From the Palm Beach Daily News--Amendment 4 a much-needed reality check on development

For those of you who missed my editorial from Saturday's edition of the Palm Beach Daily News...
Saturday, September 19, 2009

Until recently many conservationists doubted the efficacy of Amendment 4, owing to its potential to make existing permitting processes even more cumbersome and costly.

What we expected was reasonable compliance with rational comprehensive growth management plans for sustainable development, under the Growth Management Act. What we got was multiple deviations, with the imposition of multiple taxes, great profits for developers and little growth management realized.

That was then. Now is a developer push to severely limit or do away with impact fees, and a legislative threat to eliminate the Florida Department of Community Affairs. Now, with a glut of empty houses and condos, is a lobbying effort to do away with the growth management requirement for justifying growth. For those who understand the hidden costs to society and the resulting increased tax liability, this is the last straw.

The FDCA is the state agency that provides a reality check on developments run amuck, literally. By paving over paradise, there is an impact of uncalculated external costs to society, also known in economics as externalities, hence the need for impact fees. The reality check needed here is the calculation of all externalities' cost to the taxpayer.

Development externalities include all manner of infrastructure and services needed to support the proposed development and increased population: Schools, roads, fire and police, medical emergency services, garbage pick-up and landfills, sewers and waste treatment, and more government to handle this, and especially a viable water supply.

Another externality is the loss of property values across the board, caused by overdevelopment and increase in taxes per the aforementioned infrastructure and services, which the bureaucracy is finding not only hard to give up but in need of more. Hence nickel-and-dime taxes as a result in the news recently.

On the externality of water supply: For the snowbirds, here is a recognizable case study to compare what happened in New York City to what has happened in Florida, as another reality check.

To upgrade its water supply, New York City opted to restore the Catskills watershed at a cost of about $1 billion, as opposed to spending up to $8 billion on water plant construction and operation.

In South Florida, paving over paradise, by dredge and fill destruction of wetlands, has reduced our watersheds. This takes the cost of water supply for Florida residents in the opposite direction taken by New York. As the Everglades watershed has diminished, the effect is a local call for deeper drilling in the Floridan aquifer, reverse osmosis and desalination, all at a very high cost, when the New York remedy is available.

Guess what? The cost of reverse osmosis and desalination is six to eight times the cost of natural water supply. This is the same benefit-to-cost calculus that persuaded New York to opt for the low-tech, low-cost, low-risk attributes of the natural system.

Call our New York remedy the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, to restore a major part of Florida's natural watershed, at six to eight times the benefit, compared to high-tech, high-cost water supply methods, that also require more electricity.

The late Art Marshall provided this reality check in a 1981 news article: In Florida it has always been said that if we can just get a bigger population, we'll get more business and more dollars and it will solve all our problems. That's a bunch of crap. It doesn't work that way. Please observe that things have gotten much worse since 1981, with a lot more crap.

Now guess why the externalities are never mentioned. A salient quote: Success of the Growth Machine in Florida depended on the public not receiving information. Amendment 4 advocates are now the informed, but they are not the radicals. What development has done is to transform a natural asset to societal liability, with significant reduction of quality of life for all Floridians. As a recent editorial noted, "Unchecked growth is an unsustainable extreme."

In the quest for an approach to nearly unconstrained development at great cost to the taxpayers, Amendment 4 is the unintended consequence. Consider another externality: The developers' cost of political contributions to keep this tax debt spiral going.

Now, can anybody not understand why utilities are calling for increased rates to cover the cost of new infrastructure to meet increased demands, and for conservation of water and energy? ... And why the two are related?

For the long-term, big-picture thinkers, there is one more externality that portends significant costs to society: Global climate change and sea-level rise, accelerated by the loss of wetlands and more fossil fuel usage, with carbon emissions. Here the "unsustainable" word is appropriate. Needed reality checks are way past due.

As a final reality check, please have a read of Paving Paradise — Florida's Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss. This may move rational folks to go beyond just voting for Amendment 4, to campaign for a much-needed reality check. Can we say taxation without representation?

With "4" there is a chance of representation and restoring the process of democracy. Without "4," past history and current events tell us nothing will change for the better.

JOHN ARTHUR MARSHALL

Palm Beach
http://www.palmbeachdailynews.com/search/content/news/2009/09/19/EditMarshallvoice0920.html##