How many snowballs in hell would it take to reform public policy in Deerfield Beach with respect to the CRA and beach area redevelopment to make it more consistent with the interests of the community rather than what developers and insiders want?

Before a community redevelopment area was established in Deerfield Beach to encourage redevelopment, public policy toward future development of the barrier island was essentially neutral, but implicitly tending to favor the interests of local residents to have largely unrestricted access to the public beach area. Public policy shifted with the CRA.

In the pre-CRA environment, public policy was not designed to push things in any particular direction. It was protective, to a degree, but did not proscribe development. The CRA is an instrument for development. By channeling the use of public funds and resources, it is dictating future land uses without regard to the actual needs or desires of the community. Without a CRA or pro-development bias, policy could be value-neutral, not promoting nor precluding new construction.

A good example of this is the proposed realignment of A1A. This has been part of the CRA plan from the beginning, but was proposed long before any formal traffic studies had been conducted to see if this would ease traffic congestion. Clearly the A1A plan was designed to encourage or facilitate further commercialization within that sector of the CRA without a known impact on traffic. Only recently has a professional and scientific traffic study been conducted, which gave lukewarm approval to the realignment of A1A as a way to deal with traffic at the beach.

A "market-oriented" planning environment is neither pro- nor anti-development. New construction and new land uses will occur when, where and how they are economically justified. Redevelopment is not necessarily "inevitable," as some people say, but will occur over a period of time unless completely constrained by law and policy.

Planning would mitigate directly the effects of development on problem areas such as traffic and infrastructure. Policy would be such to permit innovative and useful development, but also protective of property rights and especially of the public resource (beach access). Some of this latter function would be performed by zoning and land-use guidelines. Whether traditional zoning should be replaced with performance or impact zoning methodology is a hot issue which will be considered later in this discussion.

However, reform is up against a wall, when it comes to the CRA. It will not go away. A more productive discussion would focus on how the existing political infrastructure, including the CRA, can be made more responsive to the community on the subject of beach redevelopment. Any practical reform must take place in an environment which is oriented to central planning, because this is mandated by state law.

The CRA plan is based on a mythic community vision, which was supposedly developed through an interview process with residents. In fact, there is no effective ongoing process in place, other than referendum elections, to determine consensus. A clear consensus may not even exist for that matter, as there is a wide range of self-interests in what happens at the beach. In a market oriented approach, "consensus" -- if that's the relevant term -- would be determined by patterns of consumption rather than through political power.

Therefore reform must begin with a new allocation of political power. This is a daunting task because current commissioners are recipients of developer money and influenced by business, media and party insiders who collaborate with developers. These interests will resist change, as they already have in the 1998 and 2002 charter amendments.

One of the major flaws of centralized planning is that it can be used to the advantage of those that it is designed to regulate simply by paying off public officials. In fact, government regulation is usually favored by the regulated elements, because it protects them from the vicissitudes and competition of a free market. This is why comprehensive land use planning, which was intended to manage growth, is strongly supported by developers, as long as the process is controlled by local policymakers.

Obviously, any reallocation of power must begin with the commission and city manager. Except for one commission seat, the commission today is exactly the same as it was ten years ago. The city manager, who is the main proponent of an aggressive redevelopment policy with respect to the beach area, has been given a contract which secures his position well into the next commission term (2005-2009). Even if an entirely new commission were to be seated in 2005, they would, so to speak, be stuck with the current manager.

They would also be stuck with the CRA and with irreversible decisions that have permitted construction which far exceeds the established guidelines. The most that could happen would be a shift of policy in the use of tax increment funds and, with some luck, moves to protect public lands from commercial exploitation.

There are no market forces at work within the CRA. What a market-oriented board would have to do is be more responsive to "public interest" in the use of new revenues. In other words, they would focus on the mitigation of the impacts of development, rather than on streetscapes and other wasteful projects which are dictated by planning, not by the needs of residents or consumers.

Ideally, the CRA would be controlled by an independent board. Current state law, however, does not permit the election of board members and membership cannot be restricted to any particular class of persons such as CRA residents. It might be just as effective to create a quasi-parliamentary "association" to have oversight of beach redevelopment. Membership should be inclusive of the range of interests in beach redevelopment -- business, beach users, and, of course, beach area residents. Developers and lobbyists, or those with specific financial interests, should not be directly represented, because their interests do not rise to the level of consumers (at the point where planning and policy are the core issues). Obviously, if this body were to be stacked -- as was the Beach Advisory Committee, which was hastily formed to give the appearance of citizen input on certain redevelopment issues -- it would be pointless. The success of the "citizens' association" would depend on its credibility as a body truly representative of beach residents and businesses.

With a new power matrix, not directly controlled by developer interests, beach redevelopment policy could then operate in a "market-oriented" framework. However, policymakers and advisors must be persuaded that this can work, without destruction of property rights, and that the best future use of land can be more efficiently determined by market forces.

"Consumers" must be at the heart of beach redevelopment policy. In using this term, in designating a certain class of interests, it is assumed that interests of this class in beach area redevelopment can be distinguished from those who benefit directly from development. Consumers include full-time residents, or locals; part-time residents; snow-birds and tourists; and non-residents who use the beach and other public resources in the area. Even though these "consumers" theoretically have common interests distinguishable from developers, they do not necessarily have identical interests in all phases of beach redevelopment. Centralized planning assumes that there is a community vision or consensus that unites this other range of self-interests.

A market or consumer-oriented approach assumes that there are better ways of finding common interests than imposing solutions that nobody really likes, which is the approach of centralized planning.

Another part of the "ideal" situation, one which may be difficult to achieve as a political matter, is the elimination of zoning as the primary regulator of land development on the barrier island. Performance zoning, in which the zoning authority looks at impact of proposed development instead of compliance to specific categories, was part of the controversial Regional Activity Center (RAC) plan, which was met with crippling opposition.

In fact, performance zoning could serve well consumer interests, as defined above, if it were executed within an environment of public trust, that is, where people have confidence in the competence and integrity of the zoning authority; and if it were an overlay of more traditional zoning categories. It is value neutral and less likely to be politicized to favor developer interests. Also, this methodology enables local authorities to assess impact of a proposed project, that is, to know the tangible spillover effect on neighbors and the community, which can then be mitigated directly; and developers can be made to bear the costs.

The key principle of reform would be an open-ended approach to approval of new construction. There would be no specific path for development, as the needs of the community evolve over time; in other words, no one at City Hall is deciding what will be good for the community over the next 20 or 30 years. In the consumer-oriented framework, development approvals would be contingent upon addressing and mitigating the tangible impacts of development.

This brings us back to the original question of this essay: How many snowballs in hell would it take to reform public policy with respect to beach area redevelopment to make it more consistent with the interests of the community?

The key is political reform at two levels. First, a new set of public officials must be brought in who are not influenced by developer and other special redevelopment interests and are willing to take a more balanced or modulated approach to this issue.

Second, there must be structural reforms. Because the CRA itself is set in concrete, this aspect of reform must occur within the CRA environment. Structural reform can be achieved in part by:

1. Creation of some sort of representative body of citizens most directly impacted by new construction at the beach. This body cannot legally be vested with control of the CRA, but its findings, determinations, and recommendations must be given considerable weight in practice by city officials and the city commission.

2. Impact analysis of all proposed construction, requiring all proponents to mitigate directly the impact of their projects as a pre-condition to approval.

3. Ethics legislation, including registration of lobbyists and an independent ethics commission, to reinforce public trust in those who have the final say in redevelopment policy and development decisions.

4. Reorientation of tax increment spending to useful projects favored by citizens and which would directly benefit the residents of the CRA.