As we get closer to SDS Litigation

As we get closer to the bench trial on Service Delivery between Gwinnett County and the Cities of Gwinnett, I thought it might be helpful to revisit Mr. Goodman's opinion piece from the December 17, 2006 AJC.


How Gwinnett handles its cities will affect its future

By Dick Goodman
For the Journal-Constitution

Published on: 12/17/06

Like the ghost of Christmas future, today in South Florida stand two alternative
ghosts of Gwinnett County future.

Each is starkly different, and which one foretells the future of Gwinnett will
be determined by the choices made by voters and Gwinnett County commissioners.
According to the October draft of the Joint County-Cities Community Assessment
Summary Report, the proportion of Gwinnett's population living in its cities was
only 15 percent in 2000. As the county's population grows over the next two
decades, it's expected to decline to 14 percent. Not a good omen.

If this continues, the future Gwinnett may mirror Florida's present-day
Miami-Dade County. Despite the glamorous images seen on TV, this is not good
news.

If we want Gwinnett to be a thriving, desirable community, the county should
encourage the creation of new cities within its borders and the annexation of
unincorporated areas by existing cities. Present-day Miami-Dade County stands as
a cautionary tale for why.

A half century ago, nearly every one of the 250,000 residents of Dade County
lived in one of two dozen cities —- Miami, Miami Beach, Hialeah, Coral Gables
and others.

As the population grew, a few pioneers settled in the county's unincorporated
areas. As more joined them, a centralized county government was established to
manage the surge of new residents. The expectation was that new cities would
form, or existing cities would annex the newly settled areas.

As the population swelled over the next five decades to 2.3 million, instead of
the cities growing, the centralized county government grew and grew. Today, for
more than half the population of what is now Miami-Dade County, their closest
government is a bureaucratic behemoth that administers an area larger than the
state of Delaware.

The result is unresponsive and distant government. Commission hearings are
daylong affairs that for the average citizen require a time commitment few can
afford and are as impenetrable as they are Kafkaesque. The 13 county
commissioners, elected in single member districts, trade votes with their fellow
commissioners to approve projects in neighborhoods about which they know little
and for which they care little. Each chairs a powerful committee controlling
millions of dollars of county money. Consequently, the county office tower is a
nest of lobbyists that makes the U.S. Congress look like a kindergarten. For
individual citizens to be heard requires stamina and resolve few possess.

For 28 years I lived in Miami-Dade and witnessed the decline of neighborhoods
because of governmental indifference or ineptitude. To create parking,
homeowners stripped once-beautiful suburban streets of their trees and lawns.
Attached garages became extra rooms or illegal apartments. And, despite an
ordinance that made it a crime to remove a shopping cart from a store, carts
littered every neighborhood. All this happened under the watchful eye of a code
enforcement system that behaved like Sgt. Schultz in the old "Hogan's Heroes" TV
show, "I see nothing. . . . I see nothing."

County government thwarted attempts by communities to incorporate by
gerrymandering tax-revenue-rich industrial centers or shopping malls out of
proposed new cities and by imposing new fees to compensate the county for "lost"
tax revenue.

This was not an inevitable consequence of population growth. It resulted from
decades of inbred greed and a lust for political power. Just across the county's
northern border a different story had unfolded.

Broward County, home to Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood and 30 other cities,
experienced the same growth but addressed it quite differently.
The population of Broward is 1.6 million, but only 23,000, barely 1.4 percent,
live in unincorporated areas.

In Broward, residents have access to government that is close to them and
responsive. City commissioners are their neighbors. Cities compete to be the
most livable and attractive. The county government's activities are limited to
those beyond the budgets of individual cities, or those it can provide more
efficiently —- not that will yield the greatest power or payoff.

By 2006, I'd had enough of the decay I saw in Miami and left. I came to
Gwinnett, specifically to the city of Suwanee. I vowed never again to live where
government could become distant and unresponsive.

As a Suwanee City Council member explained, "We listen to our constituents. They
know where we live." It was meant literally. And it mattered.

Unless Gwinnett changes direction, it risks becoming more like Florida's stolid
and praetorian Miami-Dade County than responsive and enlightened Broward County.
For residents of unincorporated Gwinnett that's not good news. The county is
already struggling to deal with neighborhoods adrift and in decline.

If we want Gwinnett to be a desirable place to call home, with communities that
compete to attract residents with quality services and attractive neighborhoods,
the county should follow the model of Broward, not Miami-Dade. It should commit
to encouraging the creation of new cities and set as a goal that every Gwinnett
resident live in an incorporated city.

> Dick Goodman is a freelance marketing and business communications copywriter
who lives in Suwanee. He lived in Miami-Dade County for 28 years.