When you keep poking the bear you get Florida

Let me tell you an allegorical true story.  As people are tired of hearing me say by now, I am a retired city planner.  For over 30 years my specialty was writing zoning regulations for a rapidly growing Medium-sized City in Florida.  That’s why I can say I know something about lawmaking although I’m not an attorney.

In 1982 Medium City put me in charge of a multi-year total re-write of their zoning ordinance.  It had become hopelessly out of date since it was adopted in 1924, and they’d been tinkering with it to fix problems over the years and it had become a heavy tome that everyone hated.  My orders were: Simplify!  Simplify!

Unfortunately that project was when I came up one of my mantras that my fellow bureaucrats always hated to hear: “Every time you set out to simplify the zoning ordinance it ends up more complicated than ever.”  The new simplified ordinance was more than twice as long as the old one. 

That’s because every little provision of the code has a constituency – homeowners (i.e. voters) who hate it when their yuppie neighbors plant corn in their front yard, for example.  Over time new problems arose and our reaction as bureaucrats was to fix the problems without doing any violence to the underlying failed system that was so popular among our citizens (i.e. voters). 

Doing so wasn’t evil or purposeful – it was nothing more than human nature applied to a bureaucratic setting.  But the result is a big mess.

We who struggle against America’s registries are running into this same problem I experienced throughout my career.  Reform often makes things worse.

Last year when Florida conducted its annual sledgehammer campaign against its 86,000+ registrants they included a few crumbs.  Florida Action Committee (FAC) had recently won a court battle that centered on in-state travel and the definition of the word day.  Part of our argument, as in every other state, was that the law was confusing and vague. 

FDLE’s reaction was to propose “clarifications” that (at least in their minds) fixed the problems without doing any violence to the underlying failed system that is so popular among our voters.  I personally like the new definition of “Day,” but while they were at it they also “clarified” that oh yes they really like the idea that every single little registry paperwork error should be charged as a separate felony count punishable by up to five years imprisonment.  Yikes!

This year ACSOL has been trying hard to change California’s tiered registry to move CP cases from Tier 3 to, well, anywhere else.  This CP Tier 3 status was a poison pill left over from when they adopted their tiered registry a few years ago.  This time California’s reaction has been, okay, but only if we can force over 30,000 new people onto the state’s already 100,000+ registry.  Thanks for nothing!

Finally there is Michigan, where after a protracted legal battle the MI Supreme Court found the state’s registry unconstitutional.  Why was everybody surprised when the legislature just fixed the specific problems the Court had identified and re-adopted the same underlying failed system that is so popular among their voters?

This is not a fight against a specific law.  It’s a fight against human nature.  Reform often makes things worse.