Reluctant Heroes

Manatee County Commissioners as local heroes? It's hard to imagine, but in a series of meetings, interviews and public forums, it's appeared that they have at last understood the public's anger about being to forced to pay for roads that developers need, and are at least for the moment fighting back.

And that has the Bradenton Herald worried.

Columnist Vin Mannix seems to be praising Commission chair Joe McClash all the way to the end of his column on how the "feisty" McClash is standing up to developers, but it suddenly become apparent that everything Mannix said was predicated on McClash going back to the developers' camp.

"He's stubborn, but not stupid," Mannix writes, as though Mannix himself was bright at being dishonest.

McClash has taken the position that developers can pay for the roads they need themselves. Schroeder-Manatee Ranch has a $4 billion bonding authority to build roads and infrastructure, but has used only two percent of it ($80 million) while causing what is probably more than 95 percent of the new traffic that has overloaded the roads in question. SMR builds thousands upon thousands of new homes west of I-75 that impact State Road 64, State Road 70 and University Parkway, which are nearly eight miles apart, and McClash has called them on it.

A Herald editorial in the same edition quotes McClash as saying that the builders can afford to build their own roads, since "they are selling lots for $200,000 or more and have sold tens of thousands of them."

Newer residents who learn that 10,000 housing units have already been approved but not yet built, and then watch as the commission is asked to approve thousands more in a single day, must feel that developers own the county commissioners lock, stock and barrel. I have always believed they did, too.

Bur the fact that Vin Mannix and a Herald editorial have to schmooze McClash and Jane Von Hahmann, a commissioner from the older West side of Bradenton, tells us worlds if we listen well.

The Herald's irresponsible support for unchecked growth is born of greed. Without new homes, it can't get new subscribers and new advertisers - not to mention more of those pricey full-page home sections that lard the papaer every Sunday - and its owners apparently don't have the wit to expand their numbers by better service, more honest reporting, and stronger efforts against their Sarasota rival.

The paper's economic constraints forces it to support uncontrolled development in hopes of boosting ad lines and circulation (the two are mutually dependent).

Unfortunately, people who still read newspapers are too smart to fall for that, and at least one letter, by Jeff Hale in Sunday's edition, takes editors to task for its hypocrisy:

Again, The Herald has come out in opposition to an effort (this time by certain county commissioners) to take an action that might slow growth. Whatever the idea, and whoever makes it (including private citizens - note the Wares Creek and Point Pleasant efforts of a majority of homeowners to regain single-family zoning in their areas), The Herald editorial looks the same: first, a cursory acknowledgment that growth causes problems, and second, an explanation of why this proposal (fill in the blank) would adversely affect our economy and not solve the one identified problem caused by growth. Frequently that explanation is accompanied by flawed reasoning.

In the latest example, The Herald has concluded that a requirement that road capacity exist before development is approved would "force developers to spend tens of millions of dollars up front without even having a development permit in hand" (emphasis in editorial). Baloney! Road capacity can be increased by our normal system, using gasoline taxes. Yes, that might slow growth. But is a requirement that road capacity exist before the building crews, concrete trucks, and then new residents move in, really so radical? I suggest it is only radical to someone whose sole concern is economic development.

I recommend The Herald consider walking the walk, and not just talking the talk.

But I don't think Mr. Hale knows the worst of it.
Recently the Herald, which sold out the All-American downtown district by supporting developers of high-rise towers that will forever alter its character and hide it shoreline, produced a huge, four-color map on its front page of Sheriff Charlie Wells' "crime box," a purported "target" for deputies extending over 9 and 1/2 square miles.

Well, a nine-and-a-half-square-mile target is hard to miss. Especially if you live in it.
Within days of its publication, the For Sale signs started sprouting on Bayshore Gardens Drive, which the map included. But in the Sunday Herald's Local & State section, which publishes a weird crime blotter, week after week of statistics show that an average of four crimes - and all minor ones like burglary and shoplifting - occur there.

Dozens of crimes occur in the area closer to downtown, where there is a viable target for a determined police force, yet both areas are painted as undesirable by the same broad brush. Time to move! Not.

The "crime box" was invented by Sheriff Charlie Wells (whose own %2 million home was paid for by the earnings of his wife, Leslie Wells, who heads Leslie Wells Realty, Inc.). The area stretched from downtown, where the Herald has supported high-rise towers that will forever obliterate the character and community along its shoreline, to Bayshore Gardens Parkway, where there's a community of small, modestly priced homes that house real middle-class families with real children where for decades families and seniors have enjoyed safe neighborhoods.

Within a few weeks of the article, seven or eight For Sale signs sprouted on Batshore Gardens Parkway, and in the quiet neighborhoods around it came many more.

Again, the problem is that the Sunday Herald's Local & State section, which lists the crimes in the greater Bradenton area, show almost no real activity in the 256 square blocks the Sheriff and the Herald together impugned. It doesn't list crimes in Lakewood Ranch.

In the portion between 53rd and Bayshore Gardens Parkway, between 14th St./US 41 and 34th St. West, the average is about four crimes per week, all of them minor, non-violent ones like burglary and shoplifting.

Those 256 square blocks actually experience very little crime, and what there is tends to be concentrated in the commercial strip along 14th St/US 41 and west of 34th on 53rd, not in the quiet, peaceful, family-oriented and safe neighborhoods near MCC, MTI, Bayshore High and the new elementary school at 23th St. West and Bayshore Gardens Parkway.

It is hard to understate how deeply the "crime box" nonsense has diminished the value of homes in this nearly crime-free area.

Why does the Herald want to ruin these neighborhoods?

Well, for one thing, they are too frugal to produce a lot of subscribers, and the homes are priced too low - and the communities are too stable - to produce turnover that fills up the ad pages and makes money for the likes of Leslie Wells. It is also the kind of honest, hard-working community that will not readily give way to row upon row of Clearwater Beach-like condominiums to be inhabited by wealthy retired seniors. Unless.

The strongest reason for urban redevelopment, you see, is a high crime rate and the appearance of unkempt homes and properties that in the name of "community redevelopment" can actually erase stable communities and replace them with new subdivisions that produce everything the newspaper, the developers and the sheriff's wife want.

And for creating unkempt homes, there's nothing better than creating fear that leads to emptied houses, and publishing horror stories of drug raids and shootouts so bizarrely complex that no can grasp what happened. It helps to jack up the landscape fees, too.

At the same time, just go ahead and relocate the only school that trains the kids of these modest, middle-class families for useful lives as cosmetologists, mechanics and computer repairmen - trades that pay well here - out to the borders of Lakewood Ranch, about 8 miles away, where the kids live who will become doctors, lawyers, CPAs and drug addicts.

Yes, Mr. Hale, the road issue is not the be-all and end-all it seems. The historic core of Bradenton, with its quiet, unchanging ways that are as regular as Sunday services and as patriotic as Marine Private 1st Class Christopher Cobb, the first Bradenton resident to die in Iraq, is going to be erased. They plan, in the next 10 or 15 years, to bulldoze it.

Joe McClash, who according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune owns 150 homes in the redevelopment area, is an odd one to champion the control of growth, but that growth won't affect his properties (except to possibly create less interest in them). But truth be told, SMR's Rex Jensen has sniped at him, too, and that has burned him a little.

Underneath it all lies the profound change that incorporation of Lakewood Ranch as a new city will bring when it moves forward, probably catalyzed by some element of the current hostilities. If Manatee County has spent tens of million of dollars to build roads that this new city and its funding authority can easily afford to build, the commissioners will look like a bunch of fools - and some of them will seem distinctly dishonest in light of the campaign contributions they get from developers.

Some men (and women) are born to greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them, they say.

A county commission that is among the first in the country to stop rampant development, and to turn inward instead to repair and enhance its historic communities, would be great indeed. But the Herald thinks that in the end, they'll come around.

Politicians always do.