Like mold in a Petri dish: Today, the Miami-Dade County Commission will hear a proposal posed by local developers to move the Urban Development Boundary westward to allow for the building of more McMansions on South Florida’s fragile wetlands. More alarming, they will also hear a second proposal that would make future extensions of the UDB easier to pass.
The significance of this vote is attested to by the number of lobbyists the developers have registered — more than 40. Under such concentrated political pressure it’s unlikely that the Miami-Dade Commission — never much revered for its spinefulness — will not cave in.
The rationale for filling in more wetlands with crappy houses is that the county is running out of space for affordable housing, and that soon the streets will be filled with nomadic families who have no place to live. This, despite the fact that a recent study found that there is plenty of room within the county to build until 2018 without extending the UDB.
If the commission does cave, the proposal goes to Tallahassee, to the Department of Community Affairs for review. That, effectively, allows the commissioners to face their constituencies by passing the buck.
But the bad thing is that the biggest guy on the DCA is, you guessed it, the President’s little bro. It could come down to Jebby saying whether or not we pave more of the Everglades. While he has positioned himself as a champion of the environment, Jeb’s actual record is rather spotty. Frankly, given his recent flip-flop on offshore oil drilling, his longtime alliance with developers and his generally weaseliness, I don’t trust our governor to make the morally right call.
So, we down here in Hurricane Central can probably look forward to higher taxes, fewer services, less water, more crowded schools and more traffic gridlock just so a few developers and their lobbyist lapdogs can make googobs more money. It’s the price of living in paradise, I guess, but like mold in a Petri dish, we are reaching a point where we’re on the verge of killing ourselves with our own toxic sludge.
