(This column was first published in the Tallahassee Democrat on Nov. 14, 2004.)
Welcome to pessimism. Welcome to the sinking feeling that this time the war has turned: We really are going to lose the lush landscape that made so many of us fall in love with Tallahassee. We’re going to lose our canopy road/heavily wooded/other Florida paradise.
We’re going to lose it to the longtime enemy: commerce.
You may have read about the proposals to change green-space and tree requirements for building in Tallahassee. They include such measures as reducing the percentage of greenspace set-asides and even allowing developers to buy their way out of any green-space requirements. They include decreasing the number of trees required to be saved during construction.
The proposals are aimed at putting fewer constraints on builders and developers — and thereby increasing our attractiveness to more builders and developers. They are just proposals now. But in some fashion, they will be implemented.
And those of us who firmly believe that how Tallahassee looks is its greatest charm will lose.
We’ll lose because we have a pro-business City Commission. Four otherwise nice guys are convinced that the three most important things for Tallahassee are growth, growth and growth. Environmentally minded Commissioner Debbie Lightsey isn’t enough to stop them.
We’ll lose because pro-growth forces have logical-sounding arguments: Construction permits in Tallahassee take two to five times longer to get than in most Florida cities. Tallahassee’s current green-space requirements produce little more than strips of grass and trees in parking lots. The money developers would pay to opt out — $5,000 to $50,000 an acre — could be used to buy big swaths of land for real parks.
Yes, there are counterarguments: Permits sometimes take longer here because developers sometimes don’t follow the steps correctly. Even small strips in parking lots reduce pollution runoff. The city hasn’t wisely spent the money from tree-ordinance fines, so why think it’ll do better with greenspace-buyout money?
Still, we’re going to lose.
We’ll lose because the mood of the people — even if it’s only the 51% who elected George Bush — is opposed to government and taxes.
Government exists to perform the services that produce no profit but make life better, such as protecting the environment. Taxes are how you pay for those services. Someday, the selfish idiots who vote against government and taxes will realize it hurts us all. Tallahassee will be clear-cut by then.
We can still pack the public meetings and persuade city commissioners to ride the brakes against the full-throttle pursuit of growth. But it will be only a delay. The drumbeat of money to be made always drowns out the wind chimes of beauty to be saved.
Maybe it’s the natural order of things. Maybe the Tallahassee some of us fell in love with 20, 30, 40 years ago was an accident. Maybe we just arrived before commerce discovered the potential of paradise. Maybe no city retains its charm forever.
Perhaps we should not despair. Our children want things that we don’t — or why would someone keep bulldozing forests to build bland apartment complexes? And in change is occasionally beauty: landscaped new roads, attractively designed buildings, the odd “Betton Hills” neighborhood sign.
So bye-bye, pretty Tallahassee. Gangway for growth.
Gerald Ensley was a reporter and columnist for the Tallahassee Democrat from 1980 until his retirement in 2015. He died in 2018 following a stroke. The Tallahassee Democrat is publishing columns capturing Tallahassee’s history from Ensley’s vast archives each Sunday through 2024 in the Opinion section as part of theTLH 200: Gerald Ensley Memorial Bicentennial Project.
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