Five local projects are getting money so they can continue to keep residents informed and engaged.

A total $120,000 from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Donor Advised Fund has been awarded to local projects in the Big Bend. The foundation’s goal is to promote informed and engaged communities.

Randy Hanna, chairman of the Our Region Tomorrow that received $48,000, said his non-profit hopes the grant will help fuel efforts to create meaningful conversations throughout the region on issues that need attention, such as under-employment, rural health care and protecting the environment.

“We are pleased because (the grant) will allow government, business and environmental leaders from across our region to be able to come together to clearly understand the important issues in all of the counties,” Hanna said.

The Knight fund is under the umbrella of the Community Foundation of North Florida. It was created to help improve the quality of life in communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers.

“This first round of grants in the new priority area of fostering an informed, engaged community inspired five amazing projects,” Joy Watkins, president of CFNA, said in a written statement. “And this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the impact of the Knight fund over time.”

Here’s what each project received:

Our Region Tomorrow — $48,000 for the Regional Leadership Program.

Apalachicola Riverkeeper — $25,000 for the Oil Spill Recovery Video Monitoring Project.

Tallahassee Community College Foundation — $23,000 for Town and Gown Relations Project.

Council on Culture & Arts — $15,000 for the Arts & Culture Live Project.

The OASIS Center for Women and Girls — $9,083 for Women Can Run Project.

Kicking off the event were Dr. James Ammons, President of Florida A&M University, and Randy Hanna, Chairman of Our Region Tomorrow.

Four discussions took place during the day, as local and regional experts conferred on various elements of the region’s health.

Mark O’Bryant, President and CEO of Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare, moderated the State of the Region on Health discussion, with presenters Jason Hight, Public Health Analyst at the Florida Department of Health.

Beth Kirkland, Executive Director of the Economic Development Council of Tallahassee/Leon County, moderated a discussion on Health Care and the Economy, with participation from Bryan Desloge, a Leon County Commissioner and CEO of Desloge Home Oxygen & Medical Equipment, and Bruce Reuben, President of the Florida Hospital Association.

In a discussion on Health Outcomes and Information Technology analysis, Dr. Dan Kaelin, Chairman of the Big Bend Regional Healthcare Information Organization, and Dr. James Story, Archbold Memorial Hospital, shared information about the ongoing work in the region of extending health care service through telemedicine and electronic medical records.

Community Design and Education was the fourth and final panel discussion. Rob Palmer, ULI North Florida, moderated a discussion that included presentations from Daniel Parker, Assistant Division Director at the Florida Department of Health; Eric Stern, Curriculum Development and School Improvement Administrator in Palm Beach County School District; and Robin Safley, Capital Health Plan Champions Program.

The Forum concluded with a Luncheon and keynote address from Russell Allen, President and CEO of BioFlorida.

“The announcement came today from Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood during a phone call with U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson.

“The additional $800 million comes on top of $1.25 billion President Obama announced in January the state would receive for the Tampa to Orlando stretch. The award means Florida only needs approximately $300 million more from the federal government in addition to the state’s share of funding to complete the $2.6 billion project. The remaining federal funds could come next year.

“This is fantastic news for Florida,” Nelson said. “This will ensure the state remains full speed ahead with high-speed rail construction. As I’ve said many times, high-speed rail will be a game changer for Florida’s economy, along the likes of the Interstate system and Disney.

DOT also notified Congress Monday of its intent to award an $8 million planning grant for the proposed high-speed rail line between Orlando and Miami.

The ORT forum series was developed to elevate key community and regional conversations, establish partners and find solutions. Health and health care in communities are considered (next to education, workforce and quality of life) critical elements of a thriving and competitive economy. This forum will begin with a snapshot of our region’s health followed by informative panel discussions on components that affect health outcomes. All panels consist of local and regional experts and will conclude with a luncheon presentation.

Keynote Speaker:
Bruce Rueben, President, Florida Hospital Association

Four Panel Topics:

• State Of The Region On Health
• Health Care And The Economy
• Health Outcomes And Information Technology
• Built Environment Impacts On Health

Panelists & Moderators:

Dr. James Ammons, President, FAMU
Dr. Ken Brummel-Smith, M.D., FSU College of Medicine
Bryan Desloge, Commissioner, Leon County
Mary Goble, MSN, RN
Jason Hight, Public Health Analyst, Florida Department of Health
Dr. Dan Kaelin, M.D., Vascular Surgeon; Chairman, Big Bend Regional Healthcare Information Organization
Daniel Parker, Assistant Division Director, Division of Environmental Health, Florida Department of Health
Dr. James L. Story, Jr., M.D., Archbold Hospital
Dr. Scott Whiddon, M.D., Tallahassee Memorial Family Medicine

When & Where:
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
8:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
FSU Turnbull Conference Center
555 W Pensacola Street

Cost:
$25.00 per person including lunch

REGISTER HERE

Download the printable flyer HERE

Brogan told the standing-room only crowd that communication–verbal and written–is key in life; and advised the aspiring business leaders not to forget about personal relationships throughout their journeys.

S.B.I. student Jasmine Miles said, “We as S.B.I. students really got the opportunity to interact with him, ask him great questions and the experiences that he shared with us are one of a kind.”

The event was a part of S.B.I.’s 2010-2011 forum series.

“They’ve crammed as much as they can in here,” she said this month, noting that just a few years ago cows grazed on the land west of I-95. “The people around here didn’t want it — they objected. But the City Commission did it anyway.”

Even now, with about 300,000 residential units sitting empty around the state, the push to build continues. Since 2007, local governments have approved zoning and other land use changes that would add 550,000 residential units and 1.4 billion square feet of commercial space, state figures show.

So for Ms. Blackner, a Palm Beach lawyer with a Mercedes full of paperwork, the real estate crisis is not just the fault of Wall Street, Washington or misguided borrowers; it is also the back-scratching bond between elected officials and builders — a common source of frustration in weak real estate markets around the country wherever developers are still fighting to add more housing.

In Florida, at least, Ms. Blackner hopes to put an end to the chronic oversupply with a ballot initiative she has labeled “Hometown Democracy.”

Amendment 4, as it is officially called, would give Floridians a vote on changes to state-mandated plans for growth in every county and municipality. Much of the potential impact of the measure is up for debate, with important details most likely to be decided by the courts.

But if it is added to the state’s Constitution — which would require 60 percent approval on Election Day — critics and supporters envision revolutionary change.

Leaders of the Yes on 4 campaign, including Ms. Blackner, say it would end a culture of freewheeling development that began when Hamilton Disston started dredging Florida swamps in the 1880s. Critics, led by chambers of commerce, say the measure would lead to lost jobs, chaos and expensive court battles.

Either way, the referendum is bringing into sharp relief the conflict surrounding real estate nationwide: while new homes, growth and the American dream are forever intertwined, many people are questioning why development often overwhelms other public priorities, even after it led to an economic crisis.

“Most planning advocates would love to have the structure we have in Florida, but most Floridians know that the structure doesn’t work,” said Michael Allan Wolf, a University of Florida law professor. “Amendment 4 suggests that, on the ground, this system is really broken.”

This is not an even fight. Ms. Blackner’s group has raised $2.4 million (with $800,000 from her own pocket), but most of it was spent on getting on the ballot.

The No on 4 campaign has raised nearly $12 million through a series of political action committees — enough for a glossy Web site, consultants and plenty of airtime. The Florida Association of Realtors is its largest single contributor, giving more than $2.3 million.

The nation’s biggest homebuilders, after receiving a multibillion-dollar bailout from Congress this year, have also been quite generous. Altogether, Lennar Homes, KB Home and Pulte Homes gave more than $1 million to No on 4’s main political action committee, Citizens for Lower Taxes and a Stronger Economy.

Ryan Houck, a spokesman for the group, said that developers were not the only opponents of the amendment, which he described as “overreaching and extreme.” The contributors’ list also includes community farm bureaus, which worry that it would make it harder to sell and rezone agricultural land for other uses.

Some county planners are also concerned about potential costs to government. “The litigation that ensues, no matter what happens, is really the potential fly in the ointment,” said Mark Satterlee, planning and development director for St. Lucie County.

Amendment 4 leaves open to interpretation whether every proposed change to a community’s development plan would need to appear on future ballots. In a sign of possible litigation to come, lawyers favoring the measure say that it would cover only major land use changes and that related proposals could be combined for votes by commissions.

Opponents say that under Amendment 4, each tweak of a development plan — which every county and municipality must have in place under a state law passed in the mid-1980s, and which requires updating every seven years — would have to appear on the ballot. Voters, they say, would have hundreds of items to digest each year.

That is not the typical situation. Annual figures from a half-dozen Florida counties and several fast-growing cities suggest that most voters in most years would decide on no more than 20 changes, usually fewer. (The No on 4 Web site says that the small town of Carrabelle would have had 617 proposed changes on its 2006 ballot under such a law, but records and interviews show only a handful of changes proposed that year.)

A more serious issue may be whether the ballot items, which are limited to 75 words or less, would lead to advertising campaigns, followed by misunderstandings and lawsuits. Larger development changes cover complicated issues including water supply and transportation, often with hundreds of pages of material. “Sometimes we take a hand truck to carry boxes down to the commissioners,” said Rick Burris, principal planner for Lee County.

However, Mr. Burris added, plan change approvals were not required for building. While developers claim that Amendment 4 would make construction impossible, current community plans around the state actually include robust expansion.

A rural area like Jackson County has room for 996 years of residential growth at current rates, according to a 2009 state analysis. Charlotte County has 162 years of growth in its plan, while St. Lucie County has the capacity to house its growing population for the next 212 years.

And that is what gets Ms. Blackner really fuming. “They could build until hell freezes over,” she said during a daylong tour of failed developments. “This isn’t about building. It’s about control.”

She drove past a row of empty condos on Route 1 called the Preserve, then past commercial and residential space, all vacant concrete floors and for-rent signs; then more examples of what she called the political class’s addiction to the next deal — apartment towers with few occupants, several stories higher than the plans’ original limits.

Finally she arrived at Tesoro, a golf community in the City of Port St. Lucie with a $48 million San Simeon-like clubhouse. The city’s mayor resigned and was arrested last Wednesday, on charges of pocketing campaign contributions, including money from developers. Tesoro — former scrub brush — is now an eerie ghost town of minicastles with fewer than 100 residents.

“This is bubble grandeur,” Ms. Blackner said, noting that Port St. Lucie’s taxpayers were left to pay for a new firehouse in the development.

“The commissioners were supposed to be protecting the community,” she said. “That’s their job, and they were asleep at the switch.”

A year or so later, with midterm elections looming and an electorate that is as fearful and angry as any in memory, the stock market has risen, but even a breath of bad news can send it tumbling. As dismal as housing prices continue to be, they have yet to hit bottom in some places. Unemployment remains frozen at an overall level of nine-plus percent, and job creation has been anemic. If the crisis belonged to George W. Bush, the recovery has been Obama’s—and it has been a fragile and tentative one at best. Along with billions of dollars in stimulus payments, the president has spent down most of his political capital. So what is his next step?

That depends upon how serious Obama is about his legacy—whether he is looking to win votes for himself and his party in the short-term, or to lay the foundation for a durable new economic and social order that is only beginning to emerge but is required for sustained prosperity. The two goals are not mutually exclusive, but neither are they always compatible.

Let me say first that the bailouts and stimulus programs of the last two years were not a complete mistake. Economic policymakers don’t have the luxury of hindsight in the heat of a crisis; there is tremendous pressure on them to do something. It would have been suicidal not to give the banks the capital infusions they needed when the whole financial system was on the brink of meltdown or to refuse to help states avoid laying off thousands of teachers and police and other workers.

But now we find ourselves having the wrong debate—about whether a stimulus is needed or not—and we need to shift it. The fiscal and monetary fixes that have helped mature industrial economies like the United States get back on their feet since the Great Depression are not going to make the difference this time. Mortgage interest tax credits and massive highway investments are artifacts of our outmoded industrial age; in fact, our whole housing-auto complex is superannuated. As University of Chicago economist Raghuram Rajan wrote recently in the Financial Times: “The bottom line in the current jobless recovery suggests the US has to take deep structural reforms to improve its supply side. The quality of its financial sector, its physical infrastructure, as well as its human capital, all need serious economic and politically difficult upgrades.” Now we’re getting to the nub of the matter.

Why? Because this is no bump in the business cycle that we are going through; it is an epochal event, comparable in magnitude and scope to the Great Depression of the 1930s, and even more so, as historian Scott Reynolds Nelson has observed, to the decades-long crisis that began in 1873. Back then our economy was undergoing a fundamental shift from agriculture to industry. We are in the midst of an equally tectonic transition today, as our industrial economy gives way to a post-industrial knowledge economy—but by focusing all our attention of whether we need a bigger stimulus or a smaller deficit, we’re flying blind.

These kind of epochal changes, which I have called “great resets,” are long, generational processes. They are driven by improvements in efficiency and productivity, and by the waves of innovation that Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” When economies slow down, inefficient companies go by the boards. Seeking better returns on investment, businesses redirect capital towards innovation. When the economist Alfred Kleinknecht diagrammed U.S. patents along a timeline extending through the nineteenth century, he found a huge spike in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, a period of depression that also saw the invention of electric power, modern telephony, and street and cable car systems. The economic historian Alexander Field observed a similar clustering and unleashing of innovation in the 1930s, which he dubbed the most “technologically progressive decade” of the twentieth century. More R&D labs opened in the first four years of the Great Depression than in the entire preceding decade, 73 compared to 66. By 1940, the number of people employed in R&D had quadrupled, increasing from fewer than 7,000 in 1929 to nearly 28,000 by 1940, according to the detailed historical research of David Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg.

Our transition from a Fordist mass production economy, based on the assembly line, to a knowledge economy, in which the driving force is creativity and technological innovation, has been under way for some time; the evidence can be seen in the physical decline of the old manufacturing cities and the boom in high-tech centers like Silicon Valley, government boomtowns like Washington DC, and college towns from Boulder to Ann Arbor. Between 1980 and 2006, the U.S. economy added some 20 million new jobs in its creative, professional, and knowledge sectors. Even today, unemployment in this sector of the economy has remained relatively low, and according to Bureau of Labor Statistics projections, is likely to add another seven million jobs in the next decade. By contrast, the manufacturing sector added only one million jobs from 1980 to 2006, and, according to the BLS, will lose 1.2 million by 2020.

This is the future towards which our post-industrial economy is already trending—and government should be proposing policies that will help to create a new geography and a new way of life to sustain and support it. But that doesn’t mean we need a centralized public bureaucracy to speed the process of change. As it happens, innovation occurs not only within big companies, major laboratories, and research universities, but also on the margins of business and academia. John Seely Brown, the former director of Xerox’s storied Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), has observed that many, if not most, of today’s high-tech innovations are products of the open-ended, collaborative explorations of hackers. Steve Jobs didn’t invent the PC; he saw its components at work at PARC, realized their potential, and put the pieces together.

Silicon Valley attracted the smartest innovators and entrepreneurs and provided them with the freedom and the funding to mobilize the resources they needed to start their own companies. What worked in Silicon Valley has to be reproduced across the board—government and business need to work together to create and maintain an open environment for innovation. That means dialing back intellectual property restrictions to encourage a freer flow of ideas; encouraging universities to open up their labs and discoveries to the world; and actively enabling and attracting entrepreneurs (a resource that is in truly short supply) from all over the world to come to the U.S. and turn new discoveries into companies that can grow and create jobs. We have to encourage our own young people to take risks and start companies, too. That means providing portable benefits, and not just in health care.

Our whole education system needs a drastic overhaul to make its teaching styles less rote and more dynamic, to encourage more hands-on, interactive creativity. The centralized school system as we know it is, after all, another product of the Industrial Age. And we shouldn’t fret about having to teach non-native students the English language either. An uninterrupted inflow of talented immigrants is absolutely key to our future prosperity.

Entrepreneurship should become the fourth R, right alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic. Kids need to learn more than just the abstract principles of economics—they should be taught how to form businesses, create business plans, and market their ideas. Education can no longer be confined to traditional academic subjects; students must learn how to create something of their own. Imagine if we devoted a fraction of the time and money and passion that we give to athletics to helping our young people learn how to turn their ideas into enterprises. We are wasting time and resources training young people for factory and administrative jobs that no longer exist; they have to learn how to innovate and create jobs of their own.

That brings me to a central issue that has been completely absent from the current debate. As our new economy emerges, a new way of life and a new geography of living and working must come into being as well. We didn’t finally emerge from the Great Depression until the rise of the suburbs in the 1950s, which fuelled demand not just for single-family homes but for the cars, refrigerators, washer-driers, TVs, and stereo systems that were coming off the assembly lines. Home ownership provided a powerful form of geographic Keynsianism.

But that system has reached the end of its useful life. It has led to overinvestment in housing, autos, and energy and contributed to the crises we are trying so hard to extricate ourselves from today. It’s also no longer an engine of economic growth. With the rise of a globalized economy, many if not most of the products that filled those suburban homes are made abroad. Home ownership worked well for a nation whose workers had secure, long-term jobs. But now it impedes the flexibility of a labor market that requires people to move around. My own research shows that the most innovative, most productive, and most highly skilled regions have rates of homeownership of 55-to-60 percent, while those where homeownership exceeds 75 or 80 percent are economically distressed.

Federal policy needs to encourage less home ownership and a greater density of development, along with the construction of smaller and more low-energy houses—not just because this is a greener way of life (which it is), but because it’s required to free up capital that can be invested in the skill development, technology development, and economic structures that the economy of the future requires. That means eliminating the mortgage interest tax deduction along with other massive federal subsidies for the secondary mortgage market, as well as other massive subsidies for road construction and infrastructure that undergird sprawling, economically inefficient, utterly wasteful suburban and exurban development. I am not advocating that we become a nation of renters, but the balance of homeownership should tilt back from its current level of 66 percent to perhaps 60 or even 55 percent.

Instead of further encouraging the growth of an auto-housing-suburban complex, the government should promote those forces that are subtly causing the shift away from it. Chief among these are the creation of inter-connected mega-regions, like the Boston-Washington corridor and the Char-lanta region (Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh Durham) and ten or so more across the United States. Concentration and clustering are the underlying motor forces of real economic development. As Jane Jacobs identified and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Lucas later formalized, clustering speeds the transmission of new ideas, increases the underlying productivity of people and firms, and generates the diversity required for new ideas to fertilize and turn into new innovations and new industries.

In fact, the key to understanding America’s historic ability to respond to great economic crises lies in what economic geographers call the “spatial fix”—the creation of new development patterns, new ways of living and working, and new economic landscapes that simultaneously expand space and intensify our use of it. Our rebound after the panic of 1873 and long downturn was forged by the transition from an agricultural nation to an urban-industrial one organized around great cities. Our recovery from the Great Depression saw the rise of massive metropolitan complexes of cities and suburbs, which again intensified and expanded our use of space. Renewed prosperity hinges on the rise of yet another even more massive and more intensive geographic pattern—the mega-region. These new geographic entities are larger than the sum of their parts; they not only produce but consume, spurring further demand.

Infrastructure is key to powering spatial fixes. The railroads and streetcar, cable car, and subway systems speeded the movement of people, goods, and ideas in the late 19th century; the development of a massive auto-dependent highway system powered growth after the Great Depression and World War II. It’s now time to invest in infrastructure that can undergird another round of growth and development. Part of that is surely a better and faster information highway. But the real fix must extend beyond the cyber-economy to our physical development patterns—the landscape of the real economy.

That means high-speed rail, which is the only infrastructure fix that promises to speed the velocity of moving people, goods, and ideas while also expanding and intensifying our development patterns. If the government is truly looking for a shovel-ready infrastructure project to invest in that will create short-term jobs across the country while laying a foundation for lasting prosperity, high-speed rail works perfectly. It is central to the redevelopment of cities and the growth of mega-regions and will do more than anything to wean us from our dependency on cars. High-speed rail may be our best hope for revitalizing the once-great industrial cities of the Great Lakes. By connecting declining places to thriving ones—Milwaukee and Detroit to Chicago, Buffalo to Toronto—it will greatly expand the economic options and opportunities available to their residents. And by providing the connective fibers within and between America’s emerging mega-regions, it will allow them to function as truly integrated economic units.

Obama allocated $8 billion towards high speed rail in his 2009 budget. It’s a start, but a disappointingly modest one. Depending on who’s doing the estimating and how high speed a system is envisioned, the price tag for a fully modern, truly national high-speed rail system runs somewhere between $140 and $500 billion. That’s a lot of money, but measured in 2009 dollars, Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System cost $429 billion to build—which makes it look like something of a bargain.

High speed rail is just one solution—we will need many more if we are going to encourage our cities to become more densely developed, more innovative, and more economically vibrant. But we won’t find solutions if our pundits, politicians, and business leaders are still caught up in parochial arguments about debt and deficits, and how to bring back the housing industry. We can’t neglect the present, but we also have to think beyond it. If we keep spending on the old economy and our old ways of consumption and living, a new, post-industrial society may still emerge, but it will take longer to do so and it may not be one that most Americans will want to live in.

“You are doing OK, but if you want to do better, you have to shake up the status quo,” said Tom Murphy, a senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute, former Pennsylvania state legislator, and mayor of Pittsburgh from 1994 to 2005.

Murphy’s lunchtime address at FSU’s Turnbull Conference Center capped the morning forum on a regional approach to infrastructure development, sponsored by the Economic Development Council of Tallahassee/Leon County, Urban Land Institute North Florida and Our Region Tomorrow.

Cities have a particular challenge because in major metro areas, empty-nesters and Generation Y adults overwhelmingly want to live in urban areas. If Tallahassee is going to compete in a different world with a new economy, it will be driven by local universities, the advent of new technology and formation of businesses that recruit the area’s talent, he said.

“You have the raw materials here,” Murphy told the gathering. “I think you have got to think about how they get connected.”

While in office, Murphy used public-private partnerships to leverage more than $4.5 billion in economic development in Pittsburgh, including sports stadiums and a convention center. The effort also transformed blighted, abandoned industrial properties into new commercial, residential and public sites.

The Big Bend is projected to have 75,000 more households over the next 20 years, so critical decisions are being made now on how to address that growth, especially the infrastructure needed. Forum sessions covered transportation, energy, broadband communications, and the region’s green infrastructure and water resources.

A critical element will be the area’s ability to handle mobility needs. Harry Reed, executive director of the Capital Region Transportation Planning Agency, said the region is facing a projected 78-percent increase in freight movement through 2025.

“We have to think of how we will move freight efficiently, not just people,” he added.

All presentations have been posted.

The Tallahassee Democrat reported on the event.

The program Vrooman has championed, Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE), enables property owners to borrow money to buy solar panels, wind generators, insulation or shutters for their homes with little upfront expense.

The program would establish a municipal “green corridor,” consisting of Cutler Bay, Palmetto Bay, Pinecrest, South Miami and Coral Gables. The five cities would lend money for a homeowner to install a proven energy-saving device — say, $30,000 in solar panels or $3,000 for solar plumbing.

In return, the cities would place a lien on the home until the loan was paid off by the homeowner, who would be assessed a monthly fee for the loan’s duration.

“It’s a fee that is not based on the property value but based on a set amount of what it cost to do the installation,” Vrooman said.

The investment could be recouped by lower electrical bills. Each home would undergo an energy audit and cost-benefit analysis before opting into the voluntary program.

Last month, the House and Senate passed Senate bill HB 7179, designed to help communities band together to assist residents in joining PACE.

On Monday, Gov. Charlie Crist received the bill and is reviewing it. He has until June 1 to take action on it, said his spokesman Sterling Ivey.

Sponsors anticipate its passage, especially in the wake of Crist’s call last week to convene a special legislative session later this month. At the session, legislators will consider oil drilling bans and renewable energy legislation.

“If it’s dealing with solar panels and opportunities for businesses and Floridians to move in that direction, he has been supportive of solar energy and rebates in the past,” Ivey said.

“It’s a no-mandate, no taxpayer subsidy that allows people to finance energy efficiency and other clean technologies, like solar, and save energy costs,” said Rep. Adam Hasner, R-Delray Beach, the House majority leader who cosponsored the bill with Sen. Michael Bennett, R-Bradenton.

“This is one of the most innovative public policy initiatives we’ve addressed in Florida for years for renewable energy. Local governments see this as a way for them to help residents and create jobs.”

The impetus began last year after Vrooman researched the PACE program in Berkeley, Calif. To date, 16 states operate PACE.

Vrooman lobbied Tallahassee and Cutler Bay’s sister cities. Pinecrest, Palmetto Bay, Coral Gables and South Miami all passed resolutions earlier this year to lend support for Vrooman’s initiative, as did Cutler Bay.

In the PACE program, the city would pay for the installation of the energy-saving measure. Homeowners also could apply for federal incentives to knock the costs down.

The benefit would stay with the house should an owner decide to sell sooner.

If the bill becomes law, a homeowner seeking to enroll in PACE would agree to a cost-benefit analysis of his or her home, taking into account kilowatt usage, house design, location, trees and other factors.

Such factors would play into the cost-benefit and the payback. Solar panels, for example, can cost about $35,000 for a three-bedroom, two-bath house, Vrooman said.

A 2009 Council on Environmental Quality report stated that the 130 million homes in the United States generate more than 20 percent of the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions. Energy efficiency retrofitting can reduce energy use by up to 40 percent per home, and cut home energy bills by $21 billion annually, according to the report.

Some homes may not need the pricey panels, but can qualify through other measures, such as insulation, shutters, energy-efficient windows or solar plumbing.

The payback rate for a $3,000 solar plumbing unit could be three to five years, with savings of about $40 per month for a four-person household, said Alan Towsley, owner of Sunworks in Miami, a solar energy installation firm.

“It really is such an individualized project. The system size and cost is tailored to the specific homeowner and consumption and can vary dramatically,” said Tom Staples, president of Cooler Planet, a Washington-based firm that consults homes and businesses in connecting to solar power.

One local example lends support to the plan.

Dr. Oscar Hevia, a Dadeland-area dermatologist, turned his one-story, three-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot Coral Gables house into the first solar-powered home in the city last summer. A series of 20 photovoltaic cells on his rooftop convert sunlight into electric energy.

“It’s been phenomenal,” Hevia said. “The real charm, the part I like about it so much, is that every month it’s the gift that keeps giving.”

Hevia declined to say how much he spent and says he is awaiting federal rebates to help offset his out-of-pocket cost. He says he has cut his electric bill from $500 to $250 in the peak summer months and to about $90 in the winter.

Vrooman says it could take until the end of the year for the program to be implemented if Crist signs the bill.

“We’re going into new territory in the state of Florida.”