The Cancerous Growth Promoter Act

You can try to create a green life, home, and neigborhood as I have in Florida. But if your elected officials conspire to make life worse for most people, all your individual efforts can mean nothing.

The Florida legislature is in the final stages of passing Senate Bill 360, cynically called "The Community Renewal Act."     Its supporters claim that the act's radical changes to the state's growth management laws will promote jobs and reduce the growth of sprawl in rural areas, driving it to "urban areas."  In fact, it basically guts the ability of most local communities to put any meaningful limits on rapacious development, regardless of its awful impact.

In Pinellas County where I live, we still have extraordinary natural assets, including some of the best beaches in the world, great parks, and a few undeveloped tracks of woodland. Yet, almost all of Pinellas County will be deemed urban by this bill. ("Urban" is defined as 1000 people per square mile, or 1 person per acre.)

Today, Pinellas is the most densely populated county in Florida, sprawling, traffic-congested, and filled with strip-mall mono-culture.  I live a few minutes from the ultimate artery of urban sprawl, US  Highway 19. Dubbed "Death Valley" US 19 is one of the most congested and dangerous roads in the nation - a legacy of unchecked, irresponsible development. In recent years taxpayers have ponied up lots of money to retrofit "Death Valley" but at best this is patchwork, and it is reviled in the community. 

A better name for the bill is "The Cancerous Growth Promoter Act."

You would think after two years of negative population growth in Florida, a 40% plunge in property values since 2006 and 300,000 foreclosures because of the mortgage crisis engineered by Wall Street, state legislators would run in terror from yet another irresponsible call for deregulation.  No - not in a legislature sold off to lobbyists and developers.

We see a pattern here, don't we:

1. Legislators beholden to big, private money attack basic protections for our communities under the guise of a legitimate public good (stopping urban sprawl, jobs, home ownership for everyone.)

2. The legislature throws open our communities to entirely self-interested privateers, whose profits matter more than anything, whatever the consequences.

3. Like gangsters, the apologists and propogandists for big, private money threaten the community with terrible consequences if anyone starts to object to the obvious evidence of harm from the privateers' unrestrained agendas. (Loss of jobs, more sprawl, collapse of the financial system. They always convince some of the community.)

4. The privateers reap their deregulated profits, and leave the wreckage to the community (urban sprawl, a mortgage crisis, a failing world economy.)  My grandfather use to call such public-private symbiosis "rackets."

If you are a Floridian, I suggest you contact your state rep or senator, and do something about this "racket." If you are not a Floridian and you care about your community, look for this pattern - you'll see it in many places - and start doing something about it. My next post - what do we do instead?

Comments

[Rain]

I'm out of leauge here. Too much brain power on display!

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