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Islamorada Free
Press
January 12, 2005
Bureaucracies are rarely looked upon as bastions of creativity. But
anyone who is following Florida's Department of Community Affairs in its
current attempt to strong-arm local governments into making meaningless
changes to their comprehensive land-use plans has to be impressed by the
imagination that DCA officials are displaying.
In a strain of logic so convoluted that it boggles the mind, DCA
official Rebecca Jetton last week told the Islamorada Village Council
that when the state does analysis to predict how long a mandatory
hurricane evacuation for Keys residents would take, it calculates that
45 percent of Keys tourists will have ignored early evacuation calls and
remained on the islands, thus clogging the Overseas Highway and making
the residents' evacuation process take more than 24 hours.
But, Jetton said, if the village takes the hurricane evacuation
procedure that it and the rest of the county already uses, and writes
that procedure into its land-use plan, then the state will be able to
presume that 100 percent of tourists will heed evacuation calls and exit
the islands prior to a full-scale resident evacuation.
That change, she went on to say, would reduce the overall resident
evacuation time to below 24 hours, the magic number upon which the DCA
has hinged the granting of all Monroe County building permit
allocations.
If Islamorada doesn't make the change, Jetton told the Village Council,
it risks facing a DCA-imposed building moratorium.
Something isn't right here.
To accept this remarkable strain of DCA logic, one would have to take at
face value the prospect that a tourist from say North Dakota, faced with
the possible approach of a life- threatening hurricane, will base a
decision on whether to evacuate not on the calls of emergency managers,
the weather forecast, or his or her own idiosyncrasies relating to risk
aversion and common sense.
No, this tourist, the DCA argument suggests, will think, "The village's
comprehensive plan says I've got to evacuate, so evacuate I will."
The argument is too absurd to believe the DCA believes it. But perhaps
there is something else at play here.
While speaking to the council, Jetton made mention of a "prominent
Keys citizen" who recently met with Gov. Jeb Bush to advocate affordable
housing. That citizen is likely Key West developer Ed Swift, who along
with state Rep. Ken Sorensen R-Key Largo, met with Bush in November.
In addition, at a recent meeting of the Monroe County Evacuation Working
Group, DCA official Jim Quinn reportedly said that that if Keys
governments codify the evacuation process as the state is suggesting,
then the DCA will significantly increase building permit allocations
throughout the islands.
Perhaps the DCA is feeling heat from the governor's office to make more
Keys building permits available, but because the state ties building
permit allocations to the 24-hour hurricane evacuation time figure, it
must first create some form of justification for claiming that the
evacuation time has gone down. Enter the magic comprehensive plan theory
-- sending thousands of otherwise foolhardy tourists to the mainland at
the behest of emergency managers, at least on paper.
The DCA's concerns about affordable housing are certainly justifiable.
What is not justifiable is co-opting an issue as critical as hurricane
evacuation and manipulating it for other policy objectives. Last fall's
partial evacuations for hurricanes Charley and Frances, as well as the
mandatory resident evacuation for Ivan, exposed holes in the present
Monroe County evacuation procedure. Of greatest concern were problems
surrounding the transport and out-of-county care options for the
elderly and the infirm. Problems of a regional scale also cropped up as
emergency managers from all of South Florida -- indeed all the state --
attempted to protect their own on the one hand and coordinate with their
neighbors on the other.
What the Keys need from the DCA is real help on real issues.
Facilitating interjurisdictional cooperation on hurricane matters would
be a progressive step in which state assistance would be invaluable.
Taking action to head-off potential evacuation problems caused by
unchecked development in Southwest-Miami Dade County is also essential.
Bogus arguments used to enact useless bureaucratic changes have never
saved a life. |
