The Shifting Sands of Deerfield Beach - 7/25/03

A year or two ago, it appeared that nothing could turn the tide against the "vision" of pro-development politicians and powerful developer interests to tear down and rebuild the barrier island of Broward County for their own profit. But the future of coastal redevelopment in South Florida is less certain now, and possibly more complicated.

It would be premature to declare the war over. Still, much has happened on both sides of the issue which could change who controls redevelopment and how quickly the bulldozers come to level the traditional landscape of some of Florida's beach neighborhoods. Redevelopment is being rethought:

1. There is growing public opposition to the more ambitious plans of developers and borderline tactics used by their political allies at City Hall. Grassroots activism has can successfully counter backroom influence and campaign financing of wealthy special interests in some cases. Local activists, once put down in the media as stupid, negative and reactionary, have become significant players in local politics.

2. RAC applications from Deerfield Beach and other coastal cities are dead in the water. County commissioners have asked the Planning Council to take a new look at the Regional Activity Center concept as an instrument for redevelopment. RACs would give local officials greater authority in land-use determinations.

Update: On January 14th, 2004, the Broward County Planning Council recommended that all RAC applications for the barrier island be rejected. The matter now goes to the Board of County Commissioners, which is expected to approve the recommendations.

3. County officials are skeptical about local redevelopment plans and about the way CRAs are being used. CRAs are supposed to assist in the redevelopment of slum and blighted areas for the betterment of the people who live in these districts. CRAs are being audited by Broward County.

4. In 2002, voters in Deerfield Beach enacted charter amendments that would limit redevelopment in the coastal area to existing land-use standards. The vote (75% for) is the clearest possible indication that residents are wary of redevelopment plans for the beach area. Attempts by a group of disgruntled citizens, encouraged and possibly aided by city officials, have failed to overturn the charter amendments in court, so far. Now some developers have joined the lawsuits and commissioners have stated that they may order a new referendum election to repeal the 2002 amendments based on the fear that new rounds of litigation could prove costly to the city.

Update: The developers' suits were dismissed. The suit by the Citizen Opponents continues.

5. Pompano Beach and Fort Lauderdale electors ousted pro-development commissioners in their most recent municipal elections. Will Deerfield politicians be the next to get the ax?

6. City officials refused to acknowledge the 2002 charter vote even in the face of the overwhelming voter support for those proposals. Then, they tried to end-run the County in the State Legislature. A Deerfield Beach city lobbyist got lawmakers to attach a rider to pending legislation that would limit Broward County's role in oversight of redevelopment. The effort was killed by an astute legislator. The lobbyist said this is what the city wanted.

7. Deerfield officials also charged ahead with "TIF" projects under the auspices of the CRA. These ventures will cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. Projects include streetscapes along Hillsboro and Ocean Way. Some ask, who will benefit?

8. A workshop of local officials and interested parties on June 25th, 2003, on the role of city and county governments in redevelopment gave few answers, but raised a bewildering array of issues and concerns from different sectors. A large part of it comes down to who will have the final say over redevelopment proposals in South Florida.

9. On October 14th, 2003, county commissioners adopted measures which increase the county's role in approving new construction on the coast; specifically, the commission will require compatibility reviews which examine the impact of development on the barrier island.

County commissioners want more oversight. They say that redevelopment is a regional concern and that development of the coastal regions may be going too fast and too far without considering the impact of such development on residents' access and use of the beaches. They also worry that CRAs are being misused and are siphoning off public funds that should be in their coffers, to be spent on dubious projects by the cities.

A recent audit of the CRA in Hollywood by county auditors raised a number of questions concerning its proper administration. The auditors charged that the CRA in that city was not consistent with the purposes for which such agencies are authorized to be created, and that public funds were being used as incentives to developers and not for the benefit of residents. Hollywood officials, incidentally, vigorously opposed the new rules adopted by the county requiring compatibility reviews. They say the measures undermine local government.

As in Deerfield Beach, the Hollywood CRA covers affluent beach districts and is administered by the city commission ex officio and not by an independent board.

Cities, however, want to control redevelopment and think the county is a hindrance. Local politicians are magnets for campaign cash from developer interests. Some may have personal positions in redevelopment. A lot of people don't trust their local officials to act in the public interest and welcome "interference" from the county.

Political activists say that redevelopment does not serve the public interest and that citizens should intervene to insure that excessive development does not occur. There is a state-wide movement to place control of land-use comprehensive plans in the hands of voters.

All of this is complicated by issues like annexation and what this will mean to cities like Deerfield Beach and by the redistribution of power within Broward County as unincorporated areas are pulled into the cities.

The strong mayor idea for the County has fizzled and Sheriff Ken Jenne is clearly emerging as the de facto executive in Broward County. There is even speculation that the next move will be to consolidate the three South Florida counties into a regional authority dominated by powerful politicians like Jenne.

On the other side, there is talk of disbanding the counties altogether. Municipal services functions now performed by the counties could be provided by area service compacts between the cities. This would also end oversight of land-use policies and CRAs by county officials.

The rarely asked question in this complicated debate is whether government should have any role in redevelopment other than to protect the rights of property owners against people whose constructions would effectively deprive them of the lawful use and enjoyment of their own land and houses.

Whether cities are protective or proactive depends on who is in charge in the current setup. Local governments can draw land-use maps that encourage development or adopt comprehensive plans that limit development. A more limited role for government in land-use regulation as an alternative approach to public policy is the position most consistent with the ideals of liberty and liberal democracy.

But in practice there is not room in the same town for such political ideals and the ambitions of developers. There is an underlying premise in the question of redevelopment that people can either be bought out or forced out of their property. In other words, a land owner can do what he wants with his property, but not if it conflicts in some way with some higher social purpose.

The higher purpose could be the "vision" concocted by city planners for the redevelopment of its beach area or it could be the traditional landscape of the community in the same area. Again it depends on who is the dominant force at the time.

In this view, ownership of land is not a right at the same level as life or liberty. It is a conditional right granted in consideration of what the public interest might be in the present and future use of that land.

Thus it is not so preposterous for the City of Hallandale Beach to pass an ordinance that would compel landowners to sell their property to developers who already own 70% of the land in a certain area. There was a time when such a law would have been unthinkable.

We harken back to the fact that "ownership" may have some emotional significance to most of us who own land, but no literal meaning within the framework of the common law. The ultimate owner of land is the State, or Sovereign, and thus, the ultimate uses of land are those which the State or Sovereign directs.

This fine distinction does not mean too much to us in the daily use of our houses -- we are for all practical purposes the lords of our manors -- but it does mean something when we decide to convert our house to a filling station or condominium.

We either are going to be told we can't do that or we are going to have to persuade, influence, or bribe political authorities who act for the Sovereign to gain permission to do what we want. Whether what we want to do encroaches upon our neighbor's legitimate rights is less a factor than the public interest as defined by politicians.

This in essence is what we are doing in Deerfield Beach right now. We are replacing mom-and-pops and private houses with overscaled condominiums, because they fit the redevelopment model set out by the city government. What these projects will mean to other property owners or even the general public in the future is secondary.

We live in a statist environment when it comes to land-use policy. A hands-off policy would leave it to market forces and reciprocal rights to decide the issue of redevelopment of any given piece of land. But this is not the way it is anymore. Redevelopment is at the bottom an economic issue and the economy is largely directed these days by government. Up there, it's called monetary policy and rulemaking. At the state and local level, it's called economic development.

In this environment, it would be very difficult to adopt a laissez-faire stance on redevelopment at the local level. The state imposes upon local authorities the requirement to write comprehensive land-use plans and creates incentives for cities to adopt proactive measures like CRAs and RACs to encourage development.

In fact, what cities like Deerfield Beach are doing with respect to beach redevelopment, with or without the support of voters, is not inconsistent with the principles of sustained growth that have worked their way into public policy. Assimilation of sustained or "smart growth" ideology into official policy has been given impetus by environmentalist groups bent on preserving wetlands, farmlands, and the Everglades.

The city does not have to specify the uses to which a given piece of land shall be put in the future in order to achieve redevelopment, but it can encourage certain uses by "improvements" in the infrastructure which would favor and facilitate those uses. This is one way in which the city's economic development function is carried out.

In Deerfield Beach, the city plans to reroute the main artery through the beach section, A1A, by creating a separate northbound lane which would run east along Hillsboro Boulevard and then north through what is now the Howard Johnson parking lot. What purpose does this project serve?

The public argument for this proposal is that it will help ease the traffic problem along the infamous "S" curve which winds through the business district. It does not take a traffic wizard to figure out that it more likely will make the problem worse by creating a bottle neck at the already congested intersection of A1A and Hillsboro Boulevard, where northbound cars would turn. Another bottleneck could be created at the north end of this project near the pier, where the southbound lane would split off .

The real purpose of the A1A project is to set the stage for further commercialization in the area south of the business district and east of the current A1A right-of-way. The city intends to remake the central beach by rerouting A1A and building a large parking structure on the Main Beach Parking Lot.

This will certainly mean more traffic and negatively impact nearby residents. Commercial development in that area probably would not occur if it were left to market forces without the "improvements" planned by City Hall.

Comprehensive plans and other land-use regulations also serve the cause of tradition and preservation under certain circumstances. The charter amendments ratified in the 2002 election made it more difficult to win approval of new construction projects, but by making it almost impossible for city commissioners to change the existing land-use rules.

In the context of local politics, "pro-development" means friendly land-use management policies at City Hall and new infrastructure to encourage redevelopment. The pro-development group is willing to use public money to benefit private interests and equates the public interest with its own.

Grassroots political activism has succeeded in part because it has inspired and mobilized citizens who want to preserve the quality of life that already exists in the community. Nonetheless, in politics the operative fact is that money equals power.

Redevelopment is potentially worth billions to developers, contractors, architects and investors. Campaign money given by developers to influence politicians is a drop in the bucket compared to the ultimate return.

The bottom line is that it is very difficult to get people into office at the local level who are not in the pocket of developer interests to some extent.

Pro-development can also make a compelling case on the ideological side. The argument that redevelopment of an area like the beach will expand the city's tax base and thus be good for the whole community resonates with many people. Likewise, the mythology and rhetoric of "smart growth" -- or sustained growth -- sounds very good when it is applied to truly run-down neighborhoods which could theoretically benefit from redevelopment.

However, in this particular reality, the Beach CRA, the rhetoric does not apply. In Deerfield Beach, the CRA is a fraud and this sets the stage for more political corruption, not the betterment of people's lives.

Right now, who controls redevelopment of Deerfield Beach hangs in the balance. Developer interests may have suffered some setbacks, but they are not going to give up easily. Too much money is at stake.

Any assessment of where we stand in the matter of redevelopment must conclude with the fact that a pro-development axis still controls city government. The next logical step is to replace them with public officials who are not influenced by developer interests. Then we can proceed with rethinking redevelopment policy in Deerfield Beach.

Market-Oriented Approaches to Redevelopment - 11/3/03

When public officials in states like Florida had to deal with the impact of explosive population growth, there was almost no historical precedent for growth-management in the United States and no controlling political principles, except for traditional concepts of land ownership and zoning methodology, which classified and segregated land to specific use categories.

Zoning addressed one aspect of development, property rights, but did not mitigate the more tangible issues of growth, such as open space, traffic congestion, outdated infrastructure, escalating costs of government, and the environmental consequences of new land uses.

Growth is not just about development. Another impact for which there was no clear compass is "redevelopment" that cuts across traditional land uses and traditional values of established communities. We are aware of that particular problem every day in Deerfield Beach.

Many states, including Florida, tried to develop post-zoning methodologies to manage growth. Florida set state-wide goals and required cities and counties to adopt consistent land-use plans. The primary goal of comprehensive planning was to control growth. Deerfield Beach in the mid- '70's imposed restrictions (height restrictions) on construction that was deemed fundamentally inconsistent with the "low-scape" of the community. Other coastal cities went further to protect their beach communities from the "excessive" development favored by some developers.

The model for this new methodology is "Smart Growth," in short, centralized planning. An alternative would have been market-oriented growth management, but states which adopted planning as the model for growth policy may not have had sufficient understanding of how a market-oriented policy would work to solve the major impacts of population growth, and some policy makers may even have been hostile to the idea of free markets as the controlling factor. There are, however, several deficiencies in the scheme of centralized planning, which could possibly be addressed more efficiently by a market-based approach:

1. Centralized planning substantially increases the power of public officials without any balancing principle. To put this another way, planning is not consistent with the values of liberal democracy unless it is market-oriented.

2. It requires planners to predict the future and forces local officials to make decisions based on prognostication rather than on hard data. In fact, the needs, preferences, and wants of communities tend to evolve over time and this makes it impossible to predict the long-terms needs of a community.

3. There is no inherent mechanism to mitigate the effects of poorly designed and implemented growth-management policies when goals are not well defined.

4. It politicizes the process of growth-management. Thus planning objectives can be stood on their head, to serve élite interests.

5. It wrongly assumes that a kind of utopia will be achieved at the end of the process.

Let's look at this deficiency first. In Deerfield Beach, the city chartered a Community Redevelopment Agency (an alias for the city commission) to steer future development in the beach area. The CRA (as distinguished from the city government) is empowered to spend tax increments, or TIFs, derived from rising property valuations, for the betterment of the community. But what is it that defines what is good for the community? This is the "vision for the beach," actually an imaginary picture of what the CRA area ought to look like in 20 or 30 years, formulated by city planners. Theoretically, this vision is the result of a process of public dialog, but in this case a series of interrogations of prominent local residents and business persons by consultants served as the basis of the vision.

Judging from the results of elections held since the establishment of the CRA, in which redevelopment plans were the core issues, the vision derived in this manner did not accurately reflect the sense of the whole community, and especially it was not the consensus of the beach residents who are most directly impacted by these plans.

A visioning process is only going to succeed if it finds common values upon which a consensus can be developed. In truth, the controlling vision of beach redevelopment was designed to accommodate special interests which had no connection with what beach residents in general needed or wanted. The process would have had greater credibility if the goals for the CRA had been set by beach residents independently of any preconceived notions of city planners.

It is not surprising that most of the allocation of increment funds so far is for streetscapes. These are probably not the projects for the betterment of the community that would be most favored by CRA residents.

The objective of the CRA is commercial development to create a broader tax base for the city. But where do people live? Can current residents afford to live in the beach area with rising taxes? What new population is served by the construction of condo units priced in the millions? How will access of inland residents to the beach be affected? This is a flaw of centralized planning, that it directs the goal, without responding directly to the impacts.

Market economies focus on the consumer. They work better than central planning because they are more efficient in producing what people need and want. It is ultimately the consumer that decides what is produced or provided by what he buys. This is as true in the housing market as it is for products and services. Thus, the proper measure of success of redevelopment policy, in a market-oriented approach, is not the achievement of an abstract vision or politically directed goal, based on subjective values or special interests, but whether residents are satisfied with the houses and neighborhoods they end up with.

Reform of Beach Redevelopment Policy - 11/28/03

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 advisers 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.