Helping Their Friends
Howard Troxler of the St. Petersburg Times writes on one of the many travesties that have come out of this latest session of the clown college legislature: Crist signs growth bill, sells Florida down the river
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So if you live in a “dense urban area” in Florida — which this law brilliantly defines as more than ONE PERSON PER ACRE …
If you live in any of Florida’s biggest counties, including Hillsborough and Pinellas, or in one of more than 200 Florida cities …
If you live anywhere that your local government labels as a “community redevelopment area” …
Or even if you have the misfortune of living where somebody wants to build a “job creation project” …
Then tough noogies for you.
The main thing is roads. Developers no longer have to make sure that our roads can handle the growth they are bringing.
Once again developers are exempt from the cost of the infrastructure needed to support their projects, and can continue to destroy the state with over-building. Developers don’t have to factor in the cost of roads, water, sewer treatment, or any other public service, they can just build, take their profits, and leave. The taxpayers are stuck with the bills.
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From 1980 to 1988, I lived in a rent house in an old residential neighborhood perhaps two or three miles northeast of here. Three houses were cleared from the lots east of me and purchased for the construction of a residential high-rise. That construction was rejected only because the City of Houston decided there was no way on Dog’s green earth that the nearby sewer system could support that quantity of households. Eventually, pricey individual dwellings were built on those lots (and the one I was living on). That battle was won, and in a county as close to the flood plain as Harris, the outcome was sensible.
Today, a similar battle rages about two miles north of there, and it looks likely it will be lost. The high-rise will be built; the traffic in the neighborhood will be undogly compared to its current level; the water levels during floods… well, none of us want to think about those. Times have changed. It’s more than just the fact that “[t]he taxpayers are stuck with the bills”; the taxpayers are stuck also with the floodwaters, the traffic, the garbage disposal headaches, …
By the time many of these problems manifest themselves, the developers will have moved on to wreck other neighborhoods. And nothing anyone here can do… Dog knows it’s been campaigned against vigorously… can stop it. Growth is king; money rules… and the world has gone nuts.
The problem is that the money that public officials think they will receive from these projects never appears, but the expenses do. Not only do the developers not pay for necessary improvements, they often manage to get tax breaks “for job creation”, even though too many of the jobs go to people who should not be working in this country.
I don’t blame the workers, they wouldn’t willingly come to a place like Okaloosa County. It is the developers who actively recruit them, and bring them in to increase their profits.
Our biggest problem is evacuation in case of a major hurricane. There is only one decent North-South road, and it was clogged in 1995. The high density development in Destin had increased the number of people who will be trying to use that road to escape. It is madness.