Daily Loaf

During this year’s legislative session there were many concerns expressed before and after the passage of Senate Bill 360, the growth management bill sponsored in the state senate by Bradenton’s Mike Bennett.

The bill exempts many areas from a requirement that says builders must pay for road improvements if traffic generated by their projects exceeds the local capacity, other wise known as transportation concurrency.

Florida DCA Secretary Thomas Pelham

Several municipalities around the state opposed it, as did Hillsborough County, who through Commissioner Mark Sharpe sent a letter to Governor Charlie Crist after the session to please veto it.

Supporters like Senator Bennett said it would streamline the permitting process in Florida – which even some environmentalists like Denise Layne agreed needed some tweaking – and that it would aid development and construction jobs, which the state hasn’t had a lot of due to recession the past couple of years.

But Layne and others said at the end was that the legislation went far awry from what was needed to address current growth management problems.

Layne said what the Legislature and governor have done is thrown away a flawed system, and put very little in its place.

Florida’s Department of Community Affairs Secretary Thomas Pelham had various things to say about the bill when it was being debated, but he’s extremely critical of it now, based on his comments at the University of Florida last night.

The Gainsville Sun reports Pelham as saying, “I don’t think it speaks very well of us that we can’t deal with issues of this magnitude in a more rational manner than we have been doing.”

The paper also reports that DCA must submit a plan by next month to legislators for a new mobility fee to replace concurrency requirements, but:

He expressed skepticism that the fee would be embraced in the next legislative session, which comes during an election year, and suggested such a plan should have been crafted before scrapping the concurrency requirement.

“It was ‘let’s throw the baby out first and come up with a replacement later,’ ” he said.

If you’ll recall, Governor Crist was heavily pressured to veto the bill.  And because of his (at the time) rather strong environmental credentials, it was thought that he might do so.  But this was also the period in which the guv began backing away from that green reputation, as he realized it wasn’t playing well with the base as a man named Marco Rubio began snipping at him.

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