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So Much for Accountability
Editorial,
News-Barometer,
July 8, 2005
An administrative law judge
dealt a severe blow to accountability for elected officials last week,
ruling that an agreement between the state and Monroe County could go
ahead.
The agreement, forged about 18
months ago, did some very good things. It forced the county and state
to commit money to sewer the Keys. It forced the county and state to
commit money to purchase environmentally sensitive lands. It forced the
county and state to commit money to address our serious workforce
housing issue.
But the agreement did one thing
that is probably not in the best interests of the Florida Keys. It
allows Monroe County to receive nearly 40 percent more building permits
yearly than it now does, and gives back permits that had been taken away
because the county couldn’t make any progress on sewers, land
acquisition, or workforce housing.
In an area already overpopulated
for the ability of the environment to sustain itself without help, more
housing units are probably not the best answer.
Sewers are years away.
Depending on who you talk to, workforce housing is short by thousands of
units. Sensitive land is still disappearing, and it will take hundreds
of millions to buy what is already endangered.
And our desire is to establish
more housing units.
We’re not sure where that logic
comes from.
The judge agreed that even
though the county had not lived up to any of its prior commitments, it
should be rewarded for promising to do what it had already promised, and
failed, to do.
[The good thing is that all the
extra permits are supposed to be earmarked strictly for affordable
housing units, be they single-family or rental units.]** The flip
side of that is that the county already had the ability to earmark all
permits for a few years for workforce housing and didn’t have the
political backbone to do it.
**[This is not
correct. Only 30% of the additional permits would be affordable.]
Traffic gets worse. Sensitive
lands disappear. Our near-shore water quality deteriorates. Housing
prices continue to skyrocket. Vacant land prices continue to
skyrocket. And there seems to be no end in sight, even though the
housing market has leveled off in the last six months or so. That, we
are told, is a temporary thing.
Why couldn’t the judge have
given the county back its lost permits, or increased the allocation,
after the sewers were in, after the lands were purchased, and after our
elected leadership put concrete funding and building proposals in place
for workforce housing?
We don’t know, and haven’t found
anyone who can explain it either.
We have rewarded our county
leadership for doing nothing for a decade. And we rewarded them for a
promise to do better.
The track record doesn’t make us
feel real comfortable in that promise.
The environmental groups that
challenged the agreement promise to appeal. They should. It makes no
sense to give rewards for non-performance.
And we are sure that the
name-calling will start again when an appeal is filed. The groups
trying to make the county live up to its obligations have been called
simple obstructionists by members of our county commission.
The next question has to be, how
is asking our leadership to live up to their commitments to our
environment, obstructionist?
Every one of these commissioners
has been in business in the past. We’re fairly certain they didn’t
reward employees who didn’t perform with extra money or incentives.
Why do they expect differential
treatment?
Please explain that one. |
