This month is our annual “state of the season” retrospective, and I don’t think many of us were expecting to top the record numbers of visitors and tax revenue generated by the 2021-22 tourist season. And we were right. As David Dorsey lays out in “A Season of Rebuilding” on page 28, this year’s results are sobering: double-digit percentage decreases in the number of passengers flying into Southwest Florida International Airport compared to last year, the lowest spring training attendance numbers in a decade for the Twins and Red Sox and a nearly 50% drop in tourism tax revenue in Lee County—plus the untold ripple effects on businesses struggling to reopen and stay open. There are other factors to point to besides the hurricane, but having nearly a third of Lee’s hotel rooms wiped out at a stroke isn’t something the region can bounce back from immediately.

But what’s striking to me about this story isn’t just the numbers, grim though they were this year; it’s the appreciation voiced by practically all parties, from hoteliers to tourism directors to baseball execs, for the community’s response to Hurricane Ian, and the optimism they expressed for next season. Growth and new development are still very strongly in Southwest Florida’s future. We won’t be setting new records for a little while yet, but it might not be too long.

Growth, meanwhile, requires guidance, and where that shaping influence comes from is an ongoing question. Several bills passed in the recent session of the Florida Legislature addressed varying aspects of this issue, and the collective effect is a weakening of local control over planning decisions. The issues involved are high-stakes balancing acts: multimillion-dollar developments versus established community character. The immense and intense demand for affordable housing set against longtime residents’ concerns over density and sprawl (and traffic). Measures intended to prevent substantial projects from being bogged down by bureaucratic roadblocks may inadvertently become exploitable by political interests. As John Guerra writes in “Who Shapes the Cities’ Future?” on page 42, the results of this legislative session are likely to be that residents have less time and fewer legal tools to object to and potentially block construction projects in their neighborhoods.

Of course, in order to express a community voice, members of the community must share their opinions when opportunities arise. Case in point: The Resilient Lee task force is working to compile recommendations for what to do with more than a billion dollars in federal funding for Hurricane Ian relief. As you’ll read on page 66, public meetings are ongoing and the results will affect all of Southwest Florida.

The shape of the future is up to each of us.