Local governments as policy entrepreneurs - Evaluating Florida's "concurrency experiment"

One centerpiece of Florida's landmark 1985 growth management legislation was the concept of concurrency, a requirement that new development not proceed unless specific services are in place to service the development. Whereas many analysts have critiqued Florida's concurrency mandate, these studies have usually focused on concurrency as a concept and not concurrency as actually implemented and practiced by local governments. For this article, we investigated the concurrency practices of 66 local governments in Florida, finding substantial variation in concurrency practices. Beyond this review of local government concurrency practices, the author also draws on the policy implementation literature to learn from Florida's concurrency experiment.