While Tallahassee ignores growth, ULI gets citizens organized

TAMPA — If Tallahassee won’t take on the growth issue, Florida’s several district councils of the Urban Land Institute (ULI), are ready to roll out an agenda of regional action.

Nearly every problem facing Florida’s future falls into a category that compels a regional strategy. But just about everything except water management remains organized by cities or counties. Florida leads the nation in the number of separate “MPO” organizations to manage federal and state transportation funds.

With Florida’s population growth on a collision course with its carrying-capacity, ULI sees the place for the laboratory it is: a state that has to find a better formula for managing growth if it’s not to see its quality of life deteriorate. So far, state government’s contributions are an aging legacy of growth management laws never fully funded or well implemented. And now, as lawmakers consume themselves with controversies over everything from small class-size mandates to election-year tax cuts, managing growth’s become a “capital” offense.

So into this vacuum steps ULI, which cut its organizational teeth on this issue with recent efforts in California and South Carolina. ULI, supported by a MacArthur Foundation grant, organized the Florida Committee for Regional Cooperation. Thirty-seven citizens, a mixture of elected and former elected officials, business and professional leaders, and leading environmental voices, have taken up the challenge to identify and eliminate the barriers to serious cooperation among Florida’s local governments.

The committee, co-chaired by the St. Joe Company’s CEO, Peter Rummel, and Nathaniel Reed, Florida’s legendary environmentalist (assistant secretary of the Interior in the Nixon-Ford years), met for the second time March 2.

Katy Sorenson, a Miami-Dade county commissioner, knows all too well how tough this proposition is. She recalled going to Curitiba, Brazil, seeing how land use and transportation planning converged in a development plan that makes a large urban area work intelligently. But, she admitted, “while done by planners, it was military-like in its implementation.” Witness how many years it’s taken for southeast Florida just to decide that transportation was a regional issue.

But to someone in the private sector, like Thaddeus Cohen, a Del Ray Beach architect, it looks more like a design problem. Naming one “land use” and the other “transportation”, Cohen shoved two water glasses together, so close they touched. “Why can’t we just do this,” he asked?

You could say, looking at the list, that this is yet another assembly of the usual suspects. But the attitude they showed in this meeting makes them look more like the consummate conspirators.

The project’s based in Orlando, with the same folks who produced the inventive myregion.org website. The contact person is Shelley Lauten of ULI’s Florida Initiative (407-835-2523).