Guest AuthorFlorida’s enthusiasm for disenfranchising voters is an authoritarian’s theme park.
The state is dallying in an on-again-off-again hate affair with early voting. It regularly conjures up fantastic tales of voter fraud that never happened. It treats ex-felons like ex-citizens forever robbed of their voting rights. And outdoing even bogus democracies like Iraq, it treats voter registration organizers like enemies of state, regulating them more rigorously than guns.
So it’s natural that the Legislature is always on the hunt for new ways to treat the ballot box with less respect than for chamber pots.
You wouldn’t think local governments would be giving the Legislature new ideas on how to behave like a banana republic. But they do. My own county commission in Flagler approved a list of seven legislative priorities this year. One of them is a direct affront to voters, and yet another example of how clumsy and contemptuous of public input local governments can be when it comes to economic development. And how tone-deaf.
State law allows county and city governments to give companies tax breaks to encourage economic development. For those tax breaks to be in place, the law requires that county and city voters approve the allowance once every 10 years. Consider that again: only once every 10 years, voters get to have a say in their local governments’ authority to use their tax dollars to subsidize private companies’ operations. They generally do.
In my own neck of the woods, 63 percent of the largest city’s voters and 60 percent of county voters approved just such a referendum almost nine years ago. The vote is due again in 2014 if the subsidies are to go on.
Now the county wants to take that right away from voters. The county wants the Legislature to replace voters’ say with a supermajority vote of the county commission (and have the state’s county association lobby the banana-republic deal for it).
Voters have no direct say in economic development except through that decennial referendum. But counties are getting so greedy with public dollars, and so presumptuous of their authority, that they thinks it’s time to shove voters aside and let the five county commissioners make decisions for them.
Our county administrator went so far as calling voter involvement in this “a mistake” before using bureaucratic sophistry to make it seem as if voter involvement was actually a costly inconvenience to voters, or that the county somehow is handcuffed when it must ask voters permission to use taxpayer dollars once every 10 years.
The question is: why would any county be so scared of voter involvement? It’s a simple answer, really. Florida’s involvement in economic development — and not just at the state’s Enterprise Florida level, where secrecy is a throwback to Soviet pathologies — has been more reckless than responsible. The convenient narrative is that Florida couldn’t control the Great Recession’s housing bust. Rubbish.
There’s a reason this state (and my county in particular) became the poster child of depression after 2006. My county is still clobbered with Florida’s highest unemployment until now.
City and county governments turned into the drunken sailors of development, abetting rather than tempering a growth craze they knew would crash, since it was unsustainable. But our elected representatives’ foresight was every developer’s hostage. Permits, variances, waivers and amendments to planning regulations flew unimpeded.
Florida overbuilt, and finally crashed deeper than every state in America but Nevada. We’ve been paying the price since.
Government’s direct involvement in economic development, never a good idea, made matters worse, picking and choosing winners that seldom panned out.
You can’t blame voters for being skeptical. If local governments think they’re doing a good job on economic development with taxpayer dollars, they should have no problem winning voters’ endorsement. But silencing voters — and crying all the way to legislative mommas –shouldn’t be an option.
Unless local governments are sending a message: screw voters and let’s go back to bad business as usual.
