County Commission Bows to Beruff ... Again

If this headline sounds familiar, it should. I experienced the same deja vu when I wrote it on Friday, and it turns out I used the exact same one in February. I’m guessing there’s another previous column somewhere with the same title, sans the É again. I thought about changing it, but I asked myself what would be the point, which is probably the same question all of the citizens who worked hard to oppose the absurd rezone cheerfully approved by county commissioners at Thursday’s meeting were asking by the time it ended.

For more about the specifics of the project, read this preview of the meeting. In a nutshell, Carlos Beruff, a politically-powerful developer who spends millions of dollars influencing political races, wanted a development site he owns rezoned so that instead of getting to build 199 multi-family units in the county’s 25-year floodplain, he’d be allowed to build 315–a density increase of nearly 60 percent. There were numerous reasons for the board not to allow it, which were presented to commissioners in this letter from land-use attorney Dan Lobeck, who represented surrounding landowners. In what is likely to be a surprise to almost no one, however, the board unanimously approved the rezone Beruff had asked for.

This is, unfortunately, an old story in Manatee County. A handful of developers direct hundreds of thousands of dollars every cycle toward making sure there are friendly faces behind the dais when they want approval for something that, were commissioners to apply any modicum of logic and common sense, would not be granted. Then, during a Twilight Zone-like meeting, commissioners and county staff bend over backward, applying all kinds of convoluted pretzel logic to assert that they are, on some level, actually representing the citizens rather than the developer’s who get and keep them in office.

For anyone hip to the game, the amount of energy required to willfully suspend disbelief as to the non-reality they are observing is somewhere past, say a musical, and perhaps just short of a professional wrestling event. In this case, everyone agreed that the 315 units as planned were better than the worst way 199 could be built under current zoning and, despite the flood challenges that already exist, the community would somehow be better off with the developer getting what he wanted. Then, commissioners chastised the opposition with the laundry list of logical fallacies that are always applied to misrepresent what had just been done.

People want to move here, we’re told. We can’t stop them. Maybe someday they’ll decide it’s not worth it, but until that day comes, this developer owns this land and has a right to develop it. We’re trying to keep the taxpayer from having to fund an expensive legal battle we might not win.

There are, of course, numerous problems with such non-logic. For starters, the developer does not have the development rights for the project in this and other such instances. The entire day was owed to an application, asking the county to rezone the land he’d purchased and to give him 58 percent greater density that the property had not been zoned for. The developer’s representatives acknowledged that it was a challenged property and argued that the increased units were needed to make developing it both practical and profitable. That also suggests that like most projects that come before the board asking for such drastic accommodations, it would have remained undeveloped without the approval. So the false dichotomy of give him this or you get that, simply doesn’t hold up.

The other major issue with such concessions is that they disrupt the very market forces that very much do impact how many people build new homes in the county. For six Republicans who so regularly preach both the sanctity of free markets and the peril of government choosing winners and losers, such hypocrisy seems completely lost on them. If there’s a piece of land that could but really shouldn’t be developed–and almost definitely will not, barring zoning changes that will make it more profitable–then supply is constrained by that particular market force. By artificially reducing the cost of development through such decisions, they simply increase supply to more easily meet demand, virtually guaranteeing that growth will be increased beyond what market forces dictate.

This is often defended by the idea that growing the county’s property tax base is the only way to pay for needed services. However, and I realize I sound like a broken record on the following point, virtually every study that’s ever been done on the matter concludes that growth does not pay for itself, requiring around $1.25 in services for every dollar it creates. The imbalance is paid for in numerous ways. In order not to run afoul of more conservative dogma by raising millage rates, citizens are taxed in other less direct manners from an onslaught of new "fees," to a decrease in services when the county fails to proportionately expand funding on services like law enforcement or emergency medical services that are spread thin by all the new development, or other quality of life issues such as exponentially worsening traffic conditions.

Following the collapse of the housing bubble, Beruff and other developers routinely asked for and were given density increases by arguing that market conditions made it unprofitable to build and sell homes as zoned. In either case, a county that is already seeing the quality of life of its citizenry negatively impacted by overdevelopment and a lack of supporting infrastructure and services by zoned development it actually cannot stop, should not seem so eager to change the rules for additional density in places where it can. I’m all for thoughtful density as a part of sustainable growth, but let’s face it, outside the urban core and within a floodplain is not the place where common sense would dictate it should occur. And everyone involves knows that without the rezoning, the land in question and so many other parcels like it would remain vacant, likely for decades to come.

But that’s what makes all of the explanations so hollow. They’re not about logic, common sense, or the rules. It’s decisions like this that perhaps best demonstrate why becoming the kingmakers of the local Republican Party is such a good investment for developers. By granting the rezone, a relatively-useless piece of property that no developer would have wanted to touch has instantly become worth much, much more. Beruff doesn’t even need to develop it. He can easily sell the land for much more than ever would have been possible prior to Thursday’s meeting. In fact, the difference in that one approval may be worth more than the developer spends in an entire election cycle to make sure there are friendly faces on the board.

And at Thursday’s meeting, Beruff had just that. The developer practically installed outgoing commissioners Betsy Benac and Stephen Jonsson, a banker with whom he’d also done a good deal of business (and went on to hire his son as in-house counsel), all by himself. For good measure, he has also poured money into supporting both George Kruse (who won Tuesday’s closed primary that determined who will replace Benac) and Kevin Van Ostenbridge, who will take on NPA sustainable-growth advocate Matt Bower in the November election for Jonsson’s district 3 seat with an $11-1 fundraising advantage.

Commissioner Misty Servia did a lot of work for Beruff before joining the board two years ago and enjoyed the support of he and other developers in her campaign, as well (Servia defended her vote here). Commissioner Vanessa Baugh, a developer-installed candidate whose district 5 contains nearly the entirety of this project, is as reliably pro-development as it gets. Even Priscilla Trace, who managed to defeat the developer’s hand-picked candidate in 2016 but lost her Republican primary this week, couldn’t muster the sand to give a dissenting vote on her way out.

Will this ever change? It’s hard to imagine it will anytime soon, especially given the fact that turnout for Tuesday’s local primaries were a paltry 28 percent. As it stands, there’s a good practical argument for commissioners to fear running afoul of developers like Beruff much more than they fear running afoul of their actual constituents–never a promising sign for a representative democracy augmented by unlimited dark money in each and every election. Wake up, Manatee County. It does no good to complain about the way things have gotten. We must fight to preserve what’s left before it’s too late.