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For once I kept my mouth shut at a public meeting here. It was Monday night, and the Salida Planning and Zoning Commission was holding a hearing on the revised Salida Comprehensive Master Plan.
The general thrust of the master plan, as I read it, was to enforce new and improved laws quite vigorously, especially as they applied to the esthetics of housing and small business.
It looked like plain old class warfare to me, but I
confess that I have an odd notion of class warfare.
Whenever America operates to the benefit of speculators and
coupon-clippers, it is known as business as usual,
not class warfare.
But if someone complains about
this, then he is attacked for attempting to ignite class
warfare.
These curious definitions appear elsewhere. Poor people
march on Washington.
Rich people who arrive in
private jets to contribute campaign funds and purchase
favorable decisions are, at worst, exercising their
right to petition government to redress their
grievances,
and usually they're just ignored.
Anyway, I didn't like the plan, and was prepared to say so at the hearing. But I didn't need to. So many other people showed up, almost all of them speaking in opposition, that I didn't need to say anything.
Many who spoke questioned the need for any plan.
In theory, I can see where planning could help. If there's construction going on near town, it affects water and sewer, traffic, park usage, etc. Planning should help accommodate that new population.
But I've been looking for evidence that planning works, and I haven't found much.
Vail, for instance, was well planned. Its founders, back in 1962, envisioned a European-style village with a pedestrian core at the base of some ski lifts.
Vail still has that -- along with parking problems, congestion, bad air days and similar urban woes.
I asked a friend there. The problem with Vail was
that it was too successful. I don't think anybody ever
envisioned how big it would get. So the original plan
worked pretty well until about 1980. Then there was just
more than anybody knew how to handle, and the original
planners didn't control everything any more, the way they
had at the start.
So there's one problem with planning. If it's successful and creates an attractive community, then other people want to move there. That drives up prices, but not wages. Workers don't have housing, and are forced to commute.
The commutes extend. Carbondale once housed Aspen
employees, but as the current joke goes, The
billionaires pushed the millionaires out of Aspen, and so
the millionaires are pushing everybody else out of
Carbondale.
Thus the Aspen commutershed
broadens -- Glenwood
Springs, Silt, New Castle, even over McClure Pass to Paonia
and Hotchkiss.
Or we can look at the Boulder approach -- limiting population growth. But that just keeps people from living in Boulder, not from working in Boulder. So people commute from Longmont, Louisville, Lafayette, Erie, Superior -- and Boulder gets severe traffic and parking problems.
Planning is supposed to be a way to anticipate and avoid problems, and yet it appears that planning causes problems.
After an earlier hearing, I asked our mayor why we
needed a plan, and she said It gives us some control of
developments. If something comes along and it's something
we don't want and it doesn't fit the plan, we can deny it
and we won't be acting in an arbitrary and capricious
way.
But does that ever really happen?
I recently received some e-mail from someone who lives in a small town along the I-70 corridor on the Western Slope.
Last February, he notes, the town adopted a
comprehensive master plan designed to maintain a
small-town atmosphere in a rural setting.
Along comes a developer with plans for 1,400 units that
would at least quadruple the town's population. That
doesn't sound like any way to maintain a small-town
atmosphere in a rural setting, and at a hearing the other
night, speaker after speaker
expressed
opposition, anger, even outrage.
Nonetheless the local authorities insisted this was in the town's best interest, since growth was inevitable and this development was first-class with 59 percent open space including two 18-hole golf courses, etc.
So what was the point of having a plan if it doesn't stop a development that residents don't want?
As nearly as I can tell, money gets what it wants anyway, plan or no plan. Having a comprehensive master plan on the books just means supporting a few more bureaucrats and lawyers, to no useful effect.
Or, as a friend wondered during a nicotine break at the
hearing here, If the Red Army couldn't keep McDonald's
out of Moscow, what hope do we have of running our own
towns in our own way?
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