And the Winner is: Developers

One of the most frustrating things about being a political columnist is hearing people complain endlessly about the status quo while continuing to support it blindly. This week’s general election all but ensured that the issues most Manatee County residents profess to care most about–traffic, wetland destruction, flooding, red tide and other matters related to overdevelopment–were all but guaranteed to continue to get worse as voters once again sent a full slate of developer-sponsored candidates to important positions throughout the county.

I realize that I may be, for the most part, preaching to the choir. If you’re reading this column, you’re much less likely to be someone who’s not well aware as to why the status quo is so easily perpetuated. Manatee County is deep red, as evidenced by the 20-30 point plus Republican margin of victory in every partisan race on this year’s ballot. There’s little to no Democratic opposition in most races and most of what should be open primaries are closed off by the write-in loophole.

As such, Republicans voting in primaries–who statistically tend to be the most partisan and be motivated largely by broader cultural issues and party talking points–have an oversized influence, making expensive, laser-targeted campaigning on such matters highly effective. As a result, deep-pocketed special interest groups–which in Manatee County is almost always related to new home construction–have a large incentive to invest in candidates who either truly believe that scattershot, unsustainable growth practices driven by the builder’s bottom line are economically worth their many negative side-effects, or don’t really care and are willing to do as they are told for the sake of a cushy job that comes with a litany of perks.

Cynics often ask me why better people don’t run, and I usually tell them it’s because good people so rarely win and the cost of going against the prevailing tide is most notably paid in the form of vicious, vitriolic attack ad campaigns, ruthlessly deployed to assassinate their characters, bringing pain to spouses, children, family, and friends. Couple that with the nearly impossible task of financing a competitive campaign when you’re only promising good governance and it’s not too difficult to see why the more pure of heart have little appetite for the process.

Sure, the relatively small population of citizen activists and good-government watchdogs who follow local government closely will applaud a well-intended, grassroots candidate, and if that person is willing to put the time and effort into engaging the community, they can raise the modest sum of money that should and very much used to be required to campaign effectively. But the financial influence that a government like the Manatee County Commission has grown to have in the recent decades of hyper-growth has meant that those seeking not so much an effective government as one that will bend to their will possess a much larger incentive to hijack the process by purchasing influence.

For those who do not understand how what seems like such a low-level of governance can wield so much fiscal influence, consider this. If someone owns a large piece of property zoned for agricultural use and allows for one house on every five acres of land, the market will set a certain value for it. But if someone else can purchase that parcel and use their influence with the commission to have the rules changed to allow for perhaps three or four houses per acre, and then gets other concessions such as permission to destroy protected wetlands in order to squeeze a few more in, the potential profit in developing that land skyrockets. Sometimes, they don’t even develop the land and just sell it to another builder, keeping the profit their political influence created. In other cases, they convince the county to then buy the land in order to prevent them from developing it–and at the new value that the commission’s decisions have created.

In this sense, the board of county commissioners and the city councils can essentially spin money out of thin air. Hence, the incentive for developers to sprinkle a mere fraction of the millions and millions of dollars such practices yield on ensuring that there is always a majority of friendly faces on the board. But while those six-figure investments are a mere pittance for such enterprises, they always grossly outweigh the previously-reasonable amount of money that is still achievable for issue-based candidates who do not take the dirty needle of special interest largesse.

Of course, there are mechanisms that were envisioned as ways to prevent big money from hijacking the electoral process, such as campaign finance limits, but as these interests gained more and more influence over the elected officials in charge of their implementation and enforcement, the guard rails were lowered until they were no more than an illusory sticker on a flat road. A single benefactor could already skirt the individual donor limits by issuing maximum donations in the name of every family member, business, and LLC they control to stuff the candidate’s campaign coffers, even unlimited before dark-money political action committees made it all but impossible to not only limit the financial influence of such interests but even make the public aware of who such parties were.

After Tuesday's election, the seven-member Manatee County Commission will now have seven members who've taken money from politically-connected developers to get elected. In the cases of four–Kevin Van Ostenbridge, George Kruse, Misty Servia, and Vanessa Baugh–development-related interests were their largest benefactors. As such, the board that will be seated this month represents the most developer-supported board in the county's history, ensuring that it will continue to be little more than a rubber stamp to whatever ideas builders have in terms of the kind of community Manatee County should grow into.

If you want to know why those aforementioned issues never get solved and only seem to get worse, this is your answer. So long as the bottom line is driving all phases of planning and approvals, the myriad of negative consequences created by a lack of both planning and common sense will continue to grow like a cancerous mass. And like a cancerous mass, it will only become more difficult to rectify the longer it is allowed to grow unabated by an intervention. Don’t count on traffic getting anything but worse, same for flooding, runoff, red tide, and every other wart that unchecked growth causes us to incur.

Nothing will change until the population of citizens who pay attention grows to a critical mass; until people stop allowing themselves to be so easily drawn into the culture war issues of partisan politics and realize that you can tell far less about a candidate for local office from the party affiliation next to their name than you can by the names next to the contributions on their campaign finance report. In this election, knowingly or not, Manatee County voted for Build until it Hurts, Quality of Life be Damned. And it will likely take a long time and a lot of hard work if they are ever to undo the harm that will surely be done as a result.