He approaches the podium in a black turtleneck. His curly salt-and-pepper hair is, for someone of his profession, somewhat unkempt. Anyone who’s been following the St. Pete Beach lawsuit saga instantly will recognize the name he gives before his public testimony at a Jan. 26 City Commission meeting: Ken Weiss.
Long story short, he’s the attorney for the guys who are suing the pants off the city over its comprehensive plan.
Tonight he’s talking about Amendment 4, the measure that would institute so-called Hometown Democracy in Florida. St. Pete Beach voters adopted their own version in 2006, then elected to soften it last November.
“It seems that some of the developers and the development community in the state have tried to make St. Pete Beach the hallmark of Florida Hometown Democracy,” he says. “And the fact of the matter is, the litigation in St. Pete Beach has absolutely nothing to do with Florida Hometown Democracy.”
He says the pricey, multi-year court battle in St. Pete Beach actually concerns “the utilization of the charter by developers to try to pass comprehensive plans.”
That being said, Weiss then urges the commission not to approve a resolution condemning Amendment 4. The resolution — which says that the amendment “would force Voters to decide on all changes to a City’s or County’s Comprehensive Plan” — would be tantamount to telling voters they’re too dumb to vote on land use changes.
Then he bolts.
For the uninitiated: Hometown Democracy, if applied, would require voter approval of all proposed comprehensive land use plan changes. This means citizens decide whether to allow or deny, say, a new condominium complex. The organization that’s pushing it, Florida Hometown Democracy (no points for guessing that one), was incorporated in 2003 by Palm Beach lawyer Lesley Blackner, and gets press every election cycle. (Wayne Garcia assessed the cast of characters in the Hometown Democracy debate for a two-part report in Creative Loafing in 2007: here's his analysis of those opposed and those in favor of the amendment.)
A petition to get the measure on the November 2008 ballot fell 15,567 signatures short (200,000 of the signatures on the petition were deemed invalid, which resulted in a still-active lawsuit, but that’s a whole other story).
Now it’s on the ballot, and things are getting ugly.
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2010.