Dupli-city
The proposed charter amendment is almost meaningless. Almost. The county is trying to pull a fast one on you when they tell you that this amendment, if passed, will control growth.

It won't.

Here to tell you why that is true and why you'll get fleeced no matter what, is Venice Florida! dot com's editor, John Patten, in a video clip from a county commission meeting of several months ago:

OK, so with all of that said, you would think we would endorse either a no vote or a don't even bother vote. There are still two overriding and compelling reasons to vote for this charter amendment.

1. Centralized growth, centralized battles
This amendment WILL NOT control growth to any substantial degree, despite anything you might have heard. But it will make growth centrally controlled by the county, rather than by the county and all of the cities within the county. Control growth advocates have had much better luck at controlling growth at the county level rather than at diverse venues. So again, while the amendment itself won't necessarily control growth, it will have a centralizing effect on where the growth battles will take place and it will create a somewhat more even playing field in the battles between residents and developers.

This is what scares local developers and their attorneys. They are big fish in a small bowl here in Venice, they get first taste of the food pellets dropped onto the water's surface. Take the fight to the county level and they are suddenly in a museum aquarium, competing with a number of other exotic and dangerous species. This will force them to do something that they hate: fight fair (or, rather, fairer). Nobody wants a fair fight at the expense of a sure-fire win, not with this much money at stake.

2. North Port
Venice pols are claiming that they have knuckled under to the county, thus there is no need for this amendment. Venice City Council is adamantly opposed to the passage of this amendment and they have been vocal in crying foul at the county's seeming betrayal of Venice's participation in Joint Planning Agreement discussions.

From the perspective of Venice City Council, they are arguably right to believe in that line of thinking. For now, anyway. Councils come and councils go and nobody knows what line of thinking will dominate Venice City Council five years from now.

But all of this misses a much, much bigger point. In making these kinds of statements, Venice City Council has failed to acknowledge the existence of another (and more dangerous) playmate in their sandbox.

Note to city hall: This will come as one hell of a shock, but it isn't always about you. There are actually more important things on this planet than the Venice Planning Commission.

Directly to our south is North Port, a small city in population only. In sheer size (or square mileage), North Port is bigger than Orlando, a fact that has led County Commissioner Jon Thaxton to note on several occasions that North Port really isn't a city, it's a county unto itself.

When you take into account all of the widely publicized stories of North Port trying to wheel and deal with their own out-of-control infrastructure needs (roads and drinking water, most notably), one can only come to a singular conclusion: North Port is insane, well beyond the normal run-of-the-mill greed-induced insanity caused by developer-owned kickbacked city governments up and down the west and east coasts of Florida. If it were possible, North Port would likely try to annex Miami and parts of Tennessee and Central America.

This is a town that is so wacky that they actually have a shrubbery inspector who will tell you to rip out your decorative shrubs and buy bigger ones if they do not meet the city's size requirements for required shrubberies. It doesn't matter if the ones you have will grow to a conforming size, kill them and buy new ones. There's an obvious Monty Python joke in there somewhere, but forcing homeowners to pay twice for the same shrubberies just doesn't seem very funny.

North Port begrudgingly knuckled under to the county's control growth demands at, almost quite literally, the very last minute before the county could make the final decision whether or not to put this referendum on the ballot.

North Port's furtive looks and fake acquiescence to the county is fooling no one. They'll break the Joint Planning Agreement in a heartbeat and stretch it out to a three- to five-year court battle if they think they have half of a chance of making a developer-friend happy in the proces, no matter the costs to their own taxpayers.

In dealing with North Port, you must always remember that you are dealing with an addict. A tough love intervention with compulsory rehab is the only adequate response, and that is just what this proposed amendment is to North Port.

The obvious counter to this line of thinking is the baby/bathwater argument, but that doesn't hold -- North Port is no gurgling infant in swaddling clothes, it's a huge carnivorous Baby Huey that has already eaten close to a quarter of the county. You don't throw this baby out with the bathwater, you shoot it with a rocket launcher while it's still sitting in its Olympic-sized pool before it can morph into Godzilla.

Therefore, in spite of our own city leadership's pleas to do otherwise, Venice Florida! dot com endorses a YES vote on the county's proposed charter amendment.

BACKGROUND ARTICLES:

Bureaucrats behaving badly
County vs. city over growth -- Wanna play a shell game?
INCLUDES VIDEO - No matter the outcome, in the war between the county and the cities over annexations, there is one guaranteed loser: you, the taxpayer
-- Venice Florida! dot com. 10/01/06

THE IMPACT FEE SCAM: How builders get you to pay for their profits through skyrocketing property taxes
Due to inadequate impact fees, how much does growth really cost the average lone taxpayer? For every new single family home that is built, an existing taxpayer can expect to have to pay 10, which really isn't that much... until you figure in multipliers like 40,000 new homes
-- Venice Florida! dot com, originally posted on 10/17/06