Smart Growth Hard To Plan

Published: May 27, 2007

It was pretty easy for the people at my table to poke a gazillion Legos into a pegboard that looked like the seven-county Tampa Bay region. We just jumped in and spread our vision for handling the 1.2 million people headed our way over the next 50 years.

Looking back, it's clear we didn't stop to think. We didn't share a vision. We didn't have a plan.

In truth, we were a perfect metaphor for the region.

We were a table of 10 in a Tampa Convention Center ballroom filled with 300 community leaders brought together by the Tampa Bay Partnership, a business group engaging the region in a much-needed conversation about our shared future.

As our table built a vision for growth, we talked about our values: preserving the Green Swamp and other wetlands, creating corridors for mass transit, concentrating residential densities along transit routes, no more beachfront development and creating ways to work and play closer to where you live.

Halfway through the exercise, someone remembered the ribbon for roads and rail. A moment later, someone tried to push-pin a major highway through Hillsborough's rural lands, which the county's comprehensive plan says should remain rural. There's a good reason for this. It takes a ton of money to run urban services to hither and yon.

So hold on to that ribbon of road, Nellie.

What about that other key value we discussed: protecting our neighborhoods and our way of life?

And therein lies the rub. In charting a vision for the region's growth, different stakeholders come to the table wearing different sets of lenses.

Yet at table after table, the exercise made clear that growth will dramatically change the face of our region. Far better that we draw a map we like. Otherwise, growth will continue as it has, sprawling and sporadic, an endless sea of rooftops.

Never has the time been better to engage citizens in a discussion about how the region should grow, the attributes we want to preserve and the trade-offs we might accept.

Next year a state constitutional amendment called "Hometown Democracy" will go to voters requiring citizens to approve any change to a community's "comp plan." It's a misguided proposal that could grind growth to a halt and destroy jobs.

Also, the planning commission is currently revising Hillsborough's comp plan and already a classic tension has emerged: Should new neighborhoods be required to have bike paths, smart landscaping and other "livable city" amenities or should homebuilders be allowed to design developments without layers of regulation and added costs?

Which side of the values teeter-totter would you choose - for your neighborhood? Yet not every neighborhood group makes the right call.

The wide suburban streets they like may well serve the turning diameters of fire trucks, but they're deadly for children, terrible for the environment and expensive to build.

For the region to grow smartly, neighborhood groups will have to give ground, but absent informed leaders guiding us through the trade-offs, that's highly unlikely.

Consider that the day before the event, St. Petersburg rejected plans for a 33-story building on the edge of downtown because it would have cast a shadow over the historic Old Northeast neighborhood. Virginia Park in Tampa wants to ban town homes. And a Tampa city councilwoman has raised concerns about the height of downtown buildings.

But in brainstorming, there's no harm, no foul.

At least the discussion has begun.

Rosemary Goudreau is the editorial page editor of The Tampa Tribune.