The temptation to light up the inferno on the chaos in Washington or to deploy all guns on the battles in Tallahassee is strong – but there are plenty of voices out there on this stuff – stronger and smarter and more inside the game than mine.
I’m going to bore you today with a truly positive little bill from the Florida Senate that went into hearings last week, and that demonstrates that despite all the national crazy currently exploding onto your screens, good sense occasionally prevails, even in these times.
Back on Dec. 4, almost entirely unnoticed by the pundits and pinheads of the political panorama, Florida Sen. Gayle Harrell, R-Port St. Lucie, introduced a little bill meant to spackle a gaping hole – or what was revealed as a gaping hole – in public decision-making on land use in Florida.
Last summer, you’ll recall, we were suddenly and shockingly blindsided by a plan from the governor and the Department of Environmental Protection to populate our state parks chock to the brim with pickleball courts, golf courses and other playground folderol, rolling over the carefully tended wild side of Florida like a rogue Ferris wheel run amok.
Sometimes the executive branch stumbles — and has to be corrected.
SB 80, the “State Park Preservation Act,” specifically prevents the kind of nonsense the DEP was sneaking around with last time around. Harrell’s bill would place the DEP in an unnatural position of having to deal with parklands with an eye to “conservation-based recreational uses.”
It requires that “The Division of State Lands shall make available to the public at least 30 days before the public hearing required an electronic copy of each land management plan … for parcels located within a state park” (SB 80, lines 162-166).
The bill goes on to say that the lands must be managed “for conservation-based public outdoor recreational uses” and asserts that “conservation-based public outdoor recreational uses” include “fishing, camping, bicycling, hiking, nature study, swimming, boating, canoeing, horseback riding, diving, birding, sailing, jogging, and similar … recreational uses.”
Finally, to avoid any further shenanigans, it is specific that the term “conservation-based public outdoor recreational uses… does not include sports that require sporting facilities, such as golf courses, tennis courts, pickleball courts, ball fields, and other similar facilities.”
Huzzah, Sen. Harrell!
A large crowd of people gather at the front entrance of Jonathan Dickinson State Park to protest against the proposed golf courses Saturday, Aug. 24, 2024, in Martin County. Florida Department of Environmental Protection has proposed to build three golf courses in the park as part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Great Outdoors Initiative.
The point of this parable is that despite all the efforts to cloud the legislative agendas, both here and in Washington, with scary, sometimes destructive, agency engineering, alt-elected official gibberish, and chest-beating outcries of blind loyalty, there are still worthwhile, nay, necessary, elements somehow squeaking through the eye of the partisan, ideologically tainted eye of the needle.
Law-making is a slow process, when it’s done correctly. The major hurdle for all policy is research, which takes time and people. The main elements for lawmaking that follow this are operationalizing the research, establishing need, creating majority compromise (from shared interests, of course) and budgeting.
And then, there’s timing.
R. Bruce Anderson
The current problem — in both Washington and Tallahassee — is that lately this process has been anything but deliberative. When chief executives — presidents and governors — initiate the development of policy, they often “shoot from the hip.” Executives are keenly aware of the slowness of the “partnered” process of legislating, and to speed things up very often ignore the “researching, establishing need and creating compromise” parts of the deal, to say nothing of budgeting, which in the U.S. falls outside their direction.
Errors happen. Executives depend on the legislating body to slow things down, make course corrections, work out how to pay for things and send it back. When it’s working correctly, the system delivers. When the legislating body is bullied out of doing their jobs, the inherent errors become nastily manifest.
Harrell’s Senate Bill 80 is a great example of legislation correcting a course initiated at the top. If only Washington, and the rest of Tally, could take a note. R. Bruce Anderson is the Dr. Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay, Jr. Endowed Chair in American History, Government, and Civics and Miller Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Florida Southern College. He is also a columnist for The Ledger and political consultant and on-air commentator for WLKF Radio in Lakeland.
This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Bill protecting Florida state parks is breath of fresh air | Anderson
Read the full article here