Local "Planning" Follies, part 3 - The Public’s “Input”

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

Part of a series. See Local "Planning" Follies Part 1 - The state of play in land use planning for links to all posts.

The Public’s “Input”

Early in 2006, my County Supervisor (Roberta MacGlashan) held her first Orangevale community meeting. This was supposedly to hear from citizens and formulate County policy around their concerns.
The principles discussed, and adopted on behalf of the community were these: 1. Keep our suburb rural (and control high-density housing), 2. Make our commerce nicer (make a “downtown”), 3. Keep streets safe for pedestrians, cyclists and equestrians (Reduce traffic congestion), and 4. Ensure our taxes stay local.

During the meeting some in attendance called the contradictions of these principles to Ms. MagGlashan’s attention. After all, rural areas don't attract better commercial development; they are the opposite of a downtown.

If you want to reduce traffic congestion, then you cannot build more rural sprawl, either. By design, sprawl absolutely guarantees every significant trip will be in an auto, and all the autos will meet in the traffic jam on the collector street. 

Pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use (commerce, residences, and offices all in the same neighborhood) is what really cuts congestion. Pedestrian-friendly street design connecting all these different kinds of development encourages something other than auto travel.

Perhaps the most misguided of the adopted “principles” is that our taxes should stay in the local community. Ours is a bedroom community, not a center of commerce, and it is common knowledge that homes don't pay enough taxes to cover what they demand in services (sales tax from commercial areas elsewhere makes up the difference). This is the state of California’s tax system, and it has been that way for decades. One citizen even stood up in the meeting to remind us all that we receive more in services than we pay in taxes.

Nevertheless, our Supervisor was willing to adopt “keep our taxes here” as a principle of governance. What next? “Keep the Pope Catholic”? 

Although the public is supposedly anxious about taxes and spending, the bulk of the problems with the County’s finances are in maintaining subsidies. These are not trivial subsidies, and the financial problems are wide and deep. Nevertheless, the County has continued to give away the store, offering land speculators enormous subsidies by rezoning floodplain and agricultural land to make more outlying sprawl. 

When this writer held up his hand to suggest that we tax rezones—since rezones practically mint money for the applicants—Ms. MacGlashan replied that she thought such a tax would be illegal. 

In my experience, the County has never been interested in pointing out the self-contradictory “have cake and eat it too,” or silly “keep the Pope Catholic” public wishes, and the public seldom wakes up to the inevitability of their disappointment in government with those wishes at the root of public policy. We don't suffer three-year-olds who entertain the illusion that they can have their cake and eat it too, why permit governance to be guided by such notions?

Perhaps inevitable disappointment is the entire point of this little exercise. As things are now, public officials can always say they’re pleasing some constituency when they do anything, given the self-contradictory demands expressed in these community meetings. Because there is no attempt to tell the public the alternatives, and discuss trade-offs, their costs and benefits, coherent publicly-guided policy is impossible. Things like transit and land use that necessarily need to work together are referred to the Department of Non-working Solutions because we can’t get our public servants more interested in something other than giving away the store to the commercial and development interests who give us suburban sprawl.