Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

This Thursday, commissioners will consider several changes to our Land Development Code including two proposals affecting traffic: one good change, proposed by our county transportation planners, and one bad change, proposed by developers (well, by their lawyers). Developers are loudly opposing the planners’ proposal, while the planners oppose the developers’ proposal. Who will our commissioners listen to: the developers or the planners? Citizens need to weigh in or our commissioners may change the rules to suit developers, making traffic around here even worse.

“Transportation concurrency” requirements are supposed to ensure that new development does not overwhelm our roads with too much traffic. Ideally, ‘concurrency’ requires a developer to either prove the additional traffic from his project won’t overwhelm the roads, or improve the roads so that they can handle the additional traffic. The planners’ proposal would add a few teeth to concurrency, while the developers’ proposal would knock a few teeth out.

The developers’ proposal (08-0364) would allow a developer to get “vested” against concurrency, by making some road improvements several years before he builds anything, and without completely specifying what he will build later. Once a developer got vested, he could change his plans to increase the intensity of his land use, and increase his project’s traffic demands on the local roads, without having to improve the roads to handle the increased traffic. If, in the years between his vesting and his building, traffic increased on the roads so that his project would no longer meet concurrency, he would get to build anyway, even though his project’s traffic would overwhelm the roads.

This is, after all, the point of getting vested against traffic concurrency: so that at a later date, when it turns out that what you want to build would doom the community to nightmarish traffic jams, you can just go ahead and build anyway with your “get out of concurrency free” card. Vested rights means we taxpayers must pay to improve the roads — either that or we pay with our time and gas money wasted in gridlock.

Citizens opposing Little Harbor’s attempts to further degrade Ruskin’s quality of life should oppose the developer’s proposal (it’s the same applicant: Bricklemyer, Smolker & Bolves), because this firm has amply demonstrated the evils of allowing developers to enjoy vested rights. Little Harbor was approved for way too many condos back in the ’80s, and now that they are finally getting around to building them, they don’t have to trouble themselves with the fact that lots of other development has been built since the ’80s, so that their development will now overwhelm the local roads. They just wave their vested rights in our faces and proceed to ruin the neighborhood.

We need less of this vested rights nonsense, not more.

The planners’ proposal (08-0396) is a sensible change that would require developers to provide adequate entrances/exits for new developments, and limit development wherever the developer could not provide enough access points to handle his project’s traffic. When a large subdivision has only one or two access points, they often have to use a traffic light to control the traffic at that point, but this slows down the traffic on the local roads and negatively impacts the surrounding community. In addition to the quality of life issue, there is a safety issue: without enough access points large subdivisions cannot safely evacuate in case of fire, hurricane or other emergency, and one big subdivision pouring out of one little gate can clog up the surrounding road system in a large evacuation.

If you can’t provide enough roads and driveways to handle your project, then you should scale down the project. Period.

Citizens opposing the new subdivision (The Reserve at Westlake) that would add 2 new roads in rural East Hillsborough — one through the Balm Scrub (ELAPP) Preserve and the other over Bullfrog Creek and its wetlands — should support the planners’ proposal, because if it is approved it should limit the housing that could be built in this sensitive area, which is the “hole in the donut” surrounded by environmentally sensitive land. The developer is proposing 1089 homes — way too much housing for the two roads. The reasonable thresholds proposed by our transportation planners would not allow this many houses on just these two access roads, so if this rule is adopted the developer would have to build less housing (or find other access routes which isn’t likely here) and in this rural, ecologically sensitive area, less housing and less traffic would be a very good thing. (See my update & sample opposition letter on that.)

Here’s my letter to our commissioners asking them to approve the planners’ proposal (08-0396) and deny the developers’ proposal (08-0364). (There are other proposals besides these two [all in this big pdf], so if you provide input, you should note those numbers.) Here are some comments from U-CAN. As our commissioners consider these measures that can help or harm our community as we grow, they should do so with plenty of input from all of us.

The first public hearing is Thursday, May 15, and the final hearing is June 12. Both are at 6:00 p.m. at County Center. You can speak to your commissioners about these Land Development Code changes at either hearing, or write to them. They may have their minds made up before the final hearing (yes, really!) so I encourage you to speak up as soon as possible.

County administrator Pat Bean has decided we don’t need any more nature preserves.

Oh, did you want to vote on that? Me too. After all, we always have held a vote to decide whether or not to continue our county’s Environmental Lands Acquisition and Protection Program (ELAPP), and the voters have always passed ELAPP by an overwhelming majority.

ELAPP is set to expire in 2011 unless we vote to extend the program again. Citizens have begun raising money to poll county residents to see if they want to put the issue on the ballot this year, or possibly wait until the 2010 election. The Trust for Public Lands has offered to conduct the poll, Tampa Audubon and The Tampa Bay Conservancy have offered to help pay for it, and more offers of help are rolling in.

But even though we have not asked the county to fund the poll, the county administrator is against it. Pat Bean has decided — with no poll and no vote — that we don’t need to continue this wildly popular, successful program.

She says the land-buying program has largely fulfilled its purpose by preserving the most valuable natural areas in the county.

Nonsense! We are nowhere near done protecting this county’s environmentally valuable lands.

I myself have recently nominated large tracts of pristine wildlife habitat, with ecologically sensitive riverine wetlands and tributaries whose protection is critical for healthy rivers and clean water resources. There is plenty of still-pristine land worth protecting, and we also need to protect some less-than-pristine land, in order to make connections between the pristine areas for water flow and wildlife corridors.

Continuing this program’s current budget doesn’t require a tax increase, and the economic climate is opening up a window of opportunity to acquire undeveloped land at bargain prices. Without a local conservation program we would lose the state funding which has so far matched ELAPP to the tune of $75 million.

Publicly, politicians are generally supportive of our hugely popular environmental land-buying program, which is win-win for the environment as well as the landowners who sell their property to the county for fair market value.

So what’s got into Bean? Are her bosses, the county commissioners, eyeing our ELAPP money for their own pet projects? Are they using her, again, to take an unpopular stand for them, so they don’t have to take the heat?

Commissioner Rose Ferlita has assured me that she remains a staunch supporter of ELAPP, and said the county administrator was not speaking for her. Commissioner Mark Sharpe said he’d ask today to agenda this item for public discussion on April 16. So who was Pat Bean speaking for?

Hillsborough county’s Strategic Plan, set on March 7, supports ELAPP with this objective on p.10:

Hillsborough County will pursue the acquisition of environmentally sensitive and significant resources by leveraging ELAPP funding with 40% noncounty funding on an average gross annual basis.

It is not Pat Bean’s place to push an agenda that is contrary to the county’s management strategy, set publicly by our elected officials. Her job is to carry out policy, not set policy. As I’ve said here before,

We don’t elect Pat Bean, and she has no authority to act independently of our elected officials.

I’m asking our county commissioners to support ELAPP, now and into the future, (and I’m thanking Ferlita and Sharpe for their support). Here’s some material that might help you compose your own letter of support: my letter, some bulleted points prepared by the Tampa Bay Conservancy which refute Bean’s position, and some facts & figures on the economic value of ELAPP put together by Wildlife Fellowship, Inc.

I’m also asking our commissioners to rein Bean in. I hope you will, too. The voters should decide whether to continue our land preservation program, not Queen Bean.

I’ll bet certain special interests were meanly happy to see this headline & subhead in the St. Pete Times, casting aspersions on the Environmental Protection Commission:

Auditor slams watchdog’s recordkeeping

The Environmental Protection Commission is doing a poor job of keeping track of its work.

Like a gossip tabloid making something innocuous sound sensational, the Times makes a bland audit sound as though it revealed shoddy bookkeeping which might be hiding something. They even misquote the auditors:

“It is unclear if they are protecting wetlands because of the incomplete data,” said Chad Lallemand, who helped prepare the report for auditor Jim Barnes.

Both Jim Barnes and Chad Lallemand tell me Lallemand never said this. The auditors have no doubt that EPC does protect wetlands. What is somewhat unclear is the extent to which they protect wetlands, because while much of the protection is documented, some simply cannot be.

As EPC Director Dr. Garrity told me, “It’s like asking the police how much crime they have prevented.”

EPC can and does count the acres of wetlands that have been impacted (legally or illegally), then replaced or mitigated through EPC regulation. But it’s impossible to know exactly how many acres of wetland impacts have been avoided due to EPC.

When a developer brings their plans to EPC for an initial review, who can say how many acres of wetland impacts they have already avoided, knowing that EPC would make them revise their plans had they shown certain impacts? How can EPC count all the acres of wetlands that would have been impacted if developers didn’t have to go through EPC reviews? Maybe some developers would have avoided some wetlands voluntarily, while some would have paved over every inch of wetlands that EPC protects, if they could get away with it.

EPC protects wetlands not only by enforcing regulations, but also by working together with builders, farmers and others in the early planning stages of projects, to help draw up plans that avoid wetland impacts in ways they may not have considered without the expertise of EPC’s engineers and hydrologists. If EPC suggests relocating an access road on an early pencil-draft plan, are they to take credit for saving a wetland that would have been impacted IF that road had finally been built over the wetland where it was first penciled in? Would the auditors then fault them for claiming too much success?

One of the conclusions in the county’s audit of the EPC is the suggestion to develop some performance measures to better account for the wetland impacts that are avoided due to EPC processes. As noted in the auditors’ report, and in Dr. Garrity’s attached response, EPC has recognized this need, and has already begun improving their performance measures.

So the Times turns this into an accusation of incomplete record keeping, and boosts it with a misquote suggesting that EPC may not be protecting wetlands at all.

Last summer, special interests almost succeeded in getting our county commission to eliminate EPC wetland protections. Citizens had to work feverishly to snatch the agency from the flames. Innuendo from the Times serves only to fan those flames which are still licking at our EPC.

I attended the TBARTA Open House on Monday, and today I’m bringing it to you, just in case you didn’t slog through rush-hour traffic to voice your concerns about transportation around here. (Sticks commenter Scott Gunsaullus spent 2 hours on public transportation to get to the meeting!) But you get to skip that transportation hassle, and you don’t have to wade into the usual gaggle of developers, politicians and activists milling about this kind of thing. You can participate in the Open House virtually, right here on Sticks of Fire.

First, check out the maps that were posted around the room, with “general connections” identified. Then fill out the same questionnaire that was handed out, just as if you were there.

Uh-oh. What’s that green swath on the map of South Hillsborough Options? Is that the Green Swath of Death rearing its ugly head again? So soon after it was scraped off our county planning maps by massive citizen opposition? (See my article, “roads to sprawlville” for background on this beltway/bypass.)

I asked a couple of the TBARTA folks about this, but they were kind of vague. “It’s just a possible corridor,” they told me. “We’re asking for input on all the possibilities. Everything is on the table at this point.”

Hmmm. It looks kinda like a rail corridor, but then it hooks up with a new road corridor. Could this be a resurrection of the Brandon Bypass?

I mentioned that Green Swath on my questionnaire. I told ’em that new roads in rural areas attract expensive suburban sprawl, waste farmland under new development, and pour more commuter traffic on all our roads; and, I told ’em, we need to be concentrating our growth and infrastructure along urban transit corridors in order to make mass transit feasible. And I told ’em I don’t like roads carving up my nature preserves.

Certain people — the people who make money this way — are still pushing for new roads to open up cheap farmland for more sprawling subdivisions full of commuters. If you have an opinion on transportation, you might want to voice it soon, because

TBARTA is charged with developing a Regional Transportation Master Plan by July 1, 2009.

TBARTA is also charged with engaging the public in developing this plan, so let them know what you think about rail, buses, roads, alternative transportation — anything that matters to you in your regional transportation plan.

See for yourself on a 4-hour ecotour, any Wednesday from Feb. 6 through March 26, 11:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. Cost is $20 for members of Tampa Bay Watch, or $25 for non-members. E-mail Catherine, or call 727-867-8166 for reservations.

The environmental program starts with a classroom orientation of the estuary and then spends the rest of the day on the bay. This hands-on field trip experience includes an introduction to Tampa Bay Watch, discovering estuarine sea critters from our on-site touch-tanks and kayaking over oyster bars and through mangrove forests.

The course encompasses subjects/activities including: an overview of Tampa Bay Estuary habitats, its flora and fauna, bay impacts and restoration projects. Tampa Bay Watch’s Marine and Education Center, located on the Tampa Bay shoreline directly across from Ft. De Soto, provides an easy access toTampa Bay. We hope that both on-site and in the field, participants learn about our beautiful yet fragile surroundings in a fun and engaging way.

Tampa Bay Watch is a nonprofit stewardship program dedicated to protecting and restoring the marine and wetland environments of the Tampa Bay estuary.

The sport is so rough, it was initially called Murderball. It’s often called Quad Rugby in the U.S., because it is played by quadriplegics. But it is internationally known as Wheelchair Rugby, because

“You can’t really market ‘Murderball’ to corporate sponsors.”

From quadrugby.com:

The game is a tough, give-no-quarter game. … Any misconceptions about quads and helplessness are quickly eliminated as soon as someone sees the game…

The hometown team, the Tampa Generals, is hosting the 16th Annual Coloplast International Wheelchair Rugby Tournament this weekend, January 18 – 20, at All Peoples Center, 6105 E. Sligh Avenue, next to King High School. Games will be played indoors on two basketball courts simultaneously, from 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Friday, 10:00 - 4:00 on Saturday, and 10:00 – 2:30 on Sunday, with the Final Game starting at 1:00 p.m. on Sunday. (See schedule & directions)

The Tampa Generals boast a long, illustrious history in Wheelchair Rugby. The 18-year-old team has spawned several Paralympic gold-medal winners, including their current coach, Dave Ceruti, on the left in this photo with Justin Stark, the team representative. Justin’s the guy to contact if you’d like to support Tampa’s team with time or money, or just come help out at a Saturday practice now and then.

The Generals head into this tournament in great shape, having won their division at the annual Beast of the East tournament hosted by the Philadelphia Eagles in November. But the Phillie team came in a very close second, and 3rd-place Michigan was nipping at Tampa’s wheels, so the coming tournament promises to be action-packed and extremely competitive.

Tampa’s Ryan Kress, pictured at right trapped between two Philadelphia defensive players, was the division’s MVP at the Beast of the East tournament.

My husband, Tres, keeps trying to retire from his volunteer gig as a Wheelchair Rugby referee, but this weekend he’ll be blowing his whistle again, because he just loves it too much to quit completely. He & I have been deeply involved with this fast-paced, hard-hitting sport for many years. This September we’re going to Beijing to cheer for Team U.S.A. in the Paralympics — the Olympics for physically disabled athletes, always held right after the Olympics, at the same location.

But you don’t have to go to Beijing to see this “Elegant Violence.” This is your once-a-year chance to catch this exciting sport played in an international tournament right here in Tampa.

Quad Rugby Reading: Inkwood Books, Tampa’s only full-service independent bookstore, is offering 20% off, all month, on Gimp: The Story Behind the Star of Murderball, by Mark Zupan. (Murderball is an award-winning film about the sport. See the very cool trailer.)

Citizens raised many good questions about the proposed Agricultural Exemption to our wetland protections, and we asked our Environmental Protection Commissioners (aka our county commissioners) to refrain from any action at their last hearing, on Nov. 15. So they postponed their decision until this Thursday, to allow time for EPC to address the citizens’ concerns. Disappointingly, EPC has not improved their proposal to alleviate those concerns. If you read EPC’s defense of their position, note that much of their material is actually written by the Agricultural Economic Development Council — which perfectly illustrates the problem with this Ag Exemption.

This Ag Exemption is based — not on science or economic need — but on politics. The Ag Lobby is pushing for less regulation using their political muscle, with no real economic justification or analysis of the environmental consequences. Last August we changed the rules to exempt man-made ditches and cow ponds — the farmers’ biggest bone of contention. Do farmers really need to destroy small natural wetlands, too? Can our wildlife sustain the habitat loss? What will this cost taxpayers in terms of flood control and water quality? Our commissioners don’t know. We’ll see if they care on Thursday.

And we’ll see if they mind that this “Agricultural Exemption” has loopholes big enough to drive a bulldozer through, so it can be used by developers, too.

Check out this map I made. I took the county’s map of “Ag Lands” eligible for the Ag Exemption, and I pointed out a couple of places in my neighborhood where the so-called “Ag Lands” are not being farmed at all. In fact they’ve been recently zoned for dense development. You can see plenty of this “Ag Land” all over the urban area, already zoned for condos and townhouses, where the housing is not yet built. While the developers wait for the market to recover, they can lease the land to a sod farmer, or borrow a few cows to put on the land temporarily, and thereby qualify under this Ag Exemption to fill in some wetlands before they build their subdivisions.

Just like these tactics are used by large landowners to get an “Agricultural Exemption” from their property taxes (under Greenbelt laws), and like non-farmers sign forms swearing to use fireworks only for bona fide farming operations, this “Agricultural Exemption” from our wetlands protections could easily be used by developers.

A developer could also pressure a farmer into using his exemption to fill wetlands as a condition of sale, before the developer buys the property.

Citizens have been trying to put conditions into this Ag Exemption to prevent its use by non-farmers, with no success. For example, we’ve asked that the developer who buys farmland with filled wetlands should be required to put the wetlands back, through mitigation, before building. The EPC staff tried to compromise, saying any filled wetlands turned into a non-farming use within 7 years should be mitigated, but the Ag Industry found this modest proviso unacceptable. The Agriculture Economic Development Council voted last week to approve the exemption only if this time limit is lowered to 5 years — which just shows they want to be able to use this “Agricultural Exemption” on land that will soon be paved.

This Thursday, Jan. 17, Commissioners will decide whether to approve this exemption, at a public hearing at 9:00 a.m. in county center. I’ll be there, with other concerned citizens, to ask them to make sure this rule change has net benefits, before adopting it. You can come too, and be a voice for our wetlands.

The newspapers have all but abandoned the fight now that we’ve saved the wetlands division from elimination. But commissioners continue working to weaken our wetlands protections. They think no one will notice now that the limelight is off.

Whether you agree with this rule change or not, I hope you’ll let them know we are paying attention to what they’re doing, and we’ll hold them accountable come election time. My letter to the commissioners details my concerns, and offers some suggestions for improving the rule change. You can write them with your concerns, too.

Although he appeared calm, sitting still in the audience of the public hearing, the Executive Director of the Planning Commission, Bob Hunter, had to have been aghast as he watched the County Administrator blithely break the county’s promise to protect his agency from state-sponsored meddling. I know I was flabbergasted. Was this the blatant act of insubordination it appeared to be on the surface? Or was the County Administrator carrying out a hidden agenda, contrary to her public charge and contrary to the will of the people?

On Dec. 7, at the annual public hearing on proposed laws affecting Hillsborough County, state legislators were considering a bill that would change the balance of county and city representation on 3 local boards, to give the county more power on each: the Environmental Protection Commission (EPC), the Sports Authority, and the Planning Commission. The public has been largely opposed to this change to the Planning Commission ever since it was first proposed last year, so citizens were relieved when our County Commission seemed to respond to the public will and voted unanimously to support the bill only if the Planning Commission were removed from it.

Commissioners had asked Rep. Ambler, as the bill’s sponsor, to amend the bill so that it would not affect the Planning Commission. Rep. Ambler did so, but the amendment became controversial among the other legislators, so Ambler finally suggested that his amendment be withdrawn, and offered his bill with the Planning Commission in it after all. Even though this went against the express direction of our County Commission, the County Administrator, Pat Bean, smiled knowingly (she practically winked!) and told the legislators that the County Commission would be fine with it.

>>[County Administrator] PAT BEAN: OKAY. MY UNDERSTANDING IS THAT THE BILL THAT YOU’RE LOOKING AT NOW IS A BILL THAT CONTAINS ALL THREE AGENCIES, THE EPC, THE PLANNING COMMISSION, AND THE SPORTS AUTHORITY.
…[lots of talk about the sports authority]
>>[Representative] FAYE CULP: … I HAVE A QUESTION AS TO THE OTHER TWO PARTS OF THE BILL. WHAT IS YOUR FEELING OR — ON THE EPC AND THE PLANNING COMMISSION, …?
>>PAT BEAN: WELL, THE EPC WAS INCLUDED IN THE BILL THAT THE BOARD VOTED ON WHEN THEY TOOK THEIR POSITION ON THE LOCAL BILLS. … AND THEY VOTED TO SUPPORT THE BILL … THE BOARD DID NOT — AT THE TIME THAT THE BILL WAS BEING CONSIDERED, THEY ACTUALLY RECOMMENDED TAKING OUT THE PLANNING COMMISSION FOR THIS YEAR, BUT I AM CERTAIN THAT THEY WILL SUPPORT THE BILL AS — IF YOU PASS IT TODAY AS IT HAS BEEN AMENDED HERE. BUT THEY DID RECOMMEND TAKING THAT OUT. …
>>PAT BEAN: … AS I SAID, I’M CERTAIN THE BOARD WILL SUPPORT THE BILL THAT YOU’VE GOT NOW AS AMENDED [emphases added]

Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio, City Councilwoman Mary Mulhern, Bob Hunter and several citizens spoke against including the Planning Commission. (Terry Flott & I also spoke against Pat Bean’s move.) Bean was the only person to speak in support of this unpopular legislation.

>> BOB HUNTER: … AT THE PRESENT TIME, LEGISLATORS, THERE IS NO LOCAL GOVERNMENT SUPPORTING CHANGE TO THE PLANNING COMMISSION. NO LOCAL GOVERNMENT IS ASKING FOR THIS.

Not publicly, anyway.

Pat Bean is nobody’s fool. She knows her 6-figure salary would be in jeopardy if she defied her 7-headed boss, the County Commission. So why was she smiling as she told our state legislators that our county would support something the commissioners unanimously voted to oppose? Did she have reason to think commissioners would support her in her job, even after her apparent betrayal of their public position?

Bean has often been used by the commissioners to do their dirty work. In this year of painful staff and budget cuts, she proposed that their monthly car allowances should be doubled to $600 — so they wouldn’t have to propose this let-them-eat-cake raise themselves. She has also been dispatched to campaign against tax cuts, and citizen initiatives like Ruskin incorporation and the county mayor proposal. Citizens are often told “the administration” is pushing an unpopular road, borrow pit or development, while county commissioners remain politically unscathed —and unaccountable.

In speaking for legislation which the county commission had not (publicly) supported, it is unlikely Bean was acting as a renegade. It is much more likely that she was doing the bidding of her bosses while they pretended to go along with the citizens’ position. I called Commissioners Mark Sharpe and Rose Ferlita to see where they really stand. Both seem appalled that the board’s unanimous vote was dismissed at this hearing. Commissioner Sharpe wrote the legislators after the hearing, detailing his objections to the proposed legislation.

Unless the other commissioners were just pulling the wool over our eyes with their unanimous vote against this change to the Planning Commission, they all ought to direct the County Administrator to write the legislators explaining the true position of the board. And the commissioners should ensure that Bean does not intentionally misrepresent the county again.

That’s what I told them, anyway. You can tell them what you think, too.

We don’t elect Pat Bean, and she has no authority to act independently of our elected officials. We pay her (a lot!) to carry out the publicly determined positions of our elected officials, not the secret agendas of a few of those commissioners.

WMNF is the only news outlet that reported on Pat Bean’s maneuvering. (Move the time slider to 5:40 to skip to this audio story.) The Tribune reported on the legislators’ maneuvering.