Originally Published Sept. 30, 2009

 

Ryan Houck, the director of the misnamed Floridians for Smarter Growth, continues to tout the results of St. Pete Beach's placing its revised comprehensive plan to referendum as an example of what would happen if Amendment 4 were to pass in 2010.

Unlike Amendment 4, this town's charter allowed a referendum without following state growth-management requirements.

The mention of foresight in business leaders and elected officials in planning the Lake Nona project brings to mind: Just where was this foresight when real-estate businesses sold price-inflated homes, and while the banking business was making loans to people unable to afford them?

Where was the foresight of developers and building businesses that continued to build more -- limiting resources -- without revamping infrastructure?

Elected officials sat on their benches, counting tax dollars flowing in, spending them just as fast and approving every comprehensive-plan change brought forth -- all without considering what would happen when, not if, it came to an end. Foresight? It's called greed.

If anything has halted Florida's economy today, it is the continued dependence on growth. As every growth cycle comes and goes, it fails to sustain Florida's economy, it depletes limited resources, costs taxpayers, and leaves it the transient state it has always been from short-lived jobs.

Houck's theory about St. Pete Beach doesn't apply. But, perhaps, Albert Einstein's theory of insanity, "to keep doing something over and over again and getting the same results," is more appropriate.

Dori Sutter