"One year ago, sage reporter George Packer, writing for the New Yorker magazine, captured the essence of the economic collapse in Florida with a seminal work, The Ponzi State: Florida's Foreclosure Disaster."
Another article that tells it like it is is Mark Sharpe's, Leave State's boom-bust in the Dust.
As Mark says, this year promises to be an important one. We couldn't agree more. Florida Hometown Democracy will help curtail all these changes to local Comprehensive Plans that are in the interests of developers and not the citizens who live here. People who live here are under the assumption that they are protected by their Comprehensive Plan but this IS the problem. Governments change land uses at will. It is all a political game. Now, with Florida Hometown Democracy, residents in the community will actually get to vote on land-use changes and have a say about what they want.
Local governments have not listened to the people who elected them. The Sunset property is a prime example of bad politics and the attempt to change the land-use there. Developers and special interests have been waiting patiently until the market turns so that they can continue to rape our great State and stick it in the nose of the people who actually pay the bills, destroying habitats for animals and wildlife, creating sprawl and contributing even more to our State's collapse.
Over-development is the cause of what has put our State economy at risk. The foreclosures are growing and the tax base is dropping. Better control of development will encourage a stronger, more diversified economy based on permanent, productive jobs. More housing costs our cities much more than they make in tax revenue as the cities have to provide the infrastructure and services to support the development.
The CRA and the City decided that a new Publix located on a major highway to the City would be good for business...12 people decided what our city will look like! Forget about the neighborhood that surrounds the site. Forget about the rest of us who pay the taxes. Forget about changing the street directions on 2nd Avenue North. Forget about the traffic that it will generate. We had no say on the decision to change the land-use. We might have voted "yes" but we will never know. The CRA recently gave Publix $500,000 for infrastructure with the justification that it MIGHT bring in a return on investment in ten years...might. More than likely The CRA will never recapture that money for multi-decades, if ever.
Vote YES in November 2010! Let's get our State healthy again and let us decide what we want our communities to look like.
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