State returns Comprehensive Plan amendment to Venice
Round one goes to the state: Future land use designations by city are too vague, not supported by data, missing stated objectives, missing data analysis, missing policies, missing data on schools, city's provided maps are self-contradictory
-- John Patten, HEAVILY REVISED 10/05/07, from a story originally published on 09/30/07
-- jpatten@veniceflorida.com

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MATERIAL REFERENCED IN THIS ARTICLE:
State of Florida, Department of Community Affairs -- Objections Report to the City of Venice
-- official document dated September 17, 2007, 16 pages, PDF format
City's Comprehensive Plan amendments fail state review
-- Ed Martin, 10/02/07
State questions Venice's growth plan
-- Zac Anderson, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 10/03/07
[State] commends city comp plan
-- Greg Giles, Venice Gondolier Sun, 10/03/07

No really, we were just getting around to telling you about this
Here's one (of a few items) that city hall wasn't rushing out to the public with a press release: the state's Department of Community Affairs has rejected key portions of the city's proposed Comprehensive Plan update, this in the initial round of amendment submissions to the state by the City of Venice. The proposed amendment to Venice's Comprehensive Plan is the result of approximately three years worth of work that goes back to the planning stages of the Envision Venice project in 2005.

In a 16-page report (full report in PDF format) that was dated September 14, 2007, the state doggedly listed item after item after item that had been submitted by the city as not acceptable. Most of the rejections were due to the lack of mandatory data and analysis for the given entries, but of main concern is that the state took exception to the overall direction that the city is trying to go in, stating that the goals and objectives set by the City of Venice "are not consistent with" the vision stated in the state's Comprehensive Plan:

The overall complaint seems centered on the fact that the city (apparently deliberately) left wide open holes in its definitions of future land use for maximum flexibility in future interpretation. This would not be a novelty situation -- the exact same complaint has been made by Councilman John Moore about the city's Commercial Mixed Use Ordinance.

Self-contradictory and ill-funded
In one of the itemized objections (of which there are 25 in total), the state came to the conclusion that parts of the city's comp plan changes made no sense as the proposed amendment repeatedly contradicted itself, this in a discussion about land use maps and transportation. Here, the state complained that existing roads were not on some provided maps while non-existent roads were, while other maps had some corrected road information from the previously mentioned errors along with completely different and unique new errors (Section H - Transportation Elements, page 14).

In another objection, the state noted that the city has apparently not properly planned for capital improvements to maintain and replace existing infrastructure elements as the info was not included (Item E, page 10).

City duct-tapes itself
Curiously, there were no initial public comments or press releases from the city that the state's report existed prior to the initial publication of the full report on this web site.

As the city had not publicly acknowledged that the report existed, council candidate Sue Lang received her copy from the state through a public records request made to Suzanne Lex at the Department of Community Affairs:

Ms. Lex:
Has the DCA review been completed and the response sent to the City of Venice? I recall you said DCA's response had to be sent by 9/17/07.... if it has been sent, would you please send me a copy? Thank you.
-- Sue Lang, email to DCA dated 09/23/07

Lang has been closely following the Comprehensive Plan update process over the past two years, an incredibly tedious self-imposed task.

City takes exception to coverage
The initial version of this story (this is a re-edited version) stated that the city received a failing grade on their proposed Comprehensive Plan amendment. City Manager Marty Black and Councilman Bill Willson took exception to that wording. In retrospect, it was a bit misleading as it jumped the gun -- it's too early in the process for the state to fail the proposed amendment.

As Black explained it, this is all part of the submission process and is fairly typical of what other communities are going through in the statutorily required process. The city submits a massive set of documents to the state, the state reviews all of it, then sends some of it back for corrections. The city makes the corrections, sends it back to the state and then waits to see what else the state will want corrected. It's a winnowing process that continues until the state is fully satisfied with the results.

Willson took stronger exception, going as far to say that the initial story as published on this web site was misleading and deceptive. While Willson acknowledged that any deception was unintentional and based on lack of information and a misunderstanding of parts of the legal process, he was adamant that the public would get the wrong impression of the process as a whole if the only thing they read about the amendment was the initial story on Venice Florida! dot com. After reviewing the additional information received from Black's office (subsequent to the initial publication of this story), Venice Florida! dot com agreed with Willson and Black on that assessment about our coverage of the process of approval of the Comprehensive Plan amendment.

Procedural issues aside, what about the contents of the state's objections?
Still, that leaves criticism of some of the contents of the amendment, something that both Lang and mayoral candidate Ed Martin have been writing about for several years.

Lang's audience over the past two years has been the state itself. She has issued volumes of documents to the state and some of her objections have been included in the state's initial response to the city. Martin, meanwhile, has been writing prolifically on the comp plan process over the same time period, this in a series of dry and technical articles published in the Venice Gondolier Sun and on his own web site.

Of particular concern to both Lang and Martin is the concept of "villages" as incorporated into the comp plan amendment. It is an admittedly strange use of the word "villages," which normally would conjure up small town scenes from American and English novels in the reader's mind. As the City of Venice uses it in the proposed amendment, the word comes to mean clusters of tall condominium buildings bunched closely together. At least one of the targeted areas ripe for conversion into a "village" is right in Lang's and Martin's back yard in the Golden Beach area of the island. Lang notes that the words "affordable housing" and "increased density" are often tied in with the word "villages," which admittedly sets up what would seem to be an obvious fiction: affordable, cheap condos for the working class with a window view of the gulf.

For Martin, the affront is a violation of all that Venice stands for and appears to be designed for the sole benefit of builders and land developers in this new era of the Joint Planning Agreement between the city and the county -- due to the limitations imposed by the JPA, we won't be able to annex and expand outward at our borders, so we can always rebuild in various areas inside the city and expand upwards towards the sky.

Willson objected strongly to Martin's characterization, stating that the areas targeted as potential villages have long ago been zoned to allow for taller structures (that are not there yet), and that pushing for lower height caps in those areas would involve an unlawful taking of "air rights" that the city would have to buy back at prohibitively expensive costs to the taxpayer. It's a seemingly legitimate argument, but by implication it throws the concept of "affordable housing" in conjunction with "villages" right out the window -- if buying back the "air rights" would be prohibitively expensive due to the value of the land and the air above it, the subsequent condos that would be builtin the same place would likely not be able to fall under the category of "affordable housing."

Gondo's coverage even more abysmal, while Ed Martin and the Herald-Trib get it right
While the initial story on this web site tended to indicate wrongly that the state was outright rejecting the city's proposed Comprehensive Plan amendment in its totality, the Venice Gondolier Sun went to the other extreme, seemingly indicating that the state's objections amounted to little more than minor spell-checking. To the Gondo, the paper traffic between the city and the state was all part of a major love fest with both players in total cosmic harmony with each other. That was arguably even more deceptive than what readers of this site would have picked up from our initial coverage. Curiously, nobody at the city made any mention of wanting the Gondo to correct their story, but they did lobby successfully with Venice Florida! dot com for some corrections and revisions.

Venice Florida! dot com was the first to publish anything about the state's objections to the city's planed amendments, this some three weeks after the state had filed their objections. We are the only publication to make the full 16-page report freely available and downloadable. Three stories followed on the heels of our initial publication, as both the Gondo and the Herald-Tribune first became aware of the story from our coverage, while Ed Martin had learned of the report prior to our knowledge of it but was delayed from writing about it due to the rigors of the campaign trail.

When Ed Martin weighed in on the story on his web site, he focused in on the strange use of the word "villages" to describe clusters of condominium towers, thus redefining future arguments to come. For Martin, the issue is not the process of approval. He's more concerned about what direction the City of Venice will be going in as we contemplate closed borders and an open sky in this post-JPA environment.

Of the initial four stories on the state's objections -- Venice Florida! dot com, Ed Martin, the Herald-Trib, and the Gondo, in that order -- only two publications got the story right. Sadly, Venice Florida! dot com wasn't one of them. Those honors go to Zac Anderson's coverage in the Herald-Tribune and Ed Martin's assessment on his web site. Meanwhile, Venice Florida! dot com is revising its coverage in this major revision that you are currently reading, while the Gondo is apparently still sticking with their 'blow sunshine up everyone's arse' approach to the story. All three articles from the other publications are linked to at the top of this page.

This story is ongoing.

This article contains portions of an article that was originally published on 09/30/07. This article is a re-write and an updated revision of that original article. The original article, in its original form, has been taken offline.

John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times.