The Miami Herald

Posted on Tue, Apr. 22, 2008

BY FRED GRIMM
fgrimm@herald.com

Tree huggers have company in this battle

Once, a gathering like this would have been a sparse collection of quixotic losers. They always lost.

Developers nearly always won these fights, pushing into the citrus groves and vegetable fields, bulldozing over their opposition, turning South Florida into an ill-planned mishmash of suburban sprawl.

The developers won because, well, what were they up against in the old days? A few tree huggers. The occasional community activist. ''Maybe some hippies in their Birkenstocks,'' said Miami-Dade County Commissioner Katy Sorenson.

Sorenson was at Kendall's Indian Hammocks Park at a press conference Monday called to rally opposition to yet another attempt by developers to bust through the Urban Development Boundary.

2008 VERSION

But this time out, the losers can't lose. In the 2008 version of the old game, the opponents now have a formidable array of supporters, none of them wearing Birkenstocks.

The county's own planners said no. The Florida Department of Community Affairs issued a 13-page opinion in February, blasting plans -- approved by the County Commission last year -- to build stores and 7,000 new houses outside the boundary.

Earlier in the month, the South Florida Water Management District had warned that the county's water allotment couldn't accommodate the projects.

And the bunch at Indian Hammocks Park Monday didn't seem so lonely anymore. The leadership of Hold The Line coalition claimed that some 140 different business groups and community organizations have joined up.

Richard Grosso of the Everglades Law Center said that all these years of unfettered growth in South Florida utterly disproved claims that mega-developments lead to lower taxes. ''They never pay for themselves,'' he insisted. Instead, taxpayers subsidized new suburban developments, paying billions for new schools, police and fire protection and roads.

Opposition to suburban sprawl may have once been the purview of environmentalists, but anyone who has examined their tax bills these last few decades has irrefutable proof. Approval of another 7,000 homes would be another giant county government giveaway.

This time out, it's the developers who seem nearly pathetic. They may lose outright Thursday when the proposals come up for another vote by the County Commission. If not, Mayor Carlos Alvarez promised the gathering Monday he would kill it with a veto.

If somehow they can wrangle a veto override (very doubtful), the Florida Department of Community Affairs will head to court. Grosso said the county would almost certainly lose.

7,000 NEW HOMES

And the notion of 7,000 new homes at the far western edge of Miami-Dade County, so many miles from the urban center, was up against something else, even more formidable. On Monday, the price of crude oil reached a record $117.60 a barrel. The question looms: who the hell is going to buy a suburban house at the edge of nowhere with gas soaring beyond $4 a gallon?

The outside-the-boundary proposals are such obvious losers, and so unpopular, the real question is why the developers persist.

Commissioner Sorenson ventured that it might be rote. "They've always won in the past.''

It's as if they're stuck in time. Back in 1988. They still think they are just up against a few lonely tree huggers. And not the whole damn county.