On The Mark: Stating the obvious will not be easy

The state legislature earlier this year passed legislation that may complicate the ability of counties to extract additional public benefits from land developers during the zoning process. Collier County has a unique concurrency program and wants to retain what it has.

Assuming this new legislation is as problematic for Collier as some folks believe it will be some of our local officials have recommended that there be a referendum on the ballot asking each of us for our opinion concerning the construction scheduling of our roads.

The goal is to ask voters what should happen first, roads or development. This is an attempt to counter the new state law by showing our state officials that we want something intuitively obvious, that roads must be in place before development is allowed to begin.

It is kind of like asking voters if people should be required to take an eye exam before giving them a driver's license ... would anyone not say that is the right approach? How would anyone not want roads in place before development begins?

If we had a hint of roads being in place before development this past decade, we would all be a lot happier. Seems like an obvious answer but like everything else there will be a faction that will have an opposing opinion.

You might guess where this could go if it makes it to our ballot. The developers will insist that if roads have to be in place first, they will go broke and all kinds of horrible things will happen to our local economy without their fine business expertise manipulating our system. The local business and economic groups will hem and haw about how bad things could get and how unfair it all is to property owners and how much we need more tourists and industry. If such common sense for road timing enters the picture it might be devastating. In the end, mass media miscommunication will ensue and the voters will be left to sort it out at the ballot box.

Employers will chastise their employees and insist they vote for their jobs, local government will believe that without business tax revenue, collections will be less, and others will claim that voting "yes" will cause the entire local economy to go down in flames ... all because we may want roads to be in place before houses and we were silly enough to ask the voters the obvious and expect a fair debate from those involved.

This will get twisted into so much political correctness that it will never acknowledge what the original intent was and could actually stand to fail due to overwhelming confusion.

Funny thing is, what legislator or elected official anywhere doesn't already know this answer. They are not dumb; they can add two plus two and certainly realize that the voters are tired of unregulated growth.

So then why do we even need this ballot question that could end up backfiring due to damage control exercised by a ton of local business money? Just maybe we are being challenged by the state to do locally what we should have done a long time ago ... put our foot down on more rezoning.

Rezoning to allow more density and development is not something that is a given, it must meet approval through a variety of local processes and during any one of them the answer could be "no." But that is not what we have done.

Developers know that if they need something passed they sugar coat it with a feel-good issue like adding some environmental gimmick, kicking in an inconsequential piece of road right-of-way or sprinkling the density with token affordable housing. Suggest things like that and nothing gets turned down. Then what happens is all of a sudden, for a supposedly positive public benefit, we end up seeing 10,000 more homes going up out in our Eastern swamps or another Wal-Mart or Target being built somewhere at our worst intersections.

What public benefit is there if the roads or other infrastructure are not adequate throughout all of the impacted areas of the county that will be affected by this new zoning? There is no benefit; in fact it becomes a massive detriment as we can see by what we experience right now, every day.

Maybe we should take a lesson from the anti-drug campaign ... "just say no" to more growth until we can handle it and maybe that is so obvious we do not need to waste time or money on a ballot question that will only end up being twisted every way but truthfully.