The Best Legislature Money Can Buy

BY CARL HIAASEN
CHIAASEN@MIAMIHERALD.COM

I once referred to a past Legislature as a festival of whores, which in retrospect was a vile insult to the world’s oldest profession. Today’s lackluster assemblage in Tallahassee is possibly the worst in modern times, and cannot fairly be
compared to anything except a rodeo of phonies and pimps. It’s impossible to remember a governor and lawmakers who were more virulently anti-consumer, and more slavishly submissive to big business.

The list of who’s getting screwed in the state budget battle is long and sadly familiar: the schools,college students, foster children, the poor, the elderly, the sick and the jobless. The happiest faces, of course. belong to lobbyists for corporations, insurance companies and utilities, who are getting almost everything they want. It’s astounding that so many voters were suckered into thinking that this new generation of Republicans was going to fight for the common man instead of the fats cats and their special interests.

What a joke. The so-called leadership was plainly bought and paid for by the time their shoes hit the steps of the Capitol. The House is swiftly moving to deregulate 20 different types of business, including intrastate movers and telemarketers — two occupations that aren’t exactly famous for being scrupulous and undeceptive.
Deregulation is estimated to cost the state about $6 million in revenue (and who knows how much it will cost consumers in rip-offs), but just think of all the terrific new jobs it will create. That’s what supporters claim. Seriously.
Just what Florida needs — more telemarketers!

Bills are also sailing through the House and Senate that will allow Florida Power & Light to raise your electric rates for the next five years while at the same time giving the utility a controlling grip on the state’s future solar energy market.
GOP leaders who otherwise love to cheer free-market capitalism have already voiced support of the monopolistic bill, which gives FPL and four other major utilities exclusive rights to develop solar projects, eliminating pesky bids from smaller firms.

FPL achieved this coup the old-fashioned way, by hiring 30 lobbyists and donating about $4 million in campaign contributions to certain lawmakers and candidates for governor. Renewable energy would be good for Florida, but competition among providers would actually hold down electric rates. Not happening.

More bad news: If your home is one of 1.3 million insured by Citizens — the state-run pool that was established after Hurricane Andrew — your premiums could soon rise by as much as 25 percent.

A Senate subcommittee last week voted to let Citizens jack up its rates and start dumping policies on homes valued at more than $1 million. The idea is to eventually close down Citizens and shunt all Floridians back into the private insurance market.
That would be a swell idea except for the many thousands of residents who live in coastal areas where private insurance companies will not offer coverage, or will provide it only at outlandishly high rates. Citizens is indisputably a mess, but if the Senate bill becomes law, many Floridians could be facing a future hurricane season with no homeowners’ insurance, and with their mortgage companies breathing
down their necks.

You might be wondering what the new Legislature has accomplished so far for the greater public good. The answer is not much. But to benefit themselves, lawmakers resurrected and decriminalized a scummy little gimmick called “leadership funds,” which allow special interest groups to give gobs of money to special campaign
accounts controlled by the leaders of both political parties, who can spread it around as they see fit. Outlawed by a long-ago Legislature, leadership funds are simply a sanitized way of buying votes, slightly less sleazy than taking cash in a paper bag.

This time around, donors to the politicians will be listed by name, which is supposed to make us all feel not quite so betrayed. However, there has been at least one instance this spring when the issue of ethics raised its timid little head in Tallahassee. Sen. Mike Fasano of New Port Richey introduced a bill that would have toughened penalties for crooked officeholders and public officials. However, the measure was quickly snuffed in the Rules Committee by Fasano’s fellow Republicans and Democrat Gary Siplin of Orlando, who all felt that the current laws are quite stern enough to discourage corrupt behavior.

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or vomit. On a faintly positive note, at least one terrible scheme that took seed in the Legislature will not become law, at least for now. A few weeks ago, Sen. John Thrasher of St. Augustine and Rep. Pat Rooney of West Palm Beach launched legislation that would have let Jack Nicklaus build golf courses in several state parks, starting with the beautiful Jonathan Dickinson tract near Stuart. No one is a bigger Nicklaus fan than I am, but this truly was one of the nuttiest ideas of all time.

Naturally, Gov. Rick Scott loved it.

Florida already has more than 1,000 golf courses, many of them losing business. Meanwhile our state park system draws 16 million visitors annually and is recognized as one of the country’s finest, a reputation that would disintegrate with the intrusion of driving ranges, fertilized fairways and golf carts(not to mention hotels, which the bill idiotically allowed). The outcry was loud and instant, and within days both Rooney and Thrasher bailed. The golf-in-theparks bill got shelved.

In such dreary political times, it’s good that Floridians can still come together and make themselves heard. The shocker is that they weren’t ignored.

Sea Glass wins AIA Award

Sea Glass of Sanibel, created by Benchmark General Contractors, received the 2010 Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects Florida (AIA) in the Unbuilt Design category. In the picture above, Martin Gold, Director at the University of Florida’s School of Architecture (center), accepted the award on the team’s behalf from AIA President Richard J. Logan (left) and AIA Immediate Past President Gerald Steven Jernigan

Mark Anderson, owner of Benchmark General Contractors, and business partner Ron Rosen announced that the design for Sea Glass of Sanibel, a 12-acre sustainable residential community, received the 2010 Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects Florida (AIA) in the Unbuilt Design category. The award was presented recently at the AIA convention in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.



The jury of architects, chaired by Kirsten Murray, AIA of Olsen Kundig Architects and the 2009 AIA Firm of the Year, said AIA is excited to see this type of project in Florida.



“The use of new urbanist ideas is ideally suited to this climate and informal lifestyle,” Murray said.



In collaboration with the University of Florida’s School of Architecture and the Florida Community Design Center (FLCDC), the neighborhood includes approximately 12 single-family homes along Periwinkle Way on Sanibel. The property was previously the site of the Old Schoolhouse Theater and the home of the Sanibel Landscape Company, the first landscape nursery on the island.



Other highlights of the eco-friendly community include allocated nature areas, cluster development, a civic green promenade, butterfly meadow, water harvesting, and a community building dedicated to environmental education and shared resources.



“Our unique, groundbreaking lifestyle concept will reduce our footprint on the environment, an environmentally sensitive design that could become a model for future coastal communities in our region,” said Anderson.



Martin Gold, director of the University of Florida’s School of Architecture and executive director of the FLCDC, leads the design team which has submitted the schematics that integrate coastal ecologies, social connectivity, permaculture and sustainability as core principles of the neighborhood planning and architectural design.



Building is expected to begin later this year.

Copenhagen Wheel

It is not easy to reinvent the wheel, but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are giving it their best shot.

The Senseable City Laboratory at MIT has designed a wheel that captures the kinetic energy released when a rider brakes and saves it for when the rider needs a boost. While technically sound, the wheel’s true challenge may be in winning over cyclists. For centuries, bikes have been beloved for their simplicity, not their bells and whistles.

But, said Carlo Ratti, the laboratory’s director, “biking can become even more effective than what it was”. What the lab is working on, he said, is “Biking 2.0”.

The new wheel uses a kinetic energy recovery system, the same technology used by hybrid cars, like the Toyota Prius, to harvest otherwise wasted energy when a cyclist brakes or speeds down a hill. With that energy, it charges up a battery inside the wheel’s hub.

The sleek red hub, called the Copenhagen Wheel, was to be unveiled on Tuesday in Copenhagen. It can be retrofitted to any bike’s rear wheel, and it includes sensors that track air quality, a meter that logs miles and a GPS unit to track routes. All that data can be sent via Bluetooth to a rider’s smartphone and shared with others.

The laboratory is trying to eliminate the clunkiness of other electric bikes with heavy batteries and unwieldy wires by placing all the technology into the wheel, said Christine Outram, the project’s lead researcher. “It’s a technology that can get more people on bikes,” she said.

This is a period of change in the bicycle design world, said Jens Martin Skibsted, a Danish designer who owns the biking company Biomega and the design firm Kibisi. Skibsted believes that over the next few years several popular new designs will emerge to serve an increasingly urban population trying to wean itself off cars.

In such periods of change, he said, “the winner will seldom be the one that’s most functional, but rather the one that can become an inherent part of our culture”.

“This wheel looks nice,” he continued. “Whether it will be long lasting, I cannot say.”

Back at MIT, another research group is hedging its bets on a different wheel model, spurning regenerative braking as an excessive addition. “Regenerative braking hardware adds mass, complexity and cost, and the energy efficiency gains from it turn out to be surprisingly limited,” said William Mitchell, who runs a lab at MIT called SmartCities.

One of Mitchell’s doctoral students, Michael Lin, is also building an electric bike wheel, but it has to be plugged in to charge. Lin is considering adding regenerative components as an external accessory, but not as a component embedded into the wheel’s hub.

Reprinted from CopenhagenWheels.com

A House Too Big

When I’ve heard clients over the years refer to home amenities needed for “resale value”, I’ve often wondered who these potential buyers are. Apparently from the decisions I’ve seen clients make to appease this crowd, these buyers must like monochromatic off-white walls, bath tubs that admittedly rarely get used, a formal dining room that sits empty while everyone hangs out in the kitchen, and a living room that seems to never get lived in. Of course there’s other items that seem to collect dust also like a fireplace in the master bedroom, a “morning kitchen”, or a master bath the size of a small garage.

It’s interesting that most clients lament about designing for “resale” and yet most give in to this unknown entity and add the bathtub or formal dining room or whatever. I usually tell clients that unless they have very bizarre tastes, if they like it, most likely some future buyer will also.

Our homes should be designed for us, efficiently and economically, for the way that we live. Unneeded space is a waste of resources and costs money. The costs for these “unneeded” amenities have been rationalized over the years by the belief that someone will come along who wants and demands this extra space and stuff because the “marketplace” mandates it. We seem to have fallen prey to some sort of Martha Stewart Ponzi scheme where we have kept adding beautiful and expensive products and amenities that we’ve been led to believe will forever help to maintain the high market value of our home. Apparently not so, many of the “hot buttons” have gone cold! The “marketplace” appears to be telling us something.

But are we listening? Old habits are hard to break. The first step is to develop a new vision of the needs and expectations of a home and lay a path towards that goal. It’s absolutely necessary to develop an exciting plan that functions effectively for the way we live while still honoring our past and the emotional relationships that we have with our homes. The old models of building and development were overdone because builders and owners perceived them as “safe” alike. This way of thinking is apparently collapsing because of it’s own weight; a change is upon us. Build what you really want, be creative, and most of all, be brave. The time requires it!

Jeff Good
Benchmark General Contractors, Inc.

Aurora Gold Award for Benchmark project

We are pleased to announce that one of our projects “The Stephens Residence”, located in South Seas Plantation on Captiva Island, was recently awarded the Grand Gold Award (best in show) at the 2010 Aurora Awards. Designed by K2 Design Group, from Bonita Springs, Florida, this Gulf Front home was completed in 2009.

The Aurora Awards is a architectural and interior design competition sponsored by the Southeast Builders Conference and the Florida Home Builders Association. The awards were held at the recent SEBC convention in Orlando, Florida. This is the second Benchmark project to receive an Aurora Award, the Larson Residence, located on Sanibel Island, received an Aurora award in 2002.


http://www.theauroras.com/winners/index.cfm?method=cWinners.main&thisYear=2010&sortOrder=winnerType

Jeff Good
Benchmark General Contractors, Inc.

Paralyzing the PACE

Paralyzing the PACE: Florida’s property assessed clean energy program likely strangled by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Posted on July 19, 2010 by greenbuildingsubcommittee

The Florida legislature recently took a step towards creating a more sustainable future for our state. On May 27, 2010, Governor Crist signed into law House Bill 7179, which created Florida’s version of the Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) program.

lorida’s PACE bill enables local governments to levy non-ad valorem assessments to fund improvements related to energy efficiency,conservation,renewable energy and wind resistance. This type of program is more commonly known as a land-secured financing district or special assessment, which Florida municipalities have long used as a tool to finance projects that serve a public purpose, including street paving and the creation of parks. The novelty of the PACE program is that it is not a mandatory ad valorem property tax, has minimal fiscal impact on local governments, is not linked to the financial credit status of the property owner, and is completely voluntary. The program shows promise as an innovative, no-taxpayer subsidy approach to financing individual energy efficiency and renewable energy projects without the traditional barriers: large upfront costs and difficulty of financing them.

Under a PACE program, property owners borrow money from a newly established “municipal financing district” to purchase eligible technologies that are determined at the local level.

PACE programs are funded through the issuance of local revenue bonds. A PACE bond is a bond where the proceeds are lent to commercial and residential property owners to finance energy retrofits (efficiency measures and small renewable energy systems) and who then repay their loans over 20 years via an annual special assessment on their property tax bill. The bonds therefore act as a lien on the property until the amount is paid off. If the consumer sells the property, the tax would then be paid by the new owner. For many home and business owners, the annual energy cost savings from the retrofitting will exceed the cost of the annual repayment.
Unfortunately, on July 6, 2010, the Federal Housing Finance Administration (FHFA), the agency that regulates mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, issued a letter effectively bringing PACE programs across the Country to a screeching halt. The July 6th letter expresses FHFA’s new requirement position that it will not purchase loans subject to PACE liens. The tension lies in FHFA’s concern with the “senior liens” or “first liens,” which result from the tax assessment on properties participating in a PACE program. The significance of the senior PACE lien is that if the property goes into foreclosure the PACE lien must be satisfied before the mortgage lender gets any money. In short, FHFA has “safety and soundness concerns” resulting from a combination of “first liens that disrupt a fragile housing market and longstanding lending priorities, the absence of robust underwriting standards to protect homeowners and the lack of energy retrofit standards to assist homeowners, appraisers, inspectors and lenders [to] determine the value of retrofit products.”

From a practical standpoint, FHFA’s blanket rejection of residential loans subject to PACE liens eliminates or restricts one of the most appealing aspects of the PACE program: the ability to make energy efficient improvements today and either pay the costs off over time or pass the costs off to future purchasers. Banks generally want to sell their loans to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, so under FHFA’s new rules, whenever a homeowner with a PACE loan seeks to refinance, the homeowner will have to pay off the PACE lien in full. In addition, whenever a homeowner with a PACE loan seeks to sell their home to a buyer using financing, the homeowner will have to either pay off the PACE loan or negotiate full payment of the PACE lien by the purchaser. The restrictions created by the FHFA’s position and the orders it has issued to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks have served to bring PACE programs everywhere to a complete halt.

There will have to be a significant push in favor of PACE programs on a state and federal level if one of the most promising renewable energy programs to date is going to be saved. Some commentators believe the only way to cross the proverbial “line in the sand” drawn by the FHFA is for Congress to take action on this pressing issue. If implemented in Florida, PACE programs could rev-up the state’s economic engine. The promises of an accelerated rate of renewable energy production, energy independence, green job creation, and greenhouse gas emissions reductions are all reasons to fight for PACE programs.

Submitted by Stephen A. Liverpool. Mr Liverpool is a third year law school student from Tampa, Florida. This December, he will graduate from the Levin College of Law at the University of Florida with a certificate in environmental and land use law. He is currently a summer associate at the law firm of Hill Ward Henderson and can be contacted at salpool@ufl.edu.

Opportunities and Dangers in Developing Florida's Solar Potential

Opportunities and Dangers in Developing Florida's Solar Potential