Can Local Governments Be Held Accountable to Their Own Policies?

Florida wetlands. (Source: Conservancy of Southwest Florida.)

How do you hold a local government accountable to its own plans and policies?

Of course, elections are meant to serve that purpose—if you don't like what your leaders do, vote them out (or run for office!). But issues of land use and development are tricky, for the mechanisms and decision points that affect how a city grows over time are often highly technical and opaque, even to seasoned political advocates. 

In theory, this is why most communities have some sort of Comprehensive Plan—so that a broader sense of public priorities can be established and debated in relatively plain language, resulting in a document that is used to guide more technical decisions like when and where to build a new water treatment facility or road. 

But in practice, it's very common for elected officials to make decisions that are blatantly at odds with their own comprehensive plans—and sometimes even with the specific land-use codes that are supposed to have the force of law. When this happens, states may allow residents to turn to the courts.

A Court Fight Over Reckless Development in Florida

A legal battle unfolding in Florida has potentially major ramifications for the ability of citizens to rein in insolvent and destructive forms of development in that state. The question at issue: Can residents sue their city or county when it violates its own comprehensive plan or land-use regulations? And if so, what kinds of claims are they allowed to make?

At issue is whether development should be allowed to proceed on Rivergrass, one of three giant, interconnected, master-planned communities proposed in Collier County, Florida. The three "villages" are slated to hold over 8,000 homes at the time of their completion by developer Collier Enterprises (yes, that Collier—the private company is run by descendants of the county's namesake). They would be very far from existing centers of development, extremely spread out and car-dependent, and located on the edge of some of the North American continent's most important wetlands and within the habitat of the endangered Florida panther.

The endangered Florida panther. (Source: Conservancy of Southwest Florida.)

I wrote an extended series in May 2021 explaining how these massive developments would violate many aspects of the county's own codes and long-range plans. Collier County requires "fiscal neutrality": New development is supposed to pay its own way and not create a net fiscal burden on existing taxpayers. The three new villages fail that test by any reasonable measure. Collier County also has requirements stipulating "compact" growth, "walkability," and mixed-use "town centers" in new master-planned communities. The plans for Rivergrass and the other two villages make a mockery of those requirements, stretching the plain-English meaning of those words to Orwellian lengths.

Nonetheless, as of my writing, the first of the three villages, Rivergrass, had already been approved by the County Commission in spite of the proposal's clear defects, and I predicted that the other two communities would also be approved. In early June, they were. All along, county staff and officials showed every sign of being willing to violate the clear language and intent of their own rules in order to approve the projects.

For this reason, the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, an environmental conservation organization, sued Collier County in 2020 to overturn the approval of Rivergrass. The Conservancy lost its initial case on an unusual technicality: The judge ruled that in Florida, citizen-led challenges to development orders can only deal narrowly with the use or density of planned development. Thus, adherence to fiscal neutrality or urban design requirements, although also present in the county's code, was off limits, and evidence related to them could not be presented.

The Conservancy has appealed this ruling to Florida's Second District Court of Appeal. Strong Towns is one of thirteen civic and environmental organizations to submit an amicus brief in support of the Conservancy's challenge to Rivergrass. (This does not make us a party to the lawsuit—an amicus brief is a statement of support by a third-party expert intended to help the court evaluate the significance or context of the issues at stake.)

April Olson, Senior Environmental Planning Specialist for the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, stated, “The Conservancy is optimistic, and we strongly believe that we will win the Rivergrass appeal because Florida’s Community Planning Act, which relies on citizens to enforce comprehensive plans, clearly states that the entire comprehensive plan matters, not just bits and pieces of the plan.”

The Conservancy works to protect the water, land, wildlife, and future of southwest Florida. (Source: Conservancy of Southwest Florida.)

Why This Matters Outside Collier County

The prevailing model of growth in the United States for the past several decades is fundamentally insolvent. That is, it does not generate enough revenue to cover the obligations it creates—to build and maintain new infrastructure, and to provide public services to ever more far-flung suburbs.

Every community ought to be concerned with this. And indeed, many are. But when the rubber hits the road, there's a huge amount of daylight between a typical local government's willingness to pay lip service to solvency, and the tough decisions actually required to ensure new growth does not become a financial burden on taxpayers. It is essential that citizens be able to hold their elected officials' feet to the fire when they are legally bound to require new development be fiscally neutral, but nevertheless fail to do so.

There's a bigger lesson here, one that was at the core of the May 2021 series I wrote about these developments in Collier County: One of the biggest myths about the aggressive suburban expansion characteristic of America's Growth Ponzi Scheme is that it represents a lack of planning, poor planning, or unmanaged growth. The truth is very different. Visit most of the places where the building of master-planned subdivisions on farmland is in overdrive, and you'll find an abundance of planning. Thousands of pages of documents, representing years of process. An alphabet soup of acronyms.

The problem isn't that nobody is managing the process; the problem is rather that all the "planning" we do serves to enable insolvent patterns of growth, instead of putting a meaningful check on them.

The courts may not be the ideal way to provide that check, but when all else fails, they should be one way. For this reason, we support the Conservancy of Southwest Florida in their effort to stop Collier County from green-lighting a massive development scheme that will destroy irreparable habitat and burden taxpayers for decades to come.

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