Direct Voter Control of Comprehensive Plans Fails

The initiative for Floridians to get to vote on major amendments to Comprehensive Plans is temporarily dead. The initiative required 611,009 valid signatures to get on the ballot. Florida Hometown Democracy organizers were pretty sure that they had handed in 814,000 signatures, but this is Florida, where counting of votes is not as straightforward as elsewhere. The state has counted only 552,703 signatures before the deadline.

The initiative would have meant if developers wanted to build in a protected area they would have to convince not just a few local officials, they would have to convince the voters. Business groups got pretty creative in stopping this initiative. They got a new law passed that makes it easier for signatures that were already counted to be removed, and they got the law to apply retroactively. They told people the law would increase their taxes and utility bills and let Big Developers destroy Florida's scenic beauty. They set up a competing similar-sounding but toothless initiative so that people would think they had already signed.

Three weeks before the January 31 deadline, floridians found out that the petition counting machines had been giving wrong numbers and the actual number of valid signatures would be changed downward as a result. Individual counties are responsible for counting signatures, and many couldn't keep up with the volume before the deadline, particularly because for the first time in history the Florida primaries were moved to January 29. Counties were told by the state that the primaries had priority for staff time, not counting signatures. In the strange Florida system, if the counties don't get around to counting it in time, the signature is not counted. In certain counties with a lot of signatures, the poor dears simply didn't have time to count them all. Coincidentally, those overworked counties were the very ones where the business groups concentrated their efforts, slowing down the processing.

The business groups outspent the environmental groups about 4 to 1. The decoy petition also did not get the required number of signatures. The signatures are still valid for the next election, two years from now. Keep watching.

Tags: Florida Democracy Environment Urban Planning

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