Pragmatism — political pragmatism — was the watchword for County Councilmember Steve Silverman (D-At Large) during his committee's first meeting on the county's Annual Growth Policy.
“I think we’ve got one bite at the Annual Growth Policy, and this is it,” he said.
When the Planning Board developed the AGP, they did so with an eye toward making it adjustable on a biannual basis. Silverman, however, noted the political realities that the County Council would not be likely to adjust the policy just before an election.
Once the AGP is adopted by the Council this fall, Silverman said, it is not likely to be adjusted for four years. Therefore he and the other members of the Planning, Housing and Economic Development (PHED) Committee, Marilyn Praisner (D-4) and Nancy Floreen (D-At Large), wanted to be sure that they had enough data to make recommendations to the full Council that will stand up for all four years.
For that reason, and because a planned public hearing had been postponed until after the PHED committee meeting due to the hurricane, the committee instead took on a fact-finding slant.
“No decisions are going to be made by the committee today,” Silverman said.
COMMITTEE MEMBERS ASKED many questions and requested data about rates of development and approval, and about the accuracy of assumptions upon which statistical models are based from Council and Planning Board staff.
The answer was frequently, “We’ll get back to you,” not unusual in the first stages of a policy discussion of the annual growth policy's complexity and scope.
One of the first questions raised an issue fundamental to revision of the growth policy.
The policy is supposed to implement the Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance (APFO), which states if the county does not have enough public facilities to serve new development, that development cannot occur.
The proposed revision of the growth policy says, essentially, that facilities may not be adequate, but development is going to occur, anyway.
“I’ve got a legal question,” said Floreen. “How can we comply with the APFO under this construct?”
The County currently allows development — for example affordable housing — to go forward in areas under a building moratorium, so this could be an extension of that larger policy, reasoned Karl Moritz of Park and Planning.
Council staff is also planning to develop its own legal rationale for that problem.
The committee began to question the scope of the annual growth policy. The proposed draft would allocate more housing than is currently being used by the market. It is also forcing many of those housing units to be built in Metro areas, where the market has not put them in large numbers.
“To me, that’s a pretty big policy implication,” Silverman said. “This is not where people are choosing to raise their families.”
Derick Berlage, chair of the Park and Planning Commission, pointed out that the AGP does not change what is in the county's various master plans, it simply decides the rate at which they will be implemented. “It says we want the first buildout to be where it puts the least strain on infrastructure,” he said.
Besides, he said, the public is undergoing a demographic shift of its own accord, creating an increased desire to be closer to transit. “Smart Growth is not something we are forcing. It is something people are choosing.”