Another excellent editorial by Jim Sutton in the St. Augustine Record. I agree: Governor DeSantis must veto HB 7103.
There was brief, desultory discussion at the May 7, 2019 St. Johns County Commission at the end of the meeting about HB 7103, with no result. Pitiful. Our all-Republican, other directed County Commission refused to stand up to the developers that own them and own the legislature in Tallahassee.
If Governor DeSantis is sincere about being an environmentalist, he will veto HB 7103.
Otherwise, he's just "whistlin' Dixie," engaged in a kabuki dance.
RECORD EDITORIAL: The worst bill you never heard about
Posted May 8, 2019 at 4:54 PM
St. Augustine Record
Giving credit where it’s due, this week the 1000 Friends of Florida called House Bill 7103 “maybe the worst bill you never heard about.”
There were several bad bills we warned about during the recent legislative session. We’ve learned something watching the Republican-led legislature over the past few years.
They’ve learned to toss a lot of crap out there that citizen groups and the media attack on many fronts — more like a diversion. But when something’s really important to the party and they want to ensure pesky environmentalists and other citizen groups don’t make waves, they simply keep a bill in quiet limbo until the final hours of the final day of the session. Then, almost magically, a new state law is on its way.
Before we get into that one, a little history. Former Gov. Lawton Chiles will long be remembered as one of Florida’s great ones. He was inclusive, he was in tune with both the strengths and weaknesses of the state and he got things done on both sides of the aisle.
He was the man who brought Florida’s Department of Community Affairs into being. It was tasked with looking over the development plans of every city and county in the state to help ensure they were at least in line with their own comprehensive plans.
A former legislator, Bill Sadowski, was put in charge of the fledgling department. And it sowed seeds of sustainable growth while culling out the schemes that stomped on comp plan parameters.
As an aside, Sadowski was killed here in a plane crash just west of U.S. 1 and across from the St. Augustine Airport in 1992 at the age of 48. He was coming into the county to look at some projects on the drawing board.
The DCA was ultimately dismantled by — no surprise — Gov. Rick Scott in 2011 as one of his first acts of death by deregulation. So the state’s growth oversight arm was reinvented as the DEO — Department of Economic Opportunity. Note the similarity of purpose? Neither did anyone else.
So Florida has no state oversight of comp plans. Enter HB 7103. It never went through committee. It was never debated. It had no staff analysis. It showed up as an amendment to another bill on the final day of session last week.
It has real potential to county, city and development interests’ carte blanche with our environment and growth.
Florida law provides for “consistency challenges” to development plans by individuals or groups when governments approve development inconsistent with their own comp plans.
What HB 7103 does is push comp plan challenges toward summary hearings which are a short-cut or fast-tracking proceeding. And if you, or I, or the 1000 friends of Florida challenge development for exceeding or side-stepping comp plan parameters, we’ll be liable for all attorney costs of the litigation if we don’t prevail.
Yes, it can go either way. But who has the deep pockets with a measurable payoff at the end? And this isn’t all about developers. A greater threat is our own government in non-compliance with its own comp plan. That nearly happened recently with the South Anastasia Communities association was prepping to take on the county to court over a highly controversial PUD. That development has fizzled, at least for now.
The 1000 Friends point out state law already allows judges to award damages against plaintiffs in what they determine to be nuisance challenges to development decisions. This simply pulls them out of the equation.
The bill is now in the hands of Gov. Ron DeSantis who can veto it. He’s proving to be a more thoughtful and nonpartisan leader than, at least we, expected. If nothing else, he should make a stand against pulling these political rabbits out of 11th-hour hats. It diminishes the meager trust we still have in our state government — including the office in which he sits.
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