Scott hopes to slash agency others say has minimized sprawl

"Job killer," is how Gov. Rick Scott described the Florida Department of Community Affairs.

State Sen. Mike Bennett, a Bradenton Republican, dubbed the department a "monster roadblock" to economic development.

Scott and Bennett are not alone. The agency charged with managing growth in the country's fourth most populous state is under attack by big business, developers and conservative politicians.

Scott has proposed dismantling the department, shrinking the number of DCA employees from 358 to 40, and slashing its $780 million budget by 83 percent.

The governor and his business supporters see the DCA as a meddling bureaucracy that slows down worthy building projects, impeding any chance of recovery for the state's comatose real estate market.

Yet the agency's supporters counter that one of Florida's most robust real estate booms crashed, not because of DCA's review process but because of overbuilding and inflated real estate prices.

"Without the state review we had, there would be more sprawl, more overdevelopment, more traffic congestion, more environmental degradation, more crowded schools," said Tom Pelham, who served as DCA secretary twice, most recently for Gov. Charlie Crist.

"If you remove the state review, and return to the old way of doing things, I think that would be the result," Pelham said.

Even Billy Buzzett, Scott's newly appointed DCA secretary, said in a recent presentation to legislators that the department approves 93 percent of local growth plans it reviews.

Yet, under heavy lobbying from builders and other big business, the Legislature seems poised to decimate DCA in the name of job creation.

"We have companies that would have moved to Florida years ago if they could have got a permit out of DCA," Bennett said. "They really have been a hindrance to job creation and growth in so many areas."

The Department of Community Affairs grew out of the 1985 Growth Management Act.

Florida's population was exploding at the time, transforming sleepy towns into busy exurbs. Lawmakers wanted to make sure local governments had plans to guide the growth to areas where roads, schools, sewer and water were available and away from environmentally sensitive lands.

The law required all cities and counties to draw up comprehensive, or "comp" plans to guide land-use decisions. The DCA was given authority to review the plans to make sure they complied with the provisions of the growth management law.

It's these reviews that developers see as tiresome at best and obstacles to growth at worst.

They note that the local development regulatory process, which includes noticed public hearings, can take a year or more. Final decisions on projects are made by elected public officials or their appointees. So isn't another layer of review at the state level superfluous?

"Why should you have a state agency overlooking every single Walmart in the state?" asked Nancy Linnan, a lawyer representing Associated Industries of Florida, Florida Home Builders Association and other business groups.

"It's stifling the creativity of local governments in dealing with their own problems," Linnan said. "They have the tools to do that; they have the local officials."

Bennett, the Bradenton senator, said DCA delayed construction of Babcock Ranch, billed as an environmentally sustainable town in Charlotte and Lee counties, and the city of Destiny, planned but never built in Osceola County at Yeehaw Junction.

A spokeswoman for Kitson & Partners, developers of Babcock Ranch, said DCA's review caused no problems or delays.

But in the case of Destiny, the planned city that won the Clinton Climate Initiative award for it ecofriendly design, the department's lengthy review did contribute to the project's failure, said developer Anthony Pugliese.

"Our lenders pulled out of the deal," Pugliese said. "They pulled out for other reasons, but (DCA) was a contributing factor because we could have got it done."

The agency's supporters agree the growth management law may need changing to speed up the development process. They even concede that DCA probably shouldn't review every comp plan amendment.

But when big development projects cross county lines or infringe on valuable ecosystems, they say, a state referee is still needed to decide what's in the best interest of all the people, not just special interests.

Environmental groups point to the department's rejection of a Miami-Dade County comp plan change that would have shifted the county's urban boundary. The change was approved to allow water and sewer line extensions to a planned warehousing and distribution center in the Everglades, recognized as a World Heritage Site and International Biosphere Reserve.

The county and the developers appealed the case to an administrative law court, but DCA prevailed there, too.

"If we are going to be talking about cases where paving over the Everglades is at issue, we think it's absolutely essential there be a traffic cop at the state level that will blow the whistle and be able to step in and say no," said Charles Lee, a lobbyist for Audubon of Florida.

Even when DCA agrees with a comp plan amendment, just having the agency involved gives residents who oppose a development an avenue to challenge the decision.

For example, five residents of Wakulla County, a rural county southwest of Tallahassee, challenged a comp plan amendment in 2002 to change 266 acres from rural to urban zoning. The rezoning would have allowed 404 houses to be built on land that drains toward Spring Creek Spring, the largest volume spring in the state.

The residents argued that the geology of the area - limestone rock with numerous fissures and sinkholes - put Spring Creek at risk of contamination from urban pollutants. The DCA ruled in favor of the county and developer despite those concerns.

But the residents appealed the agency's order to an administrative law court in Tallahassee where they prevailed. The judge's ruling was later upheld by the governor and Cabinet.

Howard Kessler, a Wakulla County commissioner at the time, said without the DCA, the residents would have had nowhere to appeal.

"The fact that DCA was there, and provided a way for input other than just one side of the story, was a very valuable asset to all the citizens of the state," Kessler said.

Buzzett, the new DCA secretary, declined to comment. But he said recently he supports a diminished state role in growth management.

"Local governments have become more sophisticated in planning and managing growth," he said.

That may be true for urban counties like Hillsborough and Pinellas. Peter Aluotto, Hillsborough's director of Planning and Growth Management, said he remembers few if any projects delayed because of DCA.

But rural counties like Wakulla have small planning staffs, if they have one at all. Commissioners in those counties, desperate for any kind of economic development, often approve developments that endanger priceless natural resources, DCA supporters say.

Susan Anderson, a former DCA regional planner in the Big Bend area, argues that in addition to helping smaller counties, the department can look at impacts from multicounty developments.

"Local government tends to be focused on very narrow interests," Anderson said. "And they are more politically vulnerable than the state's review agency is."

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