http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/apr/25/controversial-wiggins-pass-development-hasnt-kept-/
Today's link again comes from the Naples Daily News, which reports that a developer . . . wait for it . . . isn't doing what he promised to do when he got the county to approve a couple of condo towers near the beach.
What's surprising is the amount of shock and indignation expressed by readers.
The condo was approved for a piece of ground that once housed the largest marina in northern Collier County. Boaters who didn't want to trailer their vessels all the way to Naples or points south could launch there, or even store their boats there for a fee.
When the condo construction began, that option disappeared. In order to pacify angry area residents, the county commissioners negotiated with the developer to improve traffic near the development and to add public launch facilities. But, hey, the economy went sour and what's a developer to do?
Which prompted one NDN reader to comment:
"Again, money wins,Taxpayers lose and it's all courtesy of the Collier County government."
The mistake this reader makes is identifying three entities where only one exists in the economic monoculture that is Collier County. It works like this: The first faction of this single entity are the developers and the speculators. They put packages together, sniff out financing, line up investors or other sources of capital, and maintain sweet relationships with the consulting engineers and land-use attorneys who know how to run the "machine" known as Collier County, a place where raw land in the form of live oak plains, pine and palmetto scrub and even mangrove wetlands can be magically converted into Vietnamese nail salons, franchise tanning booths, branch banks, used car lots, convenience stores and all the other manifestations of an advanced civilization.
The second faction is the public servants, which includes the county commissioners and the county employees responsible for signing off on new developments.
Our indignant reader is nearly right when he implies that the commissioners' job is to listen to the people who put them in office. But he isn't clear about who makes up that group. He implies it is "the taxpayers." He's wrong.
It's the guys we described above.
Joe Blow might get on the horn and tell Commissioner So-and-So that he doesn't want to see fifty families displaced by the extension of a road that a certain prominent developer needs to provide access to a certain new project out in the boonies. But Joe Blow is just one vote, or maybe a dozen if all his friends call, or maybe a hundred if all the families deliver two calls each. Big deal. Commissioner So-and-So isn't looking for any 100-vote margin. He needs the manifest power inherent in a large, united group sharing a common purpose. He needs the movers and shakers on his side. He needs the developers, and their entourage of contractors, bankers, engineers, environmental scientists, surveyors and everyone else whose paycheck depends on turning raw land into houses or shops.
Such a group, for instance, might be the employees of a humongous consulting engineering firm, a firm capable of providing the expertise to advise the county on where to put that road extension, and, coincidentally, the firm that is helping design and get permits for the new development project. That's where the third faction of our single entity comes in. Let's call them, following the angry reader's example, the "taxpayers." It's amazing how many of them depend on development for their jobs. So the bosses at the firm tell the people working for them that a whole lot of jobs depend on getting the right vote from the commissioners. And the contractors who intend to make a lot of money helping bring that project out of the ground tell their employees the same thing.
And the employees tell the people they give their money to. "You know, if that new development gets squashed by a bunch of tree-huggers, I'm probably not going to be able to afford new acrylic nails every week," they tell the folks at the nail parlor. And the guy running the pizza shop cusses because traffic is a nightmare and his delivery cars need an hour to get around the block, but if the new development falters all those brick masons and carpenters and drywall hangers are going to be ordering less pizza, so what's a fella to do? Why, tell his commissioner to approve that project, and that new road extension, and sorry about the displaced families and tough cheese about the extra traffic but hey, a fella's gotta eat.
And so it goes.
For every "taxpayer" suffering from the actions of this system there are a dozen more who depend on it for their bread and butter. It IS the economy we've created here, and it rewards handsomely those who play by its rules. The displaced and unhappy can stay and gripe about the loss of beach access, the dearth of places to launch even a piddly canoe, and the time it takes to get anywhere. They can moan about the taxes the county needs to keep the monster machine running. They can make weak jokes about how Naples is still not as bad as Miami. But nothing changes. It never has, and I've been watching it a real long time. The developers, the commissioners who depend on them, and the "taxpayers" whose wages flow from them are all part of the same creature. And as Pogo once said, that creature are us.
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