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School space is key, Brogan vows
By JULIE HAUSERMAN
© St. Petersburg Times, TALLAHASSEE -- As next year's election races start to heat up, politicians are beginning to hear the cries of soccer moms fed up with overcrowded schools and traffic jams. Specifically: Why do Florida communities keep approving development when schools are already overcrowded? In a speech Friday, Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan said the issue will be "a top priority" of Gov. Jeb Bush in the 2002 legislative session. The Legislature convenes just as the race for governor gets serious. The Bush administration said the same thing last year, but got nowhere in the Legislature because lawmakers couldn't agree -- and the administration wouldn't specify -- where the money would come from to pay for new schools in fast-growing areas. The politically powerful Florida Homebuilders Association balked at proposals that would make developers pay more. This time, Brogan said, the Legislature needs to pass something that will make local governments and school boards plan together for growth. "It is time to address the elephant in the living room, and that is growth management," Brogan told members of a new, 26-member growth management commission convened this week to study the costs of development. "There are a lot of people who are now running for governor. Every single one of them is talking about growth management as an issue." It's little wonder. Consider the experience of Debbie Fabrizio of Valrico, who doesn't identify herself as a Republican or a Democrat. But she's a PTA president with three kids who says she learned the hard way that Florida has done a lousy job of getting local governments and school boards to plan together. Bulldozers started clearing the way for a 432-house subdivision near her neighborhood, and Fabrizio started worrying. Her local school, Buckhorn Elementary, was already overcrowded. "All around us, new neighborhoods were going up left and right. We're not trying to stop the development -- we know we can't stop the development. Our main issue was to ask: Can the area take any more houses? Can the roads? Can the schools?" Fabrizio and two other neighborhood moms started asking questions. They found out that development decisions and school decisions are two separate things. "We were floored," Fabrizio said in a telephone interview. "The County Commission will tell you one thing, and the School Board will tell you another. They were trying to be helpful. But we were amazed that you can't even bring up the schools as an issue when you're talking about development." Fabrizio and her neighbors formed a grass roots group called Parents Initiative to Relieve School Overcrowding. They were eventually able to get the result they were looking for, when the Hillsborough County school district agreed to build a new school two years ahead of schedule. But with similar scenarios playing out all over the state, the Republican-led Legislature may have to do what it has so far resisted: send an edict from Tallahassee forcing a link between school districts and local governments. "We're going to basically have to mandate that they cooperate,' said Republican Rep. Johnnie Byrd of Plant City, the man in line to be the next Florida House speaker. "We hate to mandate things, but at a certain point, when the schools are not where the people are, we have to have better cooperation."
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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From the Times state desk Lucy Morgan
From the state wire
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