COMMENTARY : A Lesson Worth Heeding in San Diego : Growth: A Florida law requiring that public facilities be guaranteed before new developments can go forward appears to be working. But money is still the main hurdle.

In Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., Broward County Planning Director Donald Kowell spreads out a map on his conference table. It shows in yellow the areas of Broward County where traffic volume from already approved new development will be so great that it will overload the capacity of the road network. Fully 75% of the county’s developable land is so shaded.

Half a dozen years ago, that might have done little to dissuade local officials from issuing still more building permits. But the rules are different now. In 1985, the Florida Legislature passed the Comprehensive Planning Act, better known as growth management. Local officials now must obey growth management’s “concurrency” provision.

Simply stated, concurrency allows no additional development unless adequate public facilities are, or soon will be, in place to support that development. Put another way, if Broward County or any other Florida community wants to grow, it must pay--up front--the costs of that growth. If the government is unwilling to fund the improvements, developers may have to.

The San Diego City Council will soon consider a very similar provision requiring that roads be able to handle more traffic before any new residential, retail or commercial developments are approved. It might be instructive for your city to consider the impact of Florida’s 1985 law on our state.

Growth management is reshaping Florida’s future. It is breaking the state’s longstanding habit of infrastructure neglect.

But the final outcome of this experiment depends on one key ingredient: money. With adequate funding, growth management can be a tool to guide Florida’s future development to areas where it can be best accommodated. Without more infrastructure investment, however, growth management will serve only as a barrier to growth.

John DeGrove, the former secretary of Florida’s Department of Community Affairs and the man considered by many to be the father of growth management, saw that from the start. As Florida lawmakers debated the keystone concurrency provision in 1985, DeGrove told them, “If you’re not going to fund it, don’t do this.”

Five years into the experiment, Florida has yet to make anything more than a down payment.

Growth management is wildly popular in Florida. Like California, the state has been growing at a staggering rate. Since 1970, the population has nearly doubled, to 12.8 million people. All the while, Floridians, like Californians, have grown increasingly frustrated by the ills of this rampant growth: ever-lengthening traffic jams, increasing air pollution, declining availability of potable water.

Florida’s state and local governments quite simply were failing to put in place the infrastructure needed to support this growing population. In 1987, a state committee reported that the shortfall in essential public facilities was likely to reach $53 billion by the year 2000 unless something was done. The largest share by far is roads. The rest is parks, water-treatment plants, fire stations and other public facilities.

Growth management’s architects envisioned the concurrency provision as a way to make sure Florida finally faced up to its infrastructure needs. As Orlando Planning Director Richard Bernhardt says, “It is our last chance to act responsibly.”

So far, growth management and concurrency have worked relatively well. To date, roughly half of the 459 local governments covered by growth management have submitted their required comprehensive plans and had them approved by the state. Most of those local governments now are operating under the concurrency requirement. (The law won’t be fully implemented statewide until 1992.)

In these communities, new development is being directed to those areas where roads, parks and other public facilities are in place to support it. In roughly a quarter of Florida’s 65 counties, voters have approved 1-cent local-option sales taxes to help pay for additional infrastructure. The Legislature this year also approved a 3-cent-per-gallon increase in the state gasoline tax to help pay for transportation improvements.

So far, building moratoriums--an outcome feared early on by developers--remain rare.

But this evidence presents an incomplete picture of the long-term outlook. It brings to mind the old joke, in which a man, falling off a skyscraper, announces at each floor, “Still doing fine.” The real trouble lies ahead.

The fact is that the increased revenues for infrastructure investment amount to only a fraction of the total need. The state’s gas tax increase, for instance, will generate only $3 billion in additional revenue for transportation projects. The projected need is $25 billion.

The scarcity of moratoriums may also be only a temporary phenomenon. In most of the communities where concurrency is in effect, builders rushed development applications through the approval process before the law was implemented.

Broward County is one of the places where that occurred. New development continues there because there is a vast inventory of projects approved before the concurrency deadline. This inventory will last for three or four more years.

But, as was noted earlier, roads will soon be operating over capacity in 75% of the county’s developable area. Meanwhile, county voters last year rejected an optional 1-cent sales tax that was intended, in part, to fund additional roadwork. The rejected tax leaves the county $217 million short of meeting all of its road needs over the next two decades.

With concurrency now the law in Broward, at least temporary moratoriums appear to be inevitable.

Back when DeGrove was fighting for passage of the growth management law, he coined a phrase to promote the cause. He said then, “Growth doesn’t pay for itself.”

It is a statement he now regrets. Today, he argues that properly managed growth can ultimately pay for itself.

But his former statement since has been taken up by opponents of growth to combat proposed tax increases in such places as Broward and Hillsborough (Tampa) counties. They have learned that control of the purse strings, coupled with concurrency, gives them the means to stop new development in Florida.

That is not at all what DeGrove intended when he helped draft the growth management law. He wanted to direct, not halt growth.

Nevertheless, unless Florida shows a new willingness to invest more money in infrastructure, the growth management law will indeed become a barrier to growth.