Why is it that the single most important issue heading for the 2008 ballot (no, it's not tax reform) has a cast of characters that could have come out of The Big Lebowski?
The issue is Florida Hometown Democracy (FHD), a deceptively simple proposition that would give direct control over community land-use plans to local voters. Advocates see it as a means of slowing down growth, curbing sprawl and limiting the influence that developers have over elected city and county leaders. The opponents — pro-business and development groups — are scared silly.
"For us, this is nuclear winter," said Brad Swanson, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for the Hillsborough County Commission who has been hired as the West Central Florida coordinator for the Florida Chamber of Commerce (a position created in response to the threat of Florida Hometown Democracy).
The FHD debate is volatile enough. Fueling it on both sides, however, is an assortment of players as idiosyncratic as they are powerful, including a former political advisor to Russian President Boris Yeltsin; a powerful lobbyist and former Florida speaker of the house; and a strip-club mogul and First Amendment champion who supports the Hometown Democracy idea.
A quick lesson in Florida growth management: In 1985, the state passed its first comprehensive growth management plan, which was supposed to bring some order to development in this construction-happy state. The law ordered that all local governments create comprehensive plans, blueprints that would not only dictate how land could be developed but that also laid out how local governments would provide the necessary roads, parks and sewer systems.
The idea was to link needed government projects to the growth that inevitably comes Florida's way. Developers had to detail their impact on public amenities, and government had to show that it could meet the needs of incoming residents before it would approve growth. The idea was called concurrency; private development and public infrastructure would proceed concurrently.
Nice theory. Too bad it didn't work out.
For almost 20 years, civic and environmental activists have pointed out the shortcomings of those local comprehensive plans, that they could be changed with just a vote by local politicians, often fed by lots and lots of developer campaign contributions.
By the turn of the century, Lesley Blackner had seen more than enough failures of the 1985 Growth Management Act. First in Daytona, then in West Palm Beach and then statewide, she fought on behalf of groups such as the Sierra Club against big new roads (the Suncoast Parkway in our area), residential subdivisions and badly planned commercial projects.
In 2003, she and another environmental lawyer, Ross Burnaman of Tallahassee, wrote the Florida Hometown Democracy constitutional amendment. The myriad amendments to local comprehensive plans would now have one more step to travel for final approval: the voters.
The public at large went ga-ga for it, heady for the idea of having a tool that would level the playing field with well-heeled developers and their political toadies. For the most part, people already in government were aghast. Several past secretaries of the state's Department of Community Affairs, the top land-planning agency, believe FHD is "ill-conceived" and the "worst plan" they've ever seen. Opposition also includes the three main groups representing locally elected officials: Florida League of Cities, Florida Association of Counties and Florida School Boards Association.
Not to mention the development, insurance and business interests in the state, which have already contributed more than $1.5 million in an effort to defeat it.
With so much money flying around, with so much at stake, the Hometown Democracy amendment was bound to attract some colorful characters to the political battleground. The cast of characters who are opposed includes:
Michael Caputo. As a counter to the FHD amendment, opponents ginned up their own constitutional referendum proposal, one that echoes the amendment they dread but with an important difference: proposals to change a land-use plan would not go on the ballot unless opponents gather enough signatures on a petition.
FHD's opponents created a political committee, Floridians for Smarter Growth, and hired Michael Caputo as its executive director. A journalism graduate, public relations practitioner and longtime politico, Caputo's client list is long: Jack Kemp presidential '88, George H.W. Bush presidential '92, the Nicaraguan Contras, Ollie North and Yeltsin, to name a few. Caputo has offices in Buffalo and Miami, lives in a tugboat anchored off Miami Beach, and enjoys a nonpareil reputation for guerrilla theater; the Miami Herald called him "a veteran political stunt-meister." At a recent Tampa Tiger Bay Club debate, Caputo proudly toted an oversized 57-page mock ballot representing one year's worth of comp plan changes in North Redington Beach alone. The accompanying details that local governments would provide to voters would be as big as two telephone books, he insisted. In a 2006 South Florida campaign, he sent a man in a chicken suit to his opponent's office when the opponent refused to debate.
Those stunts, however, are G-rated compared with the faux strippers who greeted Tampa strip-club owner Joe Redner earlier this year when he debated on behalf of FHD at a business breakfast. The women, with misspelled signs and dollars sticking out of their stripper garters, stole attention away from the debate itself as Redner confronted them and concluded they weren't his employees.
Redner cried foul; Caputo testily denied any involvement in the political performance piece in an e-mail exchange with WMNF radio journalist Rob Lorei. "I really don't think this stunt deserves thoughtful discussion. … Only a schoolgirl would take Joe Redner at his word."
Caputo does acknowledge hiring petition gatherers away from the Hometown Democracy effort, although he disputed paying the $3-plus per signature that the St. Petersburg Times cited when it broke the story earlier this month. "We are trying to hire every single signature collector in the state of Florida," he told me at the recent Tiger Bay Club debate. "Cheap wasn't an option for us. If we don't [pay handsomely], we won't make it on the ballot."
John Thrasher. As Caputo's group muddies the ballot water with its sound-alike amendment, John Thrasher fronts another political committee trying to convince voters to "revoke" their signatures on FHD's petitions. It is a strange place to find a former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, a Jacksonville Republican who now lobbies in Tallahassee.
At the Tampa Tiger Bay Club debate, Lesley Blackner claimed that Thrasher has sold the good name of his former office in the interest of lying to voters. She was referring to a letter that Thrasher's Save Our Constitution group mailed earlier this year to people who signed the FHD petition, urging them to revoke their signatures.
In it, Thrasher wrote, "Hundreds of thousands of good Floridians are being tricked into signing onto their special interest amendment. The special interests are hoping they can sneak their constitutional amendment past Florida's voters and into Florida's Constitution before you fully understand what's in it." Worse, he warned that FHD's amendment would put land-use decisions in the hands of "special interests" called "electors."
The letter made no notation of who was behind his group or that he is a Tallahassee lobbyist — nor did it explain that those mysterious "electors" are otherwise known as "registered voters."
Blackner said nobody at FHD stands to make a dime from the amendment, and talk of special interests is a smokescreen "designed to trick voters and prevent Florida Hometown Democracy from getting on the ballot."
The real special interests would be the folks behind Save Our Constitution (the insurance industry group Associated Industries) and Thrasher's extensive client list, which includes mega-landowner St. Joe Company and Walt Disney World.
Thrasher is unapologetic for his political prevaricating and told the Tiger Bay crowd that as a Vietnam War veteran it takes a lot more than some editorial flak to get to him as he does battle with "mercenaries from out of state" in the guise of FHD petition gatherers who he accuses of lying to get voters' signatures.
"We have had to use hard tactics as well," Thrasher admitted after his Tiger Bay Club speech. "If we stifle growth, we'll see this state's best days behind it."
Next week: The cast of characters supporting Florida Hometown Democracy, including the zero-population proponent and former abortion clinic owner; the dentist turned skin-care mogul and the South Florida lawyer who's poured half a million bucks into the campaign.
This article appears in Nov 28 – Dec 4, 2007.