Reflections on Sunset

O.K., the decision is in and at least we can say it is over now. According to an attorney friend of mine, there is a possibility of an appeal of the appellate court decision to the State Supreme Court. But the grounds are limited and discretionary. There is probably 30 day time period to appeal. So, let's assume there is no appeal - what can we take from this experience and what does it mean as we go forward as a community.

I'm not going to review all of the facts in this matter. There is plenty on this blog. Just use the search function for various keywords and you can find out the background. But, I will remind people that I happened to be the chair of the Planning and Zoning Board when this went through the approval process. Regardless of what the litigants might say, we had multiple meetings at the advisory board level before we made a 5-2 decision - based upon a serious compromise from the original request - to annex, rezone and change the land use on the 4 acre property. Our recommendation limited any potential future development to 10 units to the acre. The City Commission went on to approve all of the above at a vote of 3-2.

There was public input at all levels of the decision-making process and many that were taken on by the applicant and the applicant's agent. The weakness in the process, in my opinion, was that the neighborhood was not integrated into the process before the application was made. Because of this, immediately at the first meeting at the Planning and Zoning Board, we had an adversarial relationship between some members of the neighborhood to the applicant and to the recommending body (P&Z).

Why? I would say that the number one contributing factor to the animosity and the feeling that the neighborhood was not being listened to (when in fact they were) was the composition of the board. This is something that the board itself really didn't have control over - that was the City Commission's responsibility when appointing members to serve on P&Z. At the time, all the members lived east of Dixie Hwy. This project came from the extreme southwest corner of the city and from an area that had been devoid of any development applications for a very long time.

It also came at a time when the development application volume was high at the time and the residential market was booming. More on this later...

So, the first lesson that we can take from this experience is that the make-up of the Planning and Zoning board is important and it should represent people from all four corners of the city. The same can be said for other advisory boards as well. I firmly believe that even if the recommendation and the vote had been the same, with a more balanced representation on the board the controversy would not be what it eventually came to be. Again, a theme emerges that has been talked about here before - the importance of the integrity of process. It also speaks to the need to nurture involvement in our civic activities and neighborhoods across the five mile by five mile square that is the City of Lake Worth.

The second lesson is the effect of political opportunism and the merging of other broader political movements with local ones. We must admit that we exist in a hostile political environment. Unfortunately, it is usually about a quest for power more so than the quest for what is best for the city. We saw this in operation with this process. Suddenly, the most vocal opponents of the project had a friend in the lawyer that was also behind the Hometown Democracy movement. Their goals aligned in that both were seeking to open the land use plan change and all amendments to the Comprehensive Plan to the vote of the people.

It's ironic now that the same people who talk about the importance of referendums on local issues are seeming to ignore the local issues on the ballot during this election cycle. But that, in my opinion, is the danger of relying on referendums to decide these sorts of issues. If it got the attention it deserved all the time by those that the decision affects - great. Given the overwhelming flow of information in this day and age, the clutter can be difficult to wade through and just to find the time for anything is a challenge. I am afraid if we went down this route that only those with a vested and monetary interest would control the process.

What was also lost during this discussion is that there were other steps of project and site plan review that would have taken place before anything was built. This site plan review process could have involved the neighborhood and found additional ways to mitigate the impacts of the project on the surrounding neighborhood.

However, we didn't get the opportunity. Instead, we have years and opportunities wasted. The market has definitely passed (one of the weaknesses of zoning review is that it has a hard time dealing with market forces in metering decisions). We have a vacant, underutilized property in the middle of a single family neighborhood. Eventually, something different will be done there. But what? De-annexation is a possibility - returning the property to the unincorporated county - which would open a whole host of uses more incompatible than the one that was proposed. We'll see.

And we have a vocal group that is unhappy - period. Will they ever be happy? No one really knows. What we can do is start at the neighborhood level and plan for the best use of this property. As long as it is done with sincerity of purpose - on both sides of the table.