A mayor finds Florida lesson in Katrina

The Miami Herald, 9/14/05

BY ANA MENENDEZ, amenendez@herald.com

Long before he became mayor of Surfside, Tim Will did a stint as a land-use planner in New Orleans.

For 11 months in the early 1980s, he studied flood plans, inspected levees and scrutinized development patterns.

Years later, his head filled with stats and probabilities, Will gathered his family and fled New Orleans.

''Not only did I leave New Orleans, but I got out of urban planning altogether,'' said Will, whose wife is from the city. ``It was obvious to any urban planner what was going to happen there. I couldn't see why we would build our futures and the children's future in a place that was going to be a disaster.''

UNSUSTAINABLE GROWTH

Will didn't exactly escape to the land of environmental enlightenment. Once in Miami-Dade, he tried to protect himself by buying a house facing away from the prevailing winds. Will's development philosophy seems similarly oriented, though how much protection it will afford him remains to be seen.

Today he's mayor of a city that, despite increasing pressure, hasn't budged from decades-old zoning codes that keep maximum building heights at 12 stories.

That's another thing he learned in New Orleans: Don't build a building higher than you can evacuate.

Early into his work with St. Bernard Parish, Will says he was astonished to discover that the levees were actually much lower than the estimates everyone was working with. And yet local politicians kept approving new development.

'I said, `You cannot sustain growth like this,' '' Will said. ``Well, I was fired from that job.''

Later, Will says the word went out: ''Tim Will is too honest to work in St. Bernard Parish.'' Today, St. Bernard Parish has been all but obliterated, which proves Will's point as effectively as it makes it impossible to round out his accounting.

For Will, New Orleans was a cautionary symbol of disaster long before Katrina struck.

'In Miami, just like in New Orleans, you have a system where the rules are stacked in the developers' favor,'' he said.

``They want to spend your tax money building more and more subdivisions in the only place that water can drain to.''

The largely undeveloped land that lies to our immediate west is as crucial to the county's flood control plan as it is to preserving the Everglades.

But as of July, developers had filed 11 different applications asking the county to allow higher density development at the county's western fringe. More development out west would replace natural drainage area with concrete while additional houses would put even more pressure on what is already a strained system.

DISPOSABLE HOUSING

To Will and others, the massive development going up on the county's eastern border is almost as troubling.

Not only will high-rises be much more difficult to evacuate, but it's unclear, Will says, how well they will hold up to a crippling storm surge.

''When you really look at it,'' he says, ``housing on the beach should be disposable; it should be movable.''

As Will sees it, uncontrollable growth augurs badly not just for the city, but for the nation as a whole.

''How did the great empires collapse?'' Will asks rhetorically. ``Environmental degradation followed by natural disaster.''

He points to Jared Diamond's book Collapse, which outlines 12 environmental problems that bring on doom, including destruction of natural habitats, depletion of natural resources and overpopulation.

In every way except actual greatness, Miami-Dade seems well on its way to becoming an empire on the windward edge of oblivion.

If and when Miami's day comes, you can be sure that its surviving planners will disperse to the four corners with similar tales of woe and warning that no one will bother to heed.

Herald researcher Monika Leal contributed to this report.