I have charts, memos, e-mails, massive quantities of them. Some are quite hilarious and no, you have not been getting the truth, not from the governments and not from media outlets.

There is no way to condense this all into a story that will make any sense to the casual reader. There are too many, way too many, plots, sub-plots and twists in this story.

Bad data = bad story
Alright, here's a couple of twists, and you'll get the idea of how easy it is to get lost in the personalities and the details.

Brian Tuttle is the developer of Isles of Athena in North Port. He originally wanted to build some 12,000+ homes, he ended up settling for 4,000+. He's been singled out as the biggest, baddest renegade rogue developer in the county.

On September 14 (the same day I spoke in the above clip), he spoke to the county commission. It was the first time he had ever laid eyes on any of the commission members or on County Manager Jim Ley. Reason? According to Tuttle, over the course of the past year or two, he has invited county officials and staff to meeting after meeting, has pre-scheduled meetings with them to try to go over details of his planned development. County staff and officials either failed to show up to any of the meetings after agreeing to come or outright refused to accept an invitation.
 

I asked Tuttle point blank -- "You mean never, ever did any county staffer or official ever show up to a scheduled meeting, you never met any of them until today?"

Tuttle responded, "That's absolutely correct."

I was dumbfounded. I was quite prepared to paint Tuttle out as yet another greedy developer out to bypass the system in his quest for more riches at the expense of every other existing taxpayer, but ya know, that's kind of hard to do when the reality is that he's been trying to get into the system and the system keeps deliberately bypassing him. Here's a perfectly good potential villain that I can't villainize.

You want a seat at the table? You ever heard of maybe showing up?
When I keep hearing the phrase "seat at the table," as in the county wanting one when development and growth issues are being worked out, I'm having a hard time figuring out what is actually keeping them from sitting down at the table. Here's the table, there's the chair, what is your major malfunction?

It gets better. The county commission keeps complaining that they are kept out of the municipal growth loops, yet County Commissioner David Mills sent an e-mail to Venice Mayor Fred Hammett about four months back that stated that Mills wanted out of the loop. Mills wrote that he didn't want to see any more pre-annexation agreements and proposed comprehensive plan changes and told Hammett to stop e-mailing them to him.

Logic fails me at moments like this. I just want to scream and froth at the camera like Lewis Black.

Then there's the city claiming to have annexed only 10 acres so far this year. That was wrong. City Manager Marty Black wrote that in a column for the Gondolier. The Gondo repeated the error in a subsequent editorial that supported the city's stance against county oversight of rezonings. Local developer attorney Jeff Boone put out a self-serving revisionist 4-page history of annexations and development that included that same false number of 10 acres. Boone went on to write that North Port has annexed zero acres in the last three years. Again, wrong. The correct number would have been 300+ acres in the last three years or zero acres in the last two and a half years. Then the county tossed out a counter number of 800+ acres annexed by Venice last year when that number included some 400 acres that were tossed back to the county for wetland set aside purposes.

When it came to numbers, I walked away shaking my head -- nobody was giving out accurate data and everyone was running around pointing at everyone else's numbers as fictitious. Whether this collective campaign of misinformation was due to incompetence or deception, I could never tell (but you can guess which direction that I was leaning towards cuz I'm a cynical SOB).

What this ends up causing is the inability to write or tell an accurate story -- I have no idea what data, if any, to trust. As I stated in a frustrated manner in the video clip, "Not a clue!"

Hell, the county commission ended up pulling the ballot referendum idea off of the table early on in the September 14 meeting mainly due to the fact that their own staffers were spouting supportive numerical misinformation. Marty Black pointed out the errors when he gave his opening response, which in turn caused a lot of mumbling and furtive embarrassed glances on the commission dais.

This ends up causing readers and taxpayers who are following this story in various news reports to end up confused and, worse, misinformed. There's a heck of a lot of interest in this story, we're talking about growth that is choking the life out of all of us. One of the problems is that nobody is speaking the same language and that kind of confusion is great only if you are working the angles to try to get another 2,000 homes in under the radar.

So to summarize
The county wants "a seat at the table." This, because the county states that cities are causing the county to play catch-up without the county having a say in where development will take place. OK, on its face, a legitimate sounding argument, until you take into account that the county is equally guilty in turning its back on the situation.

By the same token, the two cities involved here, Venice and North Port, are hardly innocents. Anything but, in fact. County Commissioner Jon Thaxton does raise a valid point when he talks about North Port being more of a county unto itself than a city -- North Port was one square mile in 1959, now it has more incorporated land than the City of Orlando, most of it still open rural land. That's not what a city is supposed to be. A city is supposed to be an integrated urbanized area. A county is supposed to manage rural land.

As for Venice, the city has doubled in size over the last six years. Annexations and rezonings are becoming so routine that our local lawmakers are sleeping through them -- this web site recently reported that Mayor Hammett snoozed through a Boone rezoning presentation then voted in favor of it.

This, in turn, makes the county seem like they actually are doing the right thing, albeit for all the wrong reasons.

The county wanted a ballot referendum that would give it the final say on what lands can be rezoned and how they will be rezoned after being annexed by a city (that's the central part of the proposed referendum, anyway). The cities balked and screamed bloody murder. The county agreed to hold off, pending the negotiation of a grand and final Joint Planning Agreement.

The cities are hoping this JPA that is to be negotiated will be less onerous than the wording in the referendum. The county will be pulling for a JPA that is exactly as constricting as the proposed referendum. It's a setup for violent gunplay.

In the meantime, guns to their heads, North Port and Venice have agreed not to apply for any new comprehensive plan changes or to approve any new annexations that weren't already in the pipelines.

There will be ugliness. That is a given, but other than who ends up getting the utilities billing rights to any given new development, is there really a point to any of the rest of this war?

There are a number of unanswered questions here, but one that immediately springs to mind is: is the county even capable of doing a better job at managing growth than the cities have done? While the proposed referendum would cause a centralized agency at the county level to coordinate all future growth and infrastructure needs, given the fact that the county appears to have blundered into this debate somewhat cluelessly, why should we distrust them any less than we distrust the cities? Other than the fact that the county's push has this touchy, feely, warm, fuzzy feel to it that this push will somehow stop rampant and unchecked growth, the county has yet to make a compelling case that they are even capable of taking on the task.

Other than Jon Thaxton, who I believe is being genuinely altruistic, I'm just not seeing any good guys here. There is bad behavior on all sides and for good reason: there's millions, even billions, of potential dollars at stake on the one side of the scales and our future ecological and environmental viability as a sustainable place to live on the other. As for Thaxton, he is filled with incredibly noble motives, but I'm just not yet convinced that he can reach all that he wants to grasp. Maybe with new commish Joe Barbetta and a new county manager that is more environmentally sensitive on board, then maybe, maybe Thaxton's vision has a chance.

It's all fairly irrelevant when you take into account the one factor that nobody, I mean nobody, is talking about
I have come to one conclusion: this is all a shell game. The county is claiming poverty over wanton development by the cities, yet the county allows development that causes more debt on the county's part (which gets passed on to us in the form of ad valorem taxes).

Why?

Because the county doesn't assess impact fees that are anywhere near realistic (see my video clip at the top of this page for a fuller explanation).

Thus, whether the city or the county allows for more of those godawful bone-ugly gated communities, the county will still rack up more and more unnecessary debt, debt that would be avoidable if they just simply jacked up their impact fees. Which they won't do. Because developers don't want them. Which means you and I pay the freight in increased city and county taxes.

And that, my friends, is totally unacceptable, yet accept it we must.

So, while anti-growth advocates have been running around like headless chickens supporting this amendment (which I have no doubt will end up on the ballot in March), while the county bangs its weighty gavel, while developers and their hired guns argue about how unfair it is to impose a dictum that gives the county total control over zoning decisions (because it is easier to deal with the cities than it is to deal with the county, something that even Jeff Boone readily admitted), you and I are still getting screwed and we will continue to get screwed no matter the outcome in this particular meaningless war.

Now you know why your taxes have gone through the roof over the past few years: you are paying not only your own freight, but that of every new resident that has moved into a beautiful new arched and cathedral-ceilinged monstrosity. You may not have noticed: there's an awful lot of them that have sprouted up over the past four or five years. More are on the way. Don't you just love pastel tans and barrel tile roofs?

After I gave my presentation, County Commissioner Nora Patterson approached me and stated that developmental impact fees will never cover the true cost of development. Before I could say anything in response, she walked away.

That's it. That's really the whole story in a nutshell.

In one of the nutshells, anyway.

There's two other nutshells on the table. Can you pick the correct nutshell?