Moving Ahead in St. Pete Beach, One Jellybean at a Time

The November 29 ruling by Judge Demers against St. Pete Beach in plaintiff Bill Pyle's ballot language challenge lawsuit illustrates the challenges facing St. Pete Beach as it struggles to bring an end to the bitter polarization and costly litigation that has plagued our City since 2006 (when we embraced the core principles of Florida Hometown Democracy).  Just about everyone agrees that a full repeal of the 2006 charter amendments is necessary, including the City Commission, the editorial board of the St. Pete Times, and a majority of the citizens who attended the special meeting of the Commission on December 13th.  There is a very small minority of folks who view the Judge's ruling as proof that the City's 2008 ballot language was misleading, but look carefully and you'll see that the Judge isn't saying that the City was deceptive.  He's simply ruling that the City failed to satisfy its own self-imposed rule that it fully and completely describe its proposed 150-page comp plan in a 75-word ballot summary.

Despite the clear impact of these rules on our City's governance, the impossibility and magnitude of the problem continues to be very difficult to describe.  A few months ago, I compared the task of drafting a 75-word ballot summary of a 150-page comp plan to describing the Bible in 75 words, but some folks are still confused.

So here is another way to look at the problem:

Think of your favorite flavor of jellybean (everyone has a different favorite).  Now think of a gallon jug full of jellybeans, with each tasty bean being one of the many words needed to adequately describe each of the many elements of a 150-page comprehensive plan.

And now think of a teacup of those jellybeans as the 75 words you're allowed in a ballot summary.

St. Pete Beach embraced the principles of Hometown Democracy in 2006 by amending its charter to require all comp plans and amendments to be approved by a vote of the people.  In doing so, we injected Florida election law requirements into our local land use process and found that Florida's election laws (i.e. the 75-word ballot summary rule) were not designed to handle approval of complex, voluminous documents like comprehensive plans.  More important, by putting our comp plans on the ballot, we unwittingly and naively exposed ourselves to the crippling expense of legal challenges when voting on complex comp plans made it difficult or impossible to comply with Florida's election laws. 

In short, we the people of St. Pete Beach gave folks like Plaintiff Pyle the right to drag the City into Court and challenge the propriety of a comp plan (which was approved by an overwhelming majority vote of the people) if the City failed to fit a gallon jug's worth of descriptive jellybeans (and especially his favorites) into the 75-word ballot summary teacup.

When Judge Demers ruled against the City, it was irrelevant that it's IMPOSSIBLE to adequately describe the comp plan in 75 words.  it was the City, not the Judge, who adopted that impossible standard...the Judge's job was simply to confirm that the City failed to fit all the beans into the teacup.

The SPB ballot litigation illustrates one of the great dangers of the Hometown Democracy experiment:  it creates a highly litigious environment where cities can incur massive litigation costs because their good-faith efforts to foster redevelopment and revitalization failed to satisfy an impossible election law standard.


The solution to this problem is not to attempt to fit Pyle's favorite jellybeans into the 75-word teacup.

The solution is to throw away the cup.

The solution is to repeal our local Hometown Democracy provisions and eliminate the impossible requirement of summarizing complex, lenghthy comp plans in 75-word ballot summaries.

The solution is to stop counting jellybeans, and to start sharing them.