If you are like me, your head is spinning with all the talk about affordable housing. As recently as five years ago, most of us, including those in the housing industry, had never heard of community housing trust funds, land trusts or inclusionary zoning. Now all three, and many more ideas with catchy names, are being considered to alleviate the pent up demand for workforce housing in Sarasota County. It’s easy to be confused. We can’t even decide on a name – workforce housing, community housing, attainable housing, affordable housing. Take your pick.

When faced with a complicated issue, I try to simplify it into its most understandable components by working through simple questions and obvious facts. For affordable housing (what I’m going to call it), the bottom line is we simply do not have enough of it. Why? Because we aren’t building any.

Until about eight years ago, even construction workers could afford the houses and condos they were building in Sarasota County. Building both high-end and low-end homes had been continuous since John Ringling was building his $1.5 million bay front Ca de Zan and my grandfather was building simple frame homes in the Arlington Park area. The need for affordable homes hasn’t ended, even if we aren’t building them. If anything, the need has increased.

If there’s a demand for affordable homes, why did we stop building them? I suggest a very simple answer – the market. Free markets, the hallmark of the American economy, tend to take the path of higher profits and least resistance. And so does each of us. Do you wake up in the morning and say to yourself, “Today, I’m going to find the hardest work for the least pay?” Of course not. We strive for efficiencies, profit and ease, to better enjoy our lives and support our families. And so does the market, because we are the market.

If you were a homebuilder and you had a choice of building a $500,000 home with a high-profit margin for a cash buyer, or building a $125,000 home with a low-profit margin for a buyer who has credit issues and needs a loan, which house are you going to build? There are no incentives in Sarasota’s real estate market to build affordable homes, but many disincentives.

Some would suggest that impact fees, land supply, protection for environmentally sensitive land and density create a shortage of affordable housing. But the facts suggest otherwise.

If impact fees ($5,400 per new home, excluding utilities) were completely eliminated, the price of a new home – the only homes that pay impact fees – would only drop to $494,600 from $500,000. This is about as effective as removing the light bulb in a refrigerator to lower your electric bill. Even without impact fees, the market quickly would drive the price back where it was.

The supply of developable land also is blamed for our affordable housing shortage. The argument is that if you create more supply, prices will fall. But in reality, this hasn’t been the case. Affordable housing is just as much of a problem in Sarasota County as it is in counties such as Lee and Collier where huge tracts of agricultural and environmental land has been approved for massive, high-end development projects. Despite all of the additional supply of developable land, the affordable housing crisis in those counties has worsened.

North Port is a great example. The city not only has 40,000 existing vacant lots, North Port dramatically expanded the availability of developable land by annexing more than 15,000 acres to support another 35,000 lots. Yet North Port is experiencing the most rapid price increases in the city’s history. While the supply of developable land has increased at an unprecedented rate, home prices and taxes have blasted through the roof.

By the time enough developable land is created to effectively offset today’s unprecedented demands and bring prices down into the affordable range, the infrastructure budgets required to service that supply will be bankrupt and today’s quality of life in Sarasota will be a distant memory. The demand is that great!

Most communities throughout the nation with affordable housing shortages have no environmental land protection programs. Even with all of Sarasota County’s existing and proposed land protection programs, there would still be enough developable land to accommodate 10 times our affordable housing needs – if the market desired. But it hasn’t. Several parcels of environmental and potential park lands were recently lost to development – expensive luxury development, and not one single affordable housing unit was built!

Protecting the environment for future generations now, while it’s still available, is hardly an impediment to supplying land for affordable housing. There are no legitimate connections, only self-serving excuses from those who want the land for development and misunderstandings from others.

The density argument alone, which sounds superficially logical, also belies the facts. Affordable housing shortages are notorious in many of the most densely populated areas of the nation, the state and the county. And you wouldn’t want to live in the densely populated areas where this fact isn’t the rule. Downtown Sarasota, where densities have increased dramatically, provides a recent and classic example. Compare the price lists (market values) before and after the additional density. Additional densities have resulted in replacing affordable small homes and apartments with high-end luxury condominiums.

There’s another significant contribution to the affordable housing dilemma. For a large portion of our workforce, the ability to pay monthly housing expenses has eroded exponentially. The rise in housing costs is half of the equation, but inadequate wages are the other half. If wages had kept pace and were still commensurate with the cost of housing, affordable housing would be a fraction of the issue it is today.

Sarasota County and other communities throughout the nation have shortages of affordable housing because we live in a community where buyers with wealth want to live and they are willing to pay to get here. The market is responding to an extraordinary demand for higher priced homes. The lack of affordable housing isn’t the fault of government, home builders, developers or luxury home buyers. Likewise, the solution can’t be the sole responsibility one of these groups either. We got into this mess as a community, and that’s the only way we can get out of it.

The Sarasota County Commissioners will hold a public hearing on Sept. 14 to invite citizens’ input on a proposed charter amendment that would retain the county’s present Comprehensive Plan rural land use on designated rural lands annexed by municipalities.

A recent Herald-Tribune editorial asked four salient questions about the proposed charter amendment and suggested that if they could not be answered “yes,” the County Commission should not put the proposal on the November ballot. I agree.

The first question asked if the County Commission could guarantee that the proposal would withstand a court challenge. The proposed amendment is taken almost verbatim from a recent District Court of Appeals decision which ruled that a charter county, such as Sarasota County, could impose Comprehensive Plan restrictions on annexed rural lands. While there’s no “guarantee” that anyone will prevail in any court of law, this is as close to a guarantee as you get.

The editorial also asked if there is sufficient time to answer the questions of voters. The proposal is quite simple to explain. More complex referenda have been considered by Sarasota County voters, and 60 days was more than sufficient time for all views to be heard.

The third question asked if there is an imminent threat of massive annexations that warranted a quick vote. Threat of imminent annexation is not the issue – the proposal doesn’t prohibit annexations at all. It is solely intended to require coordinating Municipal Comprehensive Plan changes on annexed rural lands, with the county’s ability to pay for additional infrastructure needed by the annexation.

Since 2000 North Port and Venice have annexed and have changed, or soon will change, land use designations from rural to urban on over 21,000 acres, all without coordination with the county. The reason that the county had maintained these lands as rural was because there is not funding available to build the needed infrastructure such as roads, parks, schools, libraries and jails to serve the additional development. Unwilling to wait, anxious developers petitioned the cities for annexation with the promise of greater densities sooner.

“Yes,” there is imminent threat of additional massive land use changes that will destroy environmentally sensitive areas and exacerbate infrastructure deficits.

The final question asked if the county and the cities have exhausted every reasonable effort to coordinate planning and development. The preferred way for governments to coordinate planning is through joint planning agreements. JPAs codify where and when development is to take place, and which government is responsible for building what infrastructure. After many years of good-faith negations by the county, no JPAs have been reached. Next the county filed legal suits and challenges to the state planning agency. What we learned from this experience is that while intergovernmental coordination is preferred, it is not a requirement of law.

We have talked, negotiated, sued, challenged and pleaded for intergovernmental coordination to ensure that roads, schools, parks and libraries are available to meet the needs of rural lands that are converted to suburbs. All of these efforts have failed.

The county is now using the last and only legal means available to require a financially feasible infrastructure plan to meet the needs created by municipal development. “Yes,” not only have we exhausted every reasonable effort to coordinate planning.

Municipal Comprehensive Plan changes on recently annexed lands will eliminate thousands of acres of agricultural and environmentally sensitive lands to build subdivisions and malls. We are already burdened with huge infrastructure deficits without the additional impacts from 65,000 more people who could move into these recently annexed areas. It is not unreasonable to ask taxpayers to consider a rule that requires intergovernmental coordination – their taxes will pay for it if we don’t cooperate.

This proposal is not about power, home rule or slowing growth. It is about coordinating growth with our ability to pay for it, nothing more.

Another Herald-Tribune editorial asked cities how they would change their planning and development policies to preclude the need for the charter amendment. Let me suggest an answer – municipalities would approve no Comprehensive Plan amendments for rural lands without a Joint Planning Agreement with the county.

Aside from government officials, home builders and developers, very few people pay attention to impact fees. While rezone hearings may draw standing-room-only crowds, most impact fee hearings have more Commissioners than members of the public in attendance.

Many people feel that since impact fees are only charged on new development, they have no reason to be concerned. However a comprehensive look at what impact fees are intended to do and what they actually accomplish should raise serious concerns with all Sarasota County taxpayers.

Impact fees are a one-time charge to new development that can only be used to fund infrastructure such as land, roads and buildings that are needed to service new development. The fee can only be levied to the extent that new development benefits from the infrastructure built by the fees, and can not be used to fund any existing infrastructure deficiencies or for maintenance or operating cost.

An Impact fee is actually the sum of several fees that are calculated individually, depending on the cost of the infrastructure. A formula is developed that estimates the proportionate share of the need for additional infrastructure for one development unit (typically a house). An easy example is water. The impact fee is calculated by simply dividing the cost of a water treatment facility by the number of customers it is capable of serving. If the facility cost $10 million and it is capable of serving 5,000 customers, the impact fee would be $2,000. However most impact fee formulas are much more complicated and subject to wide interpretation – sometimes very wide.

Sarasota County has been charging impact fees for roads, parks, libraries and emergency services for about sixteen years. Hypothetically these impact fees were to cover most of the cost of infrastructure needed by new growth, and capital budgets would remain solvent. In reality, infrastructure needs required for growth are outstripping impact fees by a wide margin, contributing to future capital budget deficits that could choke a python. And Sarasota County is not alone. Virtually every growth county in the state is desperate to identify enough money to fund the projected infrastructure needed to accommodate future growth. Despite collecting impact fees for decades, infrastructure budgets are going bankrupt and Florida’s counties are facing congested roads, crowded schools and a diminishing quality of life.

One illustration of this predicament is roads. Sarasota County has been assessing a road impact fee on new growth since 1989. The formula used to calculate the fee is very complex and understood by few. Despite substantial increases in the cost of land, labor and materials, this fee has changed little in the last x years.

A recent study estimated how much it would cost to build a minimum road network necessary to accommodate Sarasota County’s projected 2030 population. The study also estimated how much money would be generated over that same period of time from impact fees, gas taxes, property taxes, telecommunication taxes and surtaxes. The costs were estimated at $1.8 billion dollars; the revenues were estimated at $300 million. That’s a deficit of $1.5 billion, on a $1.8 billion budget! Even though Sarasota County subsidizes road impact fees with more additional revenue sources (primarily paid by existing residents) than any other county in the state, we can’t keep up. We can’t even get close!

Regrettably, the County’s future school, recreation, administrative and judicial facilities budgets are also forecasted with large deficits. Many of these infrastructure needs, including roads, are already deep in the red today.

Solutions are limited. Part of the gap could be bridged by restoring state funding that has been reduced as the result of funding cuts, diverting “Trust” funds, and lowered return rates on school and gas taxes. But restoring these reductions will only chip away at the mountain side. The present trend is toward additional State cuts, not increases. Without adequately funded infrastructure budgets, facilities will deteriorate, resulting in crowded roads, schools and parks and inadequate judicial, public safety and administrative facilities. There is no shortage of examples where this has already occurred.

To avoid a diminished quality of life or denial of development petitions, the future infrastructure budget needed to accommodate new growth must be adequately funded. To do so, either impact fees, property taxes or some other tax will need to be increased.

As a community, Sarasota County needs to answer two fundamental questions. What is the true and full cost to fund the facilities needed to support new development? And, how should funding that cost be split between impact fees, paid by new development, and other taxes, primarily paid by current residents?

Sarasota County’s long range planning initiative is on the threshold of change.

On the surface you’ll notice a name change from Resource Management Areas to Sarasota 2050. But the relevant change will be moving from a series of consultant-based decisions to community decisions.

Up until now, the process has primarily focused on decisions made by the planning consultants who were hired to assist the county in designing a new form of development.

Frustrated with a history of sprawling suburban development that destroyed the environment and crowded roads, the county wanted to offer developers an alternative choice.

The village concept suggested by the consultants would cluster development into smaller, more compact areas, leaving large open spaces as preserves. Villages also could provide a more livable environment for their occupants and a more efficient form of development for government.

The consultants’ responsibility to provide maps, planning expertise and data analysis for the new village form of development is substantially complete. It is now the community’s responsibility to make the village form work in Sarasota.

The first step will be to provide incentives for landowners and developers to make the change a reality.

Most of the undeveloped area in Sarasota now allows for one house to be constructed on either 5 or 10 acres.

The Sarasota 2050 plan will not prohibit property owners from developing their land as they can today. So in order for the village form of development to be more attractive than the status quo, there need to be incentives.

The incentive offered in the 2050 plan is an increase in the number of homes that can be built on a parcel – thus higher profits.

When the number of houses is increased, the demand for community services also will increase. Many of these services have limitations. It is the community’s responsibility to balance the needs and benefits resulting from new village form of development, so as not to create worse conditions than those which would result from the current development scenario.

Water and transportation are two of many examples of community services with limited resources. It is critical for the community to have a means to meet the additional water supply demands – without compromising the environment or raising the rates of existing customers.

The village form of development offers some transportation benefits by mixing residential and commercial uses. That way the need for automobile travel is reduced.
However, there will be many more people, so automobile trips on roads outside of the villages will increase.

Sarasota needs a transportation plan that considers the additional impacts to the safety, convenience and cost to the community as a whole.

Here are the two fundamental questions the community will have to answer. 1) Is the village form of development preferred over the status quo? 2) If it is, then how much incentive can the community offer to make the village form of development a reality?

I believe the answer to the first question is “Yes.”

As to how much incentive to offer, I would suggest the following as a guideline: If the additional incentive development creates demands for community services that exceed the available resources needed to supply the service, or if countywide tax or fee increases are required to make the service available, the incentive is probably too large.

About 20 years ago it was suggested that we should begin to cluster development onto just a portion of a property, in a more compact form that preserved the remainder of the property as open space. The concept was viewed with distain by most developers and widely rejected by elected officials. Just the mention of deviating from the typical subdivision pattern of development, now know nation-wide as “urban sprawl”, was considered heretical.

Times have changed. With Sarasota’s 2050 Plan, these once renegade ideas are now the rule, and communities around the nation are rediscovering the benefits of traditional forms of development now known as New Urbanism or Smart Growth. Smart Growth planning principals could redefine how American communities are built to a degree never before seen, except for urban sprawl itself, which catered to the lure of auto mobility and gasoline for less than a dollar a gallon.

Smart Growth is much more than just a visual form of development with special building codes to regulate density, height, setbacks and colors. Smart Growth is a comprehensive concept that considers every aspect of development, in order to provide a more sustainable living environment. Smart Growth includes energy conservation, environmental preservation, social values and viable economic principals employed at all planning levels.

The incentive to build using Smart Growth principals is often an substantial increase in development rights. In exchange for building Smart Growth, a developer may be given a bonus for much more development than otherwise would have been permitted. In Sarasota this typically means going from being able to build one house per five acres to three to five houses per acre, or going from three units per acre to up to 25 units per acre. Rarely does one see Smart Growth built without the promise of substantial density increases.

The Smart Growth label is now put on many new development projects, whether it adheres to the comprehensive concepts of legitimate Smart Growth development or not. Frankly, many recent so called Smart Growth developments are smart in name only. The two most common ways that the Smart Growth label is misused deal with location and infrastructure.

Smart Growth can not be smart if it is built at the wrong location. First and foremost, Smart Growth requires development to be sited in a location that maximizes existing infrastructure and avoids impacting significant natural resources. No matter how cute you make the buildings look, or how compact the design, locating developments in flood plains, environmentally sensitive areas or in locations far removed from supporting urban services, its just not smart.

Smart Growth planning principals provide for more efficient use of costly urban services such as roads, police, fire and utilities. By no means does Smart Growth eliminate the need for these services. Yet many purported Smart Growth projects have no financially feasible infrastructure plan to accommodate the increased development that incentivised the so called “smart” development.

For example, if a development, now with 200%-300% more intensity due to the added units for Smart Growth), is permitted that cannot identify an sustainable water supply, it doesn’t matter that Smart Growth efficiencies have reduced individual water consumption by 25%, you still need to have the a water supply for the new development or it isn’t smart. Likewise, Smart Growth may cut individual automobile trips by 20%, but if the roads and transit services are inadequate to accommodate the “bonus” development that comes with Smart Growth, it isn’t smart. In some cases we may be better off without the additional infrastructure pressures that the added bonus density of Smart Growth brings.

Smart Growth is a development option that by far out performs typical subdivision sprawl and is a chance to avoid paving over every tree and frustrating traffic jams. But misused, Smart Growth could compound existing infrastructure budget deficits and create more sprawl, simply disguised with different name. Smart Growth should be the way that we build new development, not the reason. “Smart Growth” in the wrong location or done without a financially feasible infrastructure plan, is nothing more than dumb growth with a smart name.

In 1999 the Sarasota Board of County Commissioners and the Economic Development Board commissioned Tischler & Associates Inc. to conduct an economic and fiscal impact analysis for 19 prototypical Sarasota County land uses. The economic impact analysis measures broad impacts to the general economy, and the fiscal impact analysis determines the cost and revenues from new development on the County budget.

The report concluded that most forms of residential development are likely to generate budget deficits. The report’s findings suggested that developing residential homes from vacant land produced a net tax loss, despite an increase in gross tax revenues. Ultimately the cost of infrastructure and services required by the new residential development exceeds the increased tax revenues they generated. The report also concluded that many forms of commercial development, high-end residential development and agriculture produced a net tax benefit to the County budget.

When the report was issued in February of 2000, many in the residential development industry feared the Tischler report would be misinterpreted and misused by government officials and anti-growth advocates as a means to stop growth. In response to these fears, I published a guest column in this paper that suggested the report’s conclusions should not to be used as a single factor to determine whether development should be approved or what kind of development should be approved. Instead, the information should be used as a tool, along with many other tools available to the community, to support an appropriate rate, form and amount of new development.

Last week two separate groups with completely different positions asked me: What has been done with the Tischler report? Has the County used the report’s findings to influence development decisions? Or has the report found a comfortable place on that notorious government shelf where it will forever remain dormant, dust-covered and unused?

I believe that the Tischler report has influenced both non-governmental initiatives and numerous, though not all, Board of County Commission development decisions.

While the Tischler report and many others studies have demonstrated a potential net negative fiscal impact for many forms of residential development, a decision to approve only “profitable” forms of development isn’t that simple. Unlike a for-profit corporation, government’s role often is to provide services that are not profit centers, such as indigent health care, national security and education.

One of the main reasons that many forms of residential development don’t “pay their own way” is schools. Residential development that doesn’t generate school age children was found to produce a net tax benefit. Conversely, most homes priced in the affordable and workforce price ranges produce net tax revenue losses. Then are we to approve only childless and million dollar homes? I can only speak for myself, but that is not the kind of community that I want to live in and it certainly isn’t the standard that has made Sarasota the community that it is today.

Managing a viable community involves a great deal more than one economic measurement of profit and loss. A tax base built upon a balance of various land uses is an essential for a stable economy and a livable community. This balance often requires using revenue from one land use to support another.

That is not to say the Tischler report has been ignored – it has not. The report provided additional evidence that the County needs to diversify its ad valorem tax base, to reduce its dependence on residential properties. The County also refocused its economic development strategies based upon this finding. Non-polluting “export” industries with high paying jobs have become the target for economic development policies, replacing a priority on tourism and housing development industries.

Additionally most elected officials now realize that growth, simply for the sake of adding properties to the tax role is not a sound reason to approve development. It may have been valid at one time, or under different funding scenarios, but not anymore. Today’s development should be scrutinized at a higher level that includes a comprehensive balance of benefits and responsibilities.

The long anticipated Sarasota 2050 Plan, celebrated for its promise to offer a new direction for community planning, is now facing its first significant public challenge. There appear to be two conflicting philosophies on how to continue. One side feels that more information is needed to accurately determine the impacts the plan will have on public facilities such as roads, water, schools and taxes. The other side argues that the 2050 plan should deal with long-range, general planning policies now, and the specifics of traffic, water supply, and education should be dealt with later.

The group arguing for more information cites existing problems and forecasted deficits in the county’s ability to fund roads, water and schools as a reason to constrain the plan to only that amount of development that can be reasonably accommodated in the near future. The other side suggests that the absence of a long-range growth management plan in the past is now forcing the county to build expensive after-the-fact infrastructure. For instance, the county would not now be paying ten times the cost to retrofit areas with central utilities and expensive road right-of-ways had such a plan been in place since the 1960’s.

Both arguments are compelling. Should the resources be driving the plan, or should the plan drive the resources?

Maybe we should not be choosing between the two ideas, but adapting the 2050 Plan in a manner that uses the valid points of both. Rather than having a single map that commits to all of the new growth (over 200,000 new residents) at once, we should have two maps. One would be a future vision map showing all of the roads and villages needed to accommodate new residents through the year 2050. The other map would show only the initial village(s) that the community can afford today, in terms of water, traffic, schools and taxes.

The Sarasota 2050 Plan is a formal Comprehensive Plan amendment. After the Board of County Commissioners passes an amendment to intensify development in the plan, it is forwarded to Tallahassee, where it ultimately becomes law. Because of property rights issues, comprehensive plans are rarely changed to de-intensify land uses.

Only the map that commits to an initial village should be included in this Comprehensive Plan amendment cycle. The 2050 vision map would become a community planning document. We could then be more creative with the vision plan. Since it would not have legal standing, we could be free to add, subtract or move villages as we chose.

The formal Comprehensive Plan amendment would be the first step of the Community Plan. In time, as the initial village became developed and we saw the availability of resources, such as a new water source or schools, we would then amend the formal comprehensive plan accordingly. If corrections need to be made in the way a village is developed, we could make them.

In effect, the systematic revisions to the formal comprehensive plan act as a timing mechanism to implement the long- range community vision plan. To approve village locations on the comprehensive plan map and then rely upon “timing policies” to decide when a village gets built will only add to the likelihood of litigation from developers claiming the time is sooner rather than later. As a County Commissioner, I believe my first legal strategy should be avoiding litigation in the first place.

The two-map option affords the community the greatest flexibility while still preserving a long-range vision. It only commits to what we know we can afford, yet contemplates long-range possibilities. It enables future decisions to be made by future County Commissions and future generations. They will no doubt be more informed and better equipped to specifically plan for their needs then, than we are today.

It would be irresponsible to approve a Comprehensive Plan today, and leave the responsibility and burden of providing for water, roads, schools and funding for later. Now more than ever, we need to take a disciplined and more conservative approach toward community planning that considers both sides of our decision, before we make.

Similarly we are reminded of Sarasota’s failed effort to slow growth in the 1960’s by not building infrastructure. Growth occurred anyway and the County was forced to retrofit excessively expensive infrastructure.

If growth is inevitable, does that mean forever? Sarasota has 367,000 acres of land and if we built to the same densities as New York City or Tokyo, we could accommodate millions of people. While many of us would consider this scenario ridiculous (some may not) I use it to suggest there will be a point where the population of Sarasota County stabilizes. The question is when and how that stabilization will occur.

The concept of inevitable growth has always bothered me. Many communities have had no population growth for years, even decades, and some have even declined. Why doesn’t this rule apply to them?

Populations grow because people choose to live in a community that offers the best quality of life that they can afford. This means growth is inevitable only as long as an area remains attractive. For Sarasota, weather alone will allow us to remain attractive long enough to lose the charm and character that endears many of us to this special place. For this reason growth management and long-range community planning become critical decisions.

For most counties, build-out isn’t deliberately planned, but results from a series of incremental, isolated decisions. Development approvals overstress infrastructure such as roads, parks, schools and jails. When more infrastructure is built, more development is approved that again overcrowds the infrastructure. This mindless cycle repeats itself until all available land is developed.

As bizarre as it seems, this is a standard planning model for many Florida counties. Pinellas, Broward and Miami-Dade are veteran examples. Rather than planning what their future community could look like and determining what facilities would need to be built and what resources should be preserved, they developed by default. Thousands of uncoordinated development decisions made with no regard to a long-term plan. Times change, and plans need to be adjusted, but revising a destination plan is a much better option than chaotic decisions with no destination in mind.

Sarasota County is at a critical point. We can follow the default planning model of over-developed counties, or we can determine what amenities, assets and characters are worth protecting and adopt a plan that preserves them. Rather than competing with other counties or cities to see who can become the next Orlando, Sarasota should strive to become an exemplary mid-sized county that recognizes open space, agriculture and environmentally sensitive areas as permanent uses, rather than lands in a holding pattern for “inevitable growth” yet to come.

Creating a sustainable Sarasota means focusing more on promoting economic, capital, social and spiritual growth than on population growth. Many communities with stable populations develop these other areas and provide a high quality, attractive living environment for their citizens.

A community that deliberately plans to preserve its unique character will prosper economically and distinguish itself from other areas that accepted the defeatist slogan of “inevitable growth” at any cost and over-developed themselves into oblivion

The 1960’s effort to slow growth didn’t fail simply because they did not build infrastructure. It failed because they not only didn’t build infrastructure, they approved the development. This makes about as much sense as buying a fish but not an aquarium.

Not adding additional development capacity to the existing Sarasota County Comprehensive Plan is the most likely way to assure that Sarasota County doesn’t become an accomplice in the same botched planning exercise that created Florida’s lower East Coast. Our existing Plan assures all property owners the right to use their property and offers the community a last chance to avoid wall to wall suburbanization.

One of the sayings around the County Commission office is a variation of a popular football movie title. We call it “On Any Given Tuesday” to fit our day of scrimmage. Just like the movie, it refers to the sometimes unpredictable nature of a team effort. On a recent Tuesday, the County Commission made a fundamental change in the way we plan our roadway network.

Typical road “planning” goes something like this. Build a two lane road. When it gets congested, build a four-lane road. When that gets crowded, build a six-lane road. Keep building until the cost to buy more land for more lanes becomes prohibitive, and still the road becomes congested. With a growing population, all but local roads will inevitably become congested, regardless of how many lanes you build.

Some Florida communities have taken this road-planning model to bizarre extremes, creating 20 lanes of grid-locked traffic. While most of Sarasota County’s roads may never be subjected to this extreme, we are considering a 10- to 12-lane Interstate 75 through Sarasota County, so we aren’t exactly immune from this madness.

While widening roads to cure traffic congestion may bring short-term relief, it rarely if ever offers anything other than a temporary fix. Trying to cure traffic congestion by widening roads is like trying to cure obesity by loosening your belt. Eventually you run out of belt holes, but the problem persists. Only now, it’s more dangerous and difficult to fix.

Honore Avenue is a critical north-south component of Sarasota County’s roadway network. It provides travel options that disperse traffic over a grid rather than on one or two streets. For decades, Commissioners have seen the missing Honore link between Bee Ridge Road and Fruitville Road stalled as they struggled with budget constraints and neighborhood opposition. But without this link, there’s no connectivity or grid. The decision facing the County Commission was to consider the pro and cons of building either a two-lane or a four-lane road.

A primary consideration for evaluating road construction projects is how much additional capacity the new or expanded roadway will provide. Some of the Honore Avenue intersections in this area are constrained in size, and can only move a limited number of cars through them. As a result, a two-lane Honore Avenue will move just about as many cars as a four-lane version.

Expanding the intersections to accommodate a new four-lane road would create 16-lane intersections that would be extremely dangerous for pedestrians. It would also add millions of dollars to the cost of the road, since businesses at these intersections would have to be purchased to get the additional real estate needed to enlarge the intersection.

Even without the expanded intersections, a four-lane Honore would still be much more expensive to build and would require numerous inverse condemnation law suits to acquire land necessary for two additional lanes. But there is more to building a functioning transportation network than just moving cars.

When completed, a four-lane Honore Ave. would be canyon-like, with an asphalt runway flanked by concrete walls. In contrast, a two-lane Honore will not only preserve many of the existing trees but will also provide space to plant many more street trees. Two lanes will produce less stormwater runoff and will offer bike lanes, sidewalks and decorative street lighting. In some places the sidewalks will meander in and out of trees away from the cars. Because the two-lane option will cost significantly less, construction can start sooner and this much needed roadway link will serve the community sooner.

If four lanes are needed in the future, today’s two-lane option won’t prevent the construction of a four-lane roadway later.

While two-lane roads are more aesthetically appealing, they may not work in every situation. The specific condition surrounding this Honore Ave. decision may or may not be present elsewhere. But we at least have an alternative to consider that preserves the unique character of Sarasota’s neighborhoods and its natural environment.

In response to a growing frustration with the State’s inability to deal effectively with the needs of Florida’s rapid population growth, Governor Bush created the Growth Management Study Commission. Since Florida’s population is expected to increase by 50% in the next 30 years, with commensurate impacts to the State’s natural resources and public infrastructure, the Study Commission was to review the State’s growth management laws.

The task was daunting. In less than six months the Study Commission was to comprehend, distill and revise one of Florida’s most controversial laws, and simultaneously, mediate the passionate views from special interest groups. Senator Lisa Carlton worked meritoriously to represent Sarasota County as a member of the Study Commission.

Regrettably, the haste in which the Study Commission was operating produced a report not yet ripe for gubernatorial or legislative review.

The final draft deserves both praise and criticism. The laudable portion of the report is that it has accurately identified problems with the existing growth management system. Most of the shortcomings are found in the report’s implementation strategies. For example: today large-scale developments are reviewed by state officials in a process known as a Development of Regional Impact (DRI). DRI’s can be laborious, expensive and burdensome. The Study Commission recommended eliminating DRI’s and relegating the development review process to a regional board. The report offers inadequate levels of detail on how such a regional process would consider environmental, traffic and water impacts. Despite its numerous shortcomings, the existing DRI process is to some degree predictable. Replacing DRI’s with a yet to be defined process, has met with opposition from developers and environmentalists. It seems the devil we know is preferred to the one we don’t.

Another problematic recommendation in the Report is to replace concurrency regulations with a “true cost of growth” analysis. Existing law, known, as Concurrency requires that certain facilities such as roads and utilities be in place concurrent with proposed new development. The new policy would require an economic analysis to estimate the burden or benefit that new development would have on taxes. Presumably, only growth that generates a positive tax scenario would be approved, regardless of its impact on traffic, water supplies, etc. Requiring an analysis of the cost of development is long overdue. It is a valuable planning tool, but not a threshold for determining development approval. It fails to consider all of a community’s needs, such as affordable housing, schools, human services and the environment.

There is a trend to move government closer to home, and the Growth Management Study Commission report conforms to the trend. Unfortunately for local taxpayers, when responsibilities are moved from state to county governments, they typically come without a sustained funding source. The Study Commission’s report fails to identify the funding sources to implement their proposals, other than suggesting taking funds from other services, or raising local taxes.

Ironically the “highest priority” suggested in the report is “to achieve a diverse, healthy, vibrant and sustainable economy”. That’s a lot of adjectives to describe an economy, but is it really our highest priority, or an aspect of what should be a much higher priority, people?

We should measure growth management on a human scale, not economic. Sure, one could argue that having a strong economy provides funding for community needs. However it is possible that even with a strong economy, not all community needs are necessarily met. A community that achieves a high quality of life in human terms, such as a healthy environment, accessible and efficient transportation and quality health care and schools, needs not worry about its economy.