Florida Governor Charlie Crist signed the Community Renewal Act on June 1st amid lots of hoopla from supporters and opponents.
Will it jumpstart the Florida economy as proponents claim?
Or will it plunge the entire state of Florida into traffic gridlock as opponents claim?
Well, I am just a civil engineer - not an attorney, but what I have gathered from reading the bill is it probably won’t do either.
First off, there are lots of different things in this bill - some good and some bad. The bill includes establishment of dense urban areas, removal of traffic concurrency requirements, removal of D.R.I. requirements, modification of school concurrency requirements, implementation of a mobility fee on development, and significant changes to affordable housing incentives just to name a few.
To keep this post brief, I will only address a couple of the items in the bill and actually break these up into more than one post.
The governor and other supporters of the bill claim that in dense urban areas many streets are simply at capacity. There is no traffic concurrency available and so developers have the choice of either finding property somewhere else or paying to improve the streets to increase capacity so their development can occur without negatively impacting the level of service expected in the community.
Most developers when faced with the extremely high additional costs of improving an entire road look elsewhere and this has lead to urban sprawl in rural areas and stagnant growths in urban areas.
Well, I have worked with a great many developers and I tend to agree with this argument. The way the system was designed prior to the bill made it much cheaper to develop land in locations where concurrency was ample and cost prohibitive in locations where it isn’t.
The system failed to equally split the costs of infrastructure between users. You paid much less if you were early to the party and much much more if you came later.
As a developer, if you happen to come along just as the capacity of the road was reached, you had to pay to improve the road in order to develop your property. You paid the majority of costs for improvements to the road that would benefit all the users not just you.
State Bill 360 recognizes this problem and tries to rectify it by stating that in dense urban areas, development can not be denied due to municipalities failure to provide traffic concurrency.
I think this is a good thing.
Granted the municipalities do not have an easy job predicting growth and paying for the infrastructure to meet that growth as it is needed. But let’s not forget that is what they are required to do by law. It is one of the primary reasons for creating comprehensive plans - so infrastructure needs can be planned for and met as they evolve.
Opponents of this portion of the bill argue that eliminating traffic concurrency requirements will cause unchecked growth in undeveloped areas.
I disagree. Zoning restrictions, future land use and the comprehensive plan are the primary controls on what can and can not be developed - not traffic concurrency. The elimination of the traffic concurrency check does nothing to inhibit the control of growth in an area.
(In the second part of this post, I discuss the changes to D.R.I. regulations.)
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