You might remember reading about One Bay’s Reality Check exercises, in which 300 hand-picked invitees, rushing against a 90-minute time limit, hurriedly heaped Legos on maps to depict their ideas for the 7-county region’s development over the next 50 years. When selecting the participants, One Bay had set an artificial ratio of 1/3 citizens to 2/3 business and government, which doesn’t reflect the ratio of unaffiliated citizens to moneyed interests in our community.
The exercise was just over a year ago, and at that time I encouraged you to claim a stake in this planning process by joining their mailing list.
The results of this exercise are now being called “data,” and this “data” is being used to inform the next stage of this visioning process. The One Bay Tech Team used this “data” to create 4 scenarios upon which you are now invited to comment.
We’ll get to those scenarios in a moment, but first, take a look at the makeup of the One Bay Tech Team which created the 4 scenarios:
27 Government
10 Development Industry
4 Economic Development
3 Private Consultants to Government
2 Academics
1 Event Facilitator
Notice there are NO unaffiliated citizens, but plenty of developers. Despite my requests to see the scenarios earlier, they’ve been kept a secret from citizens like you and I up until now. Meanwhile development industry insiders have been helping to shape those scenarios before we get our say.
But wait, there’s more insider influence. Recently, One Bay’s project manager was forced to resign due to serious conflicts of interest. While guiding our region’s vision for growth, Amy Maguire was also working for a coalition of large landowners in south Hillsborough pushing for a mega-development on 5,500 acres of rural farmland; she was an advocate of our detested Green-Swath-Sprawlway; and an employee of John Thrasher’s powerful lobbying company that represents giant developers and other special interests across the state.
Now, One Bay is finally inviting everyone to participate in shaping the vision for our region. The invitation proclaims
“One Bay is powered by the voice of the citizens who want to be heard and keep our region sustainable and an attractive place to live, work and play…”
Let’s make sure this comes true. As warped as all this has been so far, I strongly encourage you to participate in One Bay’s visioning process. One Bay is being embraced by our county commission, TBARTA, and other political and business leaders across the 7-county region. It will have great influence over the future of our region—right down to our neighborhoods and our daily quality of life—whether we participate or not.
Keep in mind that while the Tampa Bay Partnership and other One Bay partners are paying for the visioning process, we taxpayers will pay for the growth that is envisioned, and its infrastructure. Yes, new growth pays some impact fees, and the new residents pay new taxes, but that doesn’t begin to cover all the costs that we taxpayers must shell out. We pay even more when poorly planned growth lowers our quality of life, destroys our natural resources, and sucks our free time into the black hole of time wasted in traffic jams.
Citizens must demand—not just a seat at the table—enough seats to represent our numbers and our taxes. If there are 1,000 butchers, bakers & candlestick makers for every developer in this region, then we should have 1,000 seats at the table for every developer seat. After all, it’s our table.
We have 6 weeks, starting with the June 2 kickoff event, to make an honest program out of One Bay, and help make its claims of citizen participation come true. In the next post, I’ll spell out some details on the four scenarios, and how you can make a difference, but for now, PLEASE give serious consideration to taking an ACTIVE role in this.
Kelly
1 year ago
Maybe they should call it ONE DAY because that is all the time they took collecting the data! Why should we be burdened even talking to them? I think we need to hold our elected officials accountable for our land use and transportation decisions and ask that they not hand over these decisions to private interests such as the Partnership…….ooops I mean One BAY. The developers already control our county and now they are asking for the official blessing to do it? Only in Hillsborough……….or judging by their Sprawl…….maybe Orlando.
George-UCAN Member
1 year ago
The One Bay effort is a conglomerate of business interests and a heavy contingent of the home building industry trying to plan our future in a way that will maximize their profit margin. And they’re going to do it all without giving real citizens any control or oversight over the finished product. They want citizens to participate, but only in a passive way. The way this effort has been set up is truly self serving. They have created 4 theoretical models which are grossly oversimplified and are designed to steer people to choose the most obvious one or possibly 2 “desired” scenarios. In order for the outcome to be meaningful they would have to totally revise this effort from the ground up. Are they willing to do that? I seriously doubt it. Since this effort is primarily funded from private sources, they will play the game their way.
Instead of playing the game their way hoping to get a slightly better outcome from a tainted, self serving process, I would rather see citizens aggressively go after their county leaders to not accept the One Bay product because it is so flawed. They should demand that their elected leaders do what they were elected to do and create a vision, instead of letting monied interests do it for them.
Remember, if you join in the One Bay game you will have a hard time later saying you don’t like the finished product. Instead, you will be giving it your endorsement by default. And many of the local county leaders are looking for One Bay to be successful in this effort so that they can adopt whatever plan One Bay offers. We want to be in control of our own destiny and One Bay is not the way to accomplish that. We need to band together and demand more from our respective local governments. If the One Bay turnout is poor and concerned citizens turn up the heat on their local elected officials not to accept the flawed One Bay plan, we might end up with something that has average citizens’ interests at the forefront.
GKR
1 year ago
As opposed to the antiquated and tired “developer-led” direction of One Bay, the latest in smart growth and sustainable planning is “planner-led”.
This means that instead of the land development industry taking the lead and limiting the pesky voice of the citizenry to reach it’s pre-determined sprawl goal, the county would hire the best multi-displinary planning team it can afford to create a true citizen vision with corresponding design guidelines (a new code). I am not talking about county planning staff, I’m talking about cutting edge private planning firms like Duany Plater-Zyberk, Torti Gallas, or Dover Kohl who know how to conduct a REAL public planning charrette (workshop). No, such a firm would not be cheap, and they do not use Legos, but they’d be a great investment in the future quality of life of our county.
Until this unbiased, third party, expert team is retained, we will not see the true collective citizen vision of future Hillsborough County.
Currently, all we’re seeing is a con being passed off as “democracy in action” which just happens to mirror what the local sprawl industry desires.