges related to land schemes.

"We have these elected commissioners that have the keys to the comprehensive plans," Blackner said. "They have the power to grant or deny land changes. It's all politics."

But Ryan Houck, who heads Floridians for Smarter Growth, a group formed in 2007 to oppose Hometown Democracy, calls the amendment a "stimulus package for lawyers."

"It's a classic case of right problem, wrong solution," said Houck, whose group is funded by business and development interests.

The thousands of growth-plan changes that elected officials send to the state for review each year would overwhelm voters, he said. Efforts to boil down the changes to digestible ballot questions would trigger a litigation bonanza, he added.

Houck refers to St. Pete Beach to illustrate what he says are the concept's flaws. After a similar amendment passed there in 2006, developers authored a new growth plan for the city and successfully campaigned to win voter approval. Lawsuits from the amendment's backers continue today, with litigation having cost taxpayers in the city of 10,000 nearly $500,000.

The lesson, Houck said, is that Hometown Democracy boosters only want voters to decide so long as voters decide to stop growth. The amendment's effect, he warned, would be to encourage special interest groups "to draft the most extreme ballot questions they can think of, and then hire political consultants to sell them."

The Palm Beach County landowners pushing proposals either did not return calls for comment, declined to discuss their plans in detail or said plans were not yet available.