Hometown Democracy

In case you dont know about the hometown democracy movement, its basically a ballot initiative to make it impossible to change a city or county's Comprehensive Plan without a public referendum. Their blog is at http://floridahometowndemocracyamendment.blogspot.com/
and states:

"This blog is designed to shine the light on the ongoing campaign of disinformation about the Florida Hometown Democracy movement and refute those lies. The real estate industry is Florida's biggest business and it is their goal to make sure that changes to our comprehensive plans can be made as quickly and easily as possible."

Here's basically how it works: if you want to change the use of a piece of property, you have to get a majority vote from people you dont even know and cant even talk to about it. So why would they vote "yes"? change is bad right? so if I vote "no" then everything will be ok right? Everybody who works in public service knows that the public is generally afraid of change. What they dont realize is that change is happening every day. Every day, another person is born, a person immigrates, a citizen graduates from college, a business is founded, a business goes bankrupt, etc, etc, etc. Comprehensive Plans change because life changes and the world changes. We, as citizens, pay highly trained people to act on our behalf, to the best of their ability to make sure these changes to the Comp Plans are the best that they can be. But the Hometown Democracy movement claims that the general voting public, who has no training and no experience in such issues, can do it better. To me, it would be like having a vote as to what kind of medical procedure I should have, or how the medical procedure should be done.

With that being said, I dont blame the Hometown Democracy folks one bit (even though I think their proposal is a colossal mistake). I stated earlier that citizens pay highly trained people to act on their behalf for the greater good. But what if there are forces preventing those highly trained people from doing their job? Or what if their jobs are threatened by the people who pay them? Then the whole system is basically a sham.
I think the Hometown Democracy folks are disgusted, and rightly so, by the Comp Plan changes that created leap-frog development which created a giant sucking sound of investment being sucked out of the rest of the city (the old city limits of Jax). Its cheap and easy to rezone and flip greenfields, that's the only reason many of these changes were made, and its not a good enough reason.
Hometown Democracy is a colossal mistake, but it's also a shot across the bow of local governments. Its a vote of "no confidence" in elected officials and city planners alike. Now its up to officials and planners to step up and to improve this situation. Just the fact that this Hometown Democracy is even being discussed is evidence of our failure.