Bush growth plan is back for a new try [Jeb challenges his opponents to come up with better plans]

Bush growth plan is back for a new try

The governor again pushes a bill to make classroom availability a consideration for approving development.

By JULIE HAUSERMAN, Times Staff Write
© St. Petersburg Times

published December 28, 2001

TALLAHASSEE -- For the second year in a row, Gov. Jeb Bush says he will try to get the Legislature to pass a law to make communities take school crowding into account before they approve new development.

It seems like a simple concept that should have been part of Florida's growth management laws long ago, Bush said in a recent interview. All over Florida, parents watch as bulldozers clear the way for new subdivisions in places where schools are already overflowing.

But Bush has been unable to get his proposal to pass the Legislature. The idea bogged down because lawmakers, lobbyists and the governor disagree about how to pay for new classroom space.

This year, Bush is softening his position somewhat in hopes of getting the law passed. And Bush, who said little about growth management when he ran for governor in 1998, now says he wants to make growth management a campaign issue when he runs for re-election in 2002.

"This is a powerful issue," Bush said. "I don't think people have connected all the dots yet. They look at it as: "My roads are crowded, or the schools are overcrowded.' They are not looking at it in a comprehensive way."

A year ago, Bush went up against the powerful Florida Homebuilders Association when he declared that communities should simply say no to developers if the local school district is overcrowded. The developers cried foul. They asked: Why should we pay because a community has failed to plan? A debate then began in the Legislature about how best to pay for added classroom space.

The homebuilders, the Florida School Boards Association and some leading Republicans in the state Senate said school boards and county commissions should be able to raise a half-penny sales tax with a "super majority" (the majority plus one) vote of the board or commission. If every school board passed the half-penny tax, school officials estimated, it would raise $800-million a year statewide.

Bush opposed the idea, saying communities shouldn't be able to raise taxes without a vote of the people. Last week, Bush softened his position: He said he won't propose the super majority taxing authority himself, but he will support it if it will get the bill passed.

"The tax issue was the one we couldn't get through," Bush said.

Bush says his growth management proposal, which hasn't yet been publicly released, would require every local community to add a new "intergovernmental coordination" element to its comprehensive plan, requiring school boards and county commissions to plan together for growth. Counties and school districts that do a good job planning together might be eligible for more state money, and more flexibility in spending it, Bush said.

Only communities that have "exhausted every opportunity" to ease school crowding and curb out-of-control development should tax residents to pay for schools, Bush said.

"I have been trying to get out in front of this because it is an economic development issue," Bush said.

Of course, Bush isn't the first Florida governor to say it's time to do a better job shaping the state's growth. "Growth in Florida must pay for the cost of growth in Florida," former Gov. Bob Graham, now a U.S. senator, declared in his opening speech to the Legislature in 1985, the year the state's Growth Management Act passed. "The alternatives are unacceptable. We are not going to pay for growth through a deteriorated quality of life."

Last week, Bush sounded a similar note: "If we strain the infrastructure of our communities, the quality of life diminishes," he said. "And lifestyle is our competitive advantage. I think it's a problem when people make a major investment -- their home -- and have their dream shattered because we didn't plan properly for the roads and the schools and the water."

Gov. Jeb Bush, Jacksonville, FL

From above article:

Bush... says he wants to make growth management a campaign issue when he runs for re-election in 2002.

"This is a powerful issue," Bush said. "I don't think people have connected all the dots yet. They look at it as: "My roads are crowded, or the schools are overcrowded.' They are not looking at it in a comprehensive way."

A year ago, Bush went up against the powerful Florida Homebuilders Association when he declared that communities should simply say no to developers if the local school district is overcrowded...

Bush says his growth management proposal...would require every local community to add a new "intergovernmental coordination" element to its comprehensive plan, requiring school boards and county commissions to plan together for growth.

I think Gov. Bush is very wise to make growth management a major campaign issue.

This is an area of real concern to FL voters, because FL continuously experiences an increase in population, and this non-stop growth impacts schools. There is so much growth in this state's population that as a result of the last census numbers, FL now has two additional electoral votes.

I think all voters in this state would like to see every candidate for governor address this growth management issue. And, the failure of a candidate to promote a responsible and comprehensive plan for growth management will be a huge negative for that candidate -- as it should be.

What makes you think that private schools are empty?

I don't think they are. I also think that, as private institutions, private schools will respond to demand as any business would. It's simply a question of allowing the consumers the freedom to participate in the market.

Gov. Bush is on the right track -- there needs to be more and better planning up front.

Government "planning" is a one-way track to disaster. It always has been, and it always will be. I went to high school in Pinellas County, and you could always tell which of the dozen-or-so municipalities in the county had interventionist governments -- they were run-down and shabby. It was the unincorporated or newly-incorporated areas that had vibrant growth and rapid development.

Bottom line: citizens and the markets shouldn't conform to government priorities. That's backwards. If government can't handle growth, then government needs to get its act together. To do otherwise implies that our communities exist by the leave of the state government. That's abhorrent and wrong.

BTW, here's another article on this issue, from "Florida Trends" magazine, Sept. 2001:

Florida Trend Archives

TALLAHASSEE - SEPTEMBER 2001 ISSUE

Once More — With Feeling

As the governor [Gov. Jeb Bush] plans to tackle growth management again, the roadblock that paralyzed progress still remains.

By Mary Ellen Klas

Gov. Jeb Bush’s failure to win major growth management reforms last session may have been his biggest legislative embarrassment in his three years in office, but it wasn’t his last try. With one more session before seeking re-election, the governor is determined to take another shot at tackling one piece of the most complicated, and controversial, sections of state law: He will push legislation that links local zoning decisions to the availability of classrooms, his advisers say.

“It’s the black hole of the growth management law,” says Steve Seibert, secretary of the Department of Community Affairs. Although current laws allow local governments to work with school boards when planning new growth and allow the Department of Education to do some things — such as waive school siting rules to help school districts trying to increase their capacity for new students — the governor believes more is needed to ease classroom crowding in many parts of the state, Seibert says.

But the roadblock that paralyzed progress on growth reform last session still remains. Bush believes that cities and counties must do more to coordinate their growth plans, and he wants to prohibit development in areas where school capacity is inadequate, yet he has resisted virtually every attempt to talk about giving local governments new ways to raise money to pay for new schools.

At odds

That position so antagonizes the powerful Florida Association of Homebuilders that it is prepared to take a back seat in the governor’s race next year and not endorse Bush, a former developer. Home builders believe the governor’s position leaves local governments with a Hobson’s choice: They must either turn down development when there are not enough schools for new families or allow development and pay for school construction with existing revenue sources.

With those options, the home builders’ lobby believes the no-growth policy will win or, in order to pay for school construction, cities and counties will raise impact fees on new homes.

“Home builders hate impact fees because 60% to 70% of new students aren’t coming from new houses, and (the fees) are disproportionate on modest-size homes,” says Doug Buck, lobbyist for the home builders’ association. Instead, home builders argue, school boards should be given the ability to generate revenue from increases in broad-based bondable sources, such as the documentary stamp tax, sales tax or telecommunications taxes.

Although Bush believes those ideas are a perilous path toward new taxes and bigger government, at the end of the session he tacitly agreed to support a Senate bill that would have allowed 19 counties that face school capacity problems to approve a tax increase to build schools. If the counties could satisfy stringent criteria, they would be allowed to levy a half-cent sales tax increase without having to go to voters first.

But in the final hours of the last day, the governor’s staff and some House members began raising questions about the school provisions that had been inserted in the bill weeks before in the Senate. With such uncertainty looming, the House never took up the bill, and it died.

That wasn’t the first time policy leaders avoided the question of how to pay for growth. The governor’s own Growth Management Study Commission offered four suggestions for ways local governments could pay for growth but recommended none of them. Instead, it suggested handing the politically unpleasant task of endorsing a recommendation to the Legislature’s Tax Reform Task Force.

True cost

This year, Bush has asked for another study — this time to develop a uniform model of determining the true cost of growth. The idea, known as full-cost accounting, emerged from his task force last year, at his behest, and lawmakers gave him $500,000 to convene a study group and hire a company to develop the model.

Ideally, the technique would force local governments to compare the long-term costs and benefits of a proposed development to the tax revenue it would produce. Local government would be required to pay for the needed services or reject the development. At a meeting before his economic advisers in January, Bush hinted that the model, once implemented, could lead to “massive dislocations in the economy” if it forced a halt to development.

So what if the models require local governments to come up with more cash? “The governor has said consistently that funding has got to be addressed, but before we open the floodgates to dollars let’s really be honest about where the needs are,” Seibert explains.

He says he doubts that the study will be completed within the next eight months. That could mean the governor can avoid engaging in a discussion over new revenue for schools and other growth-related services before the November election.

BTW: This article is dated Sept. 2001 -- and, obviously, Gov. Bush is not delaying a discussion on this important matter, since in Dec. 2001, the "St. Petersburg Times" article I posted reports that he has decided to make growth management a major issue in his campaign.

The reason more private schools are NOT popping up like mushrooms in this state is because the vast majority of FL's continuous population growth is coming from NON-English speaking immigrants moving to Florida. These people are not lining up to get into private schools -- but, they ARE flooding the public schools.

What you have is a result of decades of government control of schools: they "flood" the public schools because there aren't sufficient private schools. There aren't sufficient private schools for two reasons: first, the government undercuts their market with its own schools, and second, tuition is too high for the average family. Why is tuition too high? Because taxes reduce purchasing power. Because government control of the schools has taken away the mass consumer base that might lower tuition. It's a vicious cycle, perpetuated by the very existence of the public school system.

Your assertion that the immigrants go to public schools because they don't know English rings false. Non-English private schools have a long history in the United States, ranging from the German schools of Pennsylvania, to the Swedish and Norweigian schools of the midwest, to the Czech and Spanish schools of Texas. What wiped these schools out? Their seizure by the "progressives" in the early 20th century for public education.

....they are not consumers with the kind of money necessary to pay for private schools.

Again, it's the government's own fault that they're not. Allowing a free market in education would quickly bring prices to a level afforable to the masses; reducing the tax burden would only hasten this process.

And, who paid for the new public schools? Santa Claus?

No, we did. Why?

Local governments can and should plan better for growth, and if the governor's plan encourages such planning, I am all for it.

Ah yes....only government can form and shepherd our communities to their proper destinies. Planning is what is needed -- not the messy, unpredictable actions of independent citizens. You sound a familiar refrain; one proven wrong in socialist communities from New York to Moscow. Government serves the people, not vice-versa -- again, there is no reason to cause citizens to suffer simply because of governmental failures.

Pray tell me why I can't build my house simply because the local school board hasn't got its act together? Why can't I open my business just because there are 35 kids per classroom at the high school? Is this even remotely moral?

Overcrowded classrooms are no fun.

Maureen Dowd would be proud of this one.

And, who paid for the new public schools? Santa Claus?

No, we did. Why?

And, how did you pay? Via "impact fees"? -- the Homebuilders Association is AGAINST such fees, as they clearly state in the 2nd article I posted above. So, you are not on their side. And, you later mention "planning" as a solution. You seem to agree with Gov. Bush, without wanting to say so.

I think you are failing to "connect the dots" as Gov. Bush put it, as there are elements existing here in FL that are unique in this situation, and would not factor in elsewhere:

(1) the rate of population growth is phenomenal. This is not a normal rate of growth. What is happening in FL is happening at a very high speed in terms of population.

(2) the demand by these new consumers is NOT for private schools -- unless you plan on substantially raising the wages of menial workers, as most of these people wouldn't go to private schools even if you built them, because they can not afford them. The burden is on PUBLIC schools.

(3) FL voters are very anti-tax. People here don't want to pay more taxes for anything, even though taxes are relatively low. Yet, something has to give with this incredible increase in population. Somehow, there has to be a way to coordinate this constant growth with the need for more public schools.

That's what Gov. Bush is talking about -- the big picture. And, he is right to do so.

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