Confusing Ballot Amendments - CONA Sarasota, Monday June 11

   - monthly meeting -

         

      Monday 7 p.m.   June 11, 2018

     

understand the confusing
proposed ballot amendments

and updates on Arbor Lake Preserve, Bath and Racquet Club, Siesta, Promenade, Celery Fields 

  

   On June 11, 2018 please join CONA to hear Barbara Ford-Coates, Dennis Maley, and Lourdes Ramirez discuss the proposed state constitutional review committee (CRC) ballot amendments that voters will need to understand in order to determine which ones they will approve. Sixty percent approval is required for each to pass.        

   This year, decisions about the many changes proposed for the state constitution have been complicated further by the CRC grouping their proposed changes rather than using the traditional single-issue amendments that are more familiar to voters. 

   Every twenty years, a committee is appointed to review the state constitution and to draft changes they alone recommend. Contrary to the typical procedures for state constitutional amendments, these are not citizen-initiated through a process that requires the consent of a significant percentage of the voters just to get proposed amendments onto the ballot and, grouping has been used to obscure the large number of the 2018 committee's proposed changes. 

   The grouping device seems designed to require voters to adopt unpopular changes in order to approve popular changes. Careful scrutiny and understanding will be needed this year in order to avoid approval of changes to the state constitution that are not desired--just because they are tied to a change that voters do desire.

   Historical and contemporary perspectives of the amendments proposed by this constitutional review committee will be presented to assist voters in making their decisions. Q & A will follow.

   Following a traditional half-hour social beforehand, the meeting will open with neighborhood updates about their current issues from Chris Bales on Arbor Lake Preserve, Ben Cannon on Bath and Racquet Club, Sura Kochman on Siesta Promenade, and Tom Matrullo on the Celery Fields.

                                 

  See www.conasarasota.org/meetings.html for more information.

           

social 6:30 p.m. -  meeting 7:00 p.m.

at the Sarasota Garden Club

       

neighbors helping neighborhoods since 1961

                      

save the date  -  our anniversary party  -  November 5, 2018

Concierge service for developers, bum's rush for taxpayers

Big Development Wins ... Again

Dennis Maley• The Bradenton Times Sunday, Mar 25, 2018

On Tuesday, Manatee County residents were twice reminded who really runs this community: developers.

Tuesday's Manatee County Commission meeting included plenty of plot twists but the story ended the same way it always seem[s] to. First, we were told that Commissioner Stephen Jonsson would not be voting on whether or not to give developers a 10 percent subsidy on impact fees that are supposed to be paid in order to cover the cost of new growth. It turns out Jonsson’s son, an attorney, had just gone to work as in-house counsel for politically-connected developer Carlos Beruff. 

That’s the same Carlos Beruff who, after enjoying a long and fruitful relationship with Jonsson, a banker, went on to bankroll his 2016 county commission campaign, in which he defeated smart growth advocate and recently dismissed member of the Manatee Planning Commission (yes, those two things are related) Matt Bower.

As unseemly as this may appear, it actually seemed to bode well for the matter at hand. Since the item was a vote on scrapping a long-delayed return to collecting the impact fees at their prescribed rate, that meant that a possible 3-3 deadlock would kill the issue and they’d finally return to 100 percent next month, as scheduled. Since three commissioners—DiSabatino, Trace and Smith—had already balked at making the discount permanent, it seemed as though the public might win for once. More on that in a moment.

During public comment on impact fees, the board had to break for a time-certain item: the matter of whether or not to purchase 33 acres of woodlands from politically-connected developer Pat Neal for the exorbitant price of $3 million—nearly twice what he paid for it in December of 2016. A scheme to set up a Municipal Service Taxing Unit and force surrounding neighbors to pay back that $3 million over 30 years went askew when roughly half of them threw a fit, some of whom even filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent it.

Not to worry, Neal was getting his money one way or another. Commissioner Betsy Benac quickly suggested the county just buy the property and figure out some way to pay for it from somewhere else over the summer budget process. Suddenly, the board’s most pro-development commissioner, who had also had her seat sponsored by Mr. Beruff, just couldn’t live with the idea of missing out on the chance to preserve 33 acres of green space, no matter how much we had to pay Mr. Neal. 

County Administrator Ed Hunzeker, who developers like so much they made sure he stuck around (at significant taxpayer expense) even after he completed the state’s five-year Deferred Retirement Option Program, indicated that this was a feasible plan, despite his long-time penchant for telling commissioners that the funding for so many more important things like ambulances or competitive EMS and law enforcement pay just can’t be found during these economic times. 

That led to a mild uproar from Commissioner Charles Smith who demanded to know why the Palmetto community has been told for 50 years that putting a county-operated public swimming pool north of the river was just too cost prohibitive if a couple of million bucks were so easy to find. Surely the merit of teaching underprivileged black children how to swim in a state where the skill comes in more handy than most had to rank up there with sparing a mere 33 acres (much of which would have remained woods had it been developed), especially in a county that's usually so eager to clear land for new construction. Smith said that "anyone who knows anything about building pools has told me you can’t build one like that for $3 million" and was worried that if costs grew, the people in his district would be given yet another excuse as to why there was still no pool. 

Unable to come to a conclusion by lunch, the commissioners recessed with neither item having been voted on. When they came back, the mood was much more congenial. Support for the east county preserve purchase had suddenly materialized. Smith, having been assured by Hunzeker that the pool was a done deal, already budgeted for, and would be built as scheduled, grew more comfortable and joined Benac, Commissioner Baugh (another developer-supported commissioner whose district includes the site in question) and Commissioner Priscilla Trace, to flip the vote to 4-2. 

So, in the end, the 33 acres will be spared, and we’ll all pay Neal his $3 million. You can read about that in more depth here. 

That led us to the impact fee vote. Once again, those in attendance had to go through the excruciating dog and pony show of developers pleading with the board to relinquish them from this unfair burden and save the mythical middle-class homeowners who would be forced from this community in droves if the oppressive fees were allowed to increase.

Then we sat and listened as advocates like Bower, planning commissioner Al Horrigan, impact fee activist Ed Goff, and Federation of Manatee County Community Associations President Sandy Marshall shoot their arguments full of enough holes to bury nearly every single one of the $4.5 million that were stuffed into the pockets of local developers in FY 2016-17 alone by way of not paying the fees. Fees that were prescribed, by the way, in an expensive taxpayer-funded study the county commissioned from reputable consulting firm Tischler Bise.

Prices are market driven. Houses sell for what the market will bear. They don’t reduce a $350,000 house to $349,000 if you eliminate the fee. Your expressed fear of a lawsuit from developers is unfounded, as Tischler Bise has never ever had their prescribed impact fees successfully challenged in court. If everyone is so concerned about the middle class, why are new home sale prices growing faster in Manatee County than almost anywhere in the country?

Then we had to listen to the commissioners explain that these people don’t really understand impact fees, what they can be used for, how if they are sued it could ultimately cost more than the extra 10 percent to defend, how they are for jobs and middle-class home buyers. If you have an old house and didn’t pay impact fees,how can you say that someone building a new one should? Blotty blue, blotty blah. 

Commissioner Benac gave perhaps the most artistic performance. She reminded those in attendance that the county only collected about two thirds of the maximum millage on property taxes and suggested that maybe if we wanted the developers to pay 100 percent, so should we. Benac admitted that sure, we could probably find things to do with the money from the fees, but government can always find a way to tax someone and spend the money. Perhaps Benac missed Mr. Goff’s informative treatise on the difference between a "tax" and a "fee" during public comments.

Benac then posited that the reason there seemed to be a perception that the public was overwhelmingly in favor of collecting full impact fees was owed to the fact that they're only a burden on people who've not yet arrived. Who will be the voice of those taxpayers who've yet to make the decision to come to Manatee County in the first place, the commissioner wanted to know. It seemed she was intent to be the champion of all (future) Manatee County residents. The commissioner, whose voice often drips with condescension when forced to answer those who would question the board publicly, then gave yet another soliloquy on the public's failure to grasp the nuts and bolts of the process and how frustrating it can be to hear their misinformed complaints and how they contradict what impact fees can be used for.

Chairman Priscilla Trace District 1	Charles B. Smith District 2	Stephen R. Jonsson District 3	Robin DiSabatino District 4
Vanessa Baugh District 5	Carol Whitmore At Large	Betsy Benac At Large

It's true that many citizens are unaware of every spending limitation attached to the funds. However, that doesn't mean that the ones who understand them more fully don't have very valid arguments. To wit, some additional irony came by way of an earlier proclamation that National Library Week would be scheduled from April 8-14. The board took great effort to fawn over their support of libraries in general and our county’s hard working and talented library staff in particular. Yet, when was the last time we used the impact fees we apparently don’t need to build a library that we demonstrably do? Despite massive population growth in Lakewood Ranch and eastward, there is still not a library east of I-75 and south of the river. For LWR residents, the only option is the small Braden River branch, quite a ways down the traffic-riddled SR70 corridor, which is closed two days a week and only stays open until 8 p.m. on two others. 

During the recession, the county cut library staff and operation hours, and despite increased usage and budgetary growth have not found the money to put them back, let alone build new facilities to keep up with population growth. Impact fees can only be used for capital expenses, not operational costs such as staff, as commissioners are quick to point out, but I’ve never heard anyone say, hey let’s restore all of the libraries to their regular hours and put adequate programming staff in place and then find the money during the summer budget process. My guess is that unless Pat Neal and Carlos Beruff get into the business of building libraries, we won’t.

When it came time to vote, everyone knew that three votes were in the bag. Commissioners Benac, Baugh and Whitmore would vote for capping the fees at the reduced rate. Commissioner Robin DiSabatino held firm once again, as did Commissioner Trace, which put the decision on whether we collect the fees at 100 percent or give up around $10 million over the next three years on Commissioner Smith. 

Smith, who is up for reelection in November, had showed signs of wavering during the public hearing, arguing that all the fees in Lakewood Ranch and Ellenton couldn’t pay for projects in his district anyway. Without much explanation, Smith once again grew more comfortable, pitching in the fourth vote to give developers another win. His mood would improve further after the next item when it was decided to move the Washington Park environmental preserve in his district to a list of projects funded by the half-cent sales tax voters approved in 2016.

DiSabatino was livid. "It was the people of this county who lost today,” she told me afterward. "It’s disgusting. You have a developer (Neal) gouging the county on the price for land, pitting neighbor against neighbor over who’s gotta pay for it. That must be the new business model. Why build the development when you can just get the county to pay you twice what it cost for the land? And the commissioners just stand there and vote for it. It makes me sick. Then they vote for capping the fees, when everyone knows the reasons are all phony. It’s a rigged game. You try and do what’s right and represent what’s best for the people of the county, but you just can’t win. This is a dark day in Manatee County."

It is indeed, and DiSabatino’s had her fill. She’s already announced that she won’t be seeking another term. You can’t blame her for having grown tired of fighting the good fight, maybe getting another commissioner or two to join her on a good cause once in a while, but never seeming to be able to flip the board in favor of the people when it counts. She knows that until more people also run for the right reasons and survive the developer-sponsored attacks to actually get into office, nothing will change, and she’ll be left to continue to bang her head against the wall. 

Of course voters have the power to change all that by paying closer attention and then holding public officials accountable for their allegiances. But as many as 130,000 people will vote in a countywide commission race, and you’d be hard pressed to find 10 percent of that number who have any real grasp of issues like this one or even have any idea of the sort of power developers wield in our local government and how it affects them personally. Instead, most just look at whether there’s a D or an R next to the name and vote accordingly. 

Developers know this, of course, which is why they funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars into the races to ensure there’s always at least four friendly votes who can send much more dough their way once they’ve gotten a seat at the dais. In 1949, George Orwell wrote in his seminal novel 1984 that all the power was with the proletarians, if they could only ever figure out how to use it. Seven decades later, it’s clear we haven’t.

related:

Same Old Story, Same Old Song and Dance

Maley: New Growth + low impact fees = infrastructure meltdown?

Same Old Story,
Same Old Song and Dance

Dennis Maley• The Bradenton Times Sunday, Mar 04, 2018

On Thursday, the Manatee County Commission held a public hearing on the idea of giving developers a multi-million dollar freebie by capping impact fees at a rate lower than what the board had previously passed, based on what had been prescribed in a taxpayer-funded study. As is always the case when this subject comes before the BOCC, I felt like my head was going to explode through much of the meeting.

The most painful part of these engagements is sitting through the litany of tired and misinformed rhetoric about the subject. Impact fees hurt young families, they put people in the industry out of work, they send developers and home buyers elsewhere. None of this is true, of course, but you have to remind yourself that the truth doesn’t matter in such proceedings. The practiced baloney is simply window dressing for a truth that most commissioners find acceptable to practice, if unacceptable to utter: lowering impact fees puts money into the pockets of the developers who get and keep us elected.

Three of the seven commissioners on the board—Baugh, Benac and Jonsson—were installed directly by developers who poured vast sums of money into their campaigns. For their efforts, they have enjoyed votes that reflect the allegiance they’ve expected. Commissioner Whitmore, the longest serving commissioner currently on the board, has gotten the mountains of campaign cash which have kept her in office from a much broader array of interests, but has nonetheless been reliably pro-growth, even if she’s occasionally given to some inconvenient hemming and hawing before casting a vote.

As such, they’re gonna get their four votes, and in most cases five or six, partly because the others know when it’s wise and unwise to go up against them. Nonetheless, such measures require a public hearing, so we had to go through the exercise on Tuesday for the sake of checking the block. In fact, the people showing up to demand that commissioners represent the interests of the taxpayers instead of their campaign sponsors knew more than most that it was just a dog and pony show. On March 20, the board will vote to cap the impact fees at 90 percent of what the consulting firm that conducted the study recommended. They’ll do so because the developers told them to. It's that simple.

Its futility notwithstanding, the hearing was not without entertainment. The commissioners reminded me of an aging rock band on tour without a new album, playing an easily-guessed set list of greatest hits over a painfully predictable 90 minutes. We’re afraid we’ll get sued. That’ll cost us more than the extra 10 percent will yield. We can’t spend it on the things we need. Maybe we should be looking at a "mobility fee” like Hillsborough County has. Maybe we should look at a fee on all real estate transactions not just new homes, blah, blah, blue.

That last one has been the favored complaint of the builders for years. Only one in eight home sales is new construction they tell us. Why shouldn’t the costs be spread out among all people who buy a house here? The people who move to the county and buy existing homes are getting a free ride. Impact fees don’t help the poorest communities where no new development is occurring, because they can’t be spent there.

If you read my column regularly, you’ve heard me debunk all of the arguments used by commissioners and builders ad nauseum. Briefly for those who are new: impact fees are the primary means by which we pay for the infrastructure needed to support new growth. Moving to our county and buying a home that already has the required infrastructure connected to and surrounding it does not create the costs that putting a few thousand homes on a formerly rural parcel without the required infrastructure does. On some levels, we are all forced to pay for the new growth. Impact fees just help make it at least somewhat more equitable.

New growth simply does not pay for itself. It costs about $1.25 in services for every $1 in money it brings in. Impact fees are one of the ways we help to offset that. With somewhere around 10,000 vacant homes in the county, we should be doing everything we can to encourage people who come here to purchase existing property supported by existing infrastructure. Conversely, we should want to discourage our rural hamlets from becoming new development, requiring new infrastructure that must not only be created but maintained. Subsidizing the cost of new construction by waiving and reducing fees is the opposite of that. It doesn’t make sense, but it does make dollars—for developers.

As for discouraging people from moving here or hurting the economy, there's simply no basis in fact whatsoever for such arguments. Indeed, a report issued by Moody Analytics just this week has our area's population as the 10th fasted growing in the entire nation in 2017, with a projection to move up to 9th next year. The same report had us first in job growth. Clearly, we should be much more worried about the long-term effects of our lack of EMS and policing resources (including capital expenses like patrol cars and ambulances), libraries, adequate roadways and other services that impact fees help pay for eventually dissuading current and potential residents than a fee on new construction that would be charged in the sale price anyway, were it not collected.

One of the more interesting aspects of Thursday’s meeting was the public comment, which was perhaps more intellectually organized than usual. Al Horrigan, who spent four decades as a developer out west before retiring to Florida, serves on the Manatee Planning Commission. In his role as the head of an east-county neighborhood association, Horrigan gave commissioners extended comment. 

Horrigan asked if a developer who has established the price point for a house at $350,000 isn’t going to build it because of $1,000 fee, or whether, in the history of development, one has lowered the price of a home from $350,000 to $349,000 because such a fee was reduced. No, they sell their homes for what the market will bear. Reducing such costs, simply increases profits.

Horrigan chastised commissioners for recently asking the public for more money via a half-cent infrastructure sales tax that amounts to more annually from everyone than they would be saving just the purchasers of newly constructed homes when amortized over their mortgages. "Did you suddenly realize you now have too much money for infrastructure and the only way you can get rid of it is to give it away to developers?” he asked, pointedly.

Commissioner Vanessa Baugh went on at length about the perils of impact fees, painting a dark picture in which they could leave the entire county economy in a state of ruin. Baugh said that during the development recession that occured after the mortgage crisis in 2009 people "couldn't live here” and "couldn't work here.” She said, "We were basically running them out of town.”

Baugh said that, sure, now the economy was good and building was booming but that we all know there’s a recession on the horizon, and that "we need to prepare for that day and be ready” .... by, you guessed it, capping impact fees. Baugh echoed the fear of legal challenges and stressed that impact fees were paid for by homeowners, including poor and middle class ones, not developers. She’s never been in favor of them, she added, and said that because the county has now begun mentioning mobility fees, that was somehow more reason to cap fees. 

Matt Bower, who commissioners recently kicked off the planning commission—presumably for making their tribute votes to developers more embarrassing by politely pointing out the obvious—clearly relished his new role as regular citizen, telling the board when he came up to give public comment that getting rid of him was a double edged sword, as he no longer felt compelled to bite his tongue on public policy issues.

Bower brought the whole developers buy your commission seats issue right out into the public forum and then took down Baugh’s defense of her vote point by point. Bower reiterated that houses will continue to be driven by market demand, that we clearly aren’t hurting to attract both developers and buyers, and that lower fees mean little more than reduced ability to provide needed services—for the sake of increased developer profits. He also pointed out the absurdity of using a mythical coming recession to justify keeping fees lower than they should be while times were admittedly booming.

Bower said that since we’ve routinely lowered them when development was down, it was only common sense that you would collect them fully when development was up. As for the threat of a lawsuit, he echoed Horrigan’s advice: let them sue. Bower said that to his knowledge, the firm that did Manatee’s study has never lost a legal challenge when the fees were collected at 100 percent of what they prescribed. As for the mobility fees, Bower said it was irresponsible to use something that hasn’t even begun to be studied or considered as a reason to alter the current prescribed course, especially because commissioners have no idea whatsoever how or when they would be implemented or what impact on need they would provide.

Ernest "Sandy” Marshall, representing the Federation of Manatee Community Associations, has also been a solid provider of common sense every time this issue comes up. Marshall said the Federation strongly supported collecting 100 percent of the prescribed fees and that they very clearly have not slowed growth in Manatee and Sarasota counties where transplants continue to pour in year after year. He also pointed out that even if new homes are slightly more expensive, that lifts the price of existing properties, leading to growth in revenues from ad valorem taxes.

Glen Gibellina, a citizen activist who has long championed a focus on affordable housing while deriding proposed developments that don’t include it (especially when they seek density increases), said that if we want to look at impact fees, let’s only look at the ones on affordable units. Gibellina suggested we collect 100 percent on every new home with a sale price over $100,000, and then waive them completely for houses under that amount. "People buying a $350,000 house can afford those fees,” argued Gibellina. "When you’re collecting $20,000 in fees on an $80,000 house, that’s gonna be a fifth of that person’s mortgage.”

Commissioner Betsy Benac pointed out that by state law they cannot waive impact fees for any class of homes but said that there was a bill in the legislature that sought to give local governments that latitude. She said she agreed they needed to "look at” affordable housing and the 600 sq ft minimum unit size that Gibellina also lampooned. 

However, the point is, the board doesn’t look at those things, because they are of no interest to the developers who put and keep them in office. Developers like minimum square footage, they hate affordable housing requirements, and they hate impact fees. Consider that and then consider the way our meetings are run and which issues are given the most consideration and you’ll see quite clearly who really runs this county. 

Commissioner Robin DiSabatino was the only enthusiastic voice for collecting the fees at 100 percent, reasoning that since it’s only become more expensive to build needed infrastructure since the study was done in 2015, the idea that we needed less than the experts told us we needed then didn’t hold water. "I don’t even understand why we’re here talking about this,” DiSabatino said rhetorically, though some of the commissioners seemed to take it literally.

Not coincidentally, DiSabatino announced this week that she will not be seeking reelection in November. Having tried to fight the good fight for almost eight years, she too feels as though her head might spontaneously combust at any moment and has decided that floating on a sailboat in the Bahamas with a margarita in her hand is a better way to spend her golden years. Who can blame her? Things won’t change until more people wake up and take notice, stop casting uninformed, straight-ticket votes and make commissioners fear voter accountability more than developer disloyalty.

Being a commissioner in Manatee County is a good way to feel important, take home a six-figure compensation package for a part-time job with superb benefits, and pad your retirement for a decade or so. It’s not at the moment, however, a good way to fight corruption, improve the quality of life for regular citizens, and be a responsible steward for future generations. Far too many powerful interests find the latter much too inconvenient to abide. So long as the voters and commissioners allow that to be the case, nothing will change.

CONA Potluck and Maley on Constitutional Revision

CONA Sarasota offered two broadcasts this week. One has to do with its annual potluck supper on Monday, Dec. 11 at the Garden Club:

The Sarasota County Council of Neighborhood Associations is throwing its annual holiday potluck party at 7 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 11, at the Sarasota Garden Club, 1131 Boulevard of the Arts, Sarasota. Attendees are encouraged to bring a favorite dish to share with others. The council represents more than 70 neighborhood, condo, resident and homeowner organizations whose members include more than 35,000 Sarasota citizens. Its mission is to provide practical information to member associations on community concerns and issues and to urge local and state governments to encourage sensible growth.

The second points us to Dennis Maley in the Bradenton Times on what we know so far about the work of the Constitution Revision Commission headed by Developer Carlos Beruff.

A few tidbits from Maley's substantial article:

Charter Schools:  

Proposal 71 would amend the constitution to allow such a body to oversee the charters, making it possible to streamline the petition process, ushering in a wave of new charter schools. Such an amendment, if passed, would have profound implications in the battle between public schools and charters, giving the latter an enormous boost, as the state has typically been far more pro-charter than most school boards.

Church and State:

Proposal 4 would "remove the prohibition against using public revenues in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or any sectarian institution,"

Judges and Politics:

Proposal 58 would have county and circuit judges appointed with nominations coming from the governor's judicial nominating commissions. This would only further politicize the process, allowing a party that is in power to stack the benches at all levels with unqualified partisans who could legislate from the bench.

Right to Privacy:

The award for the most obviously-dangerous idea goes to Proposal 22, which attacks Floridians' constitutional right to privacy. The proposal . . . would limit that right specifically to the release of our personal information.. . . If Proposal 22 is adopted, the legislature's powers would be broadly expanded in this realm. It could, for example, "provide by law" that certain "private" information is no longer public record. The First Amendment Foundation has expressed alarm in that it would seemingly "give the legislature the power to selectively pull existing public records from the public domain."

Don't forget the potluck