The Irony of Public Input and Economic Development

Posted on 17 March 2012 by admin

Citizen input during a comprehensive planning process always points  to one of the great ironies of economic development, namely the support  and failure of small businesses.

Take a few minutes and go read the results of the citizen survey for your local comprehensive plan. What you will find is the following:

  1. We need more small mom and pop stores or other small businesses;
  2. We want fewer big box stores and more economic diversity;
  3. We want our to see our downtown revitalized (generally combined with comments about interesting shops and restaurants).

You would be hard pressed to find a set of comprehensive plan survey responses that did not include citizens lament about the loss of locally owned small businesses.  In one recent comprehensive plan citizen survey we looked at, nearly sixty percent of those who responded said they wanted to see more economic diversity, more small businesses, and fewer “big box” stores.

The irony is that when push comes to shove, citizens may want to see more small businesses, but they generally fail to support small businesses. Small businesses fail because citizens vote with their checkbooks and make decisions based on ease rather than a concern for a diversified economy. Let’s face it…it is easier to stop at a big box store for all of your shopping than to have to visit a half-dozen locations to accomplish the same thing. Or, worse yet, they may visit a small business and then go home and order online because it is easier and will save you a couple of bucks.

According to the 3/50 project, for every dollar spent at a locally-owned small business, a bit more than 60% of the businesses take will stay in the local economy. If you shop at a big box store, the percentage drops to a bit more than 40%. If you order online, the percentage is zero.  The shopping decisions translate to fewer tax dollars being invested in the community and less money re-circulating. The 3/50 Project proposed a solution…go spend  50 dollars each in three locally owned businesses (restaurants, small shops, farmers markets, and so on) each month. Vow to spend roughly $150 per month locally and you may actually keep your small business community alive and thriving. For example: in a town of 6000 households, $50 expenditure would amount to $300,000. That is just one expenditure. For micro-businesses, that $50 dollar expenditure would keep their doors open for another couple of years, would pour $189,000 into the local economy, and would result in $15,000 in local sale tax.

If economic diversity is important to you, shop local. If local schools are important to you, shop local. If you economic diversity and products beyond the standard offerings at Walmart, shop local. If you want a local economy that actually works and is sustainable, shop local.  If your only concern is to save a dollar or two by ordering online, then order away, but don’t complain when your property taxes go up to support local schools or local government. And the next time you are asked what you would like to see in you town, don’t lament the loss of small businesses and the prevalence of big box stores.

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Posted in Comprehensive Planning, Planning and Politics | Leave a comment

Show up!

Posted on 16 February 2012 by admin

Dear Citizens:

Ask any planner who works with the public or is tasked with setting up public participation processes what the hardest or most painful part of the process is, and, after they stop grimacing, they are likely to say that the hardest part is getting people to show up.  Staff planners and the public agencies for which they work are almost routinely criticized for their failure to garner significant public input, yet most will tell you that they tried. Take them at their word. They probably did.

Government agencies, especially those charged with developing policy (like comprehensive plans),  include significant pubic input in order to create policies that enjoy, at least to some degree, public support. The stronger the support; the stronger the policy. It is always in their best interest to reach out and ask their citizens to join in the process. They send out surveys; hold public workshops, and invite their citizens to participate. They write press releases, news articles, and editorials; make phone calls; post announcements on their websites and on Facebook; and send out notifications on listservs. They turn on the lights, open the doors, and often do everything they can, short of walking up and down the main drag wearing a sandwich board, to get citizens to the table. The day and the time of the meeting arrives; four people out of 22,000 show up; and citizens wonder why their local planners are less than enthusiastic about repeating the experience and are convinced that their citizens really don’t care when the rubber in fact hits the road.

So…

You want more participation in your local government? Show up. Don’t demand a greater say and then sit back and assume that your neighbors are going to pick up the slack. They chances are, they are making the same assumption. Governments have the responsibility to ask citizens what they think; citizens have an equal responsibility to answer.

If your jurisdiction is asking for volunteers, for participants…show up.  Yes, it requires your time. It may require 20 minutes of your time and the cost of an envelop and a postage stamp to respond to a survey or two or more hours of your time to attend a meeting… the length of a football game…but your town will be a better place if you are an active participant.

If you profess to care about your jurisdiction…show up.  While you probably have a lot of obligations and demands on your time,  the people who actually take the time to participate have the same demands, but they also see value in adding their voices to the mix.

If you want a better town….
or city….
or county…

Show up.

 

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The politics of citizen participation.

Posted on 26 September 2011 by admin

In the first issue of The Community Planner, we briefly covered the politics of planning in an article on planning the planning process. The inclusion of the subject was a tacit acknowledgement that planners and those involved in the planning process avoid politics at their own risk and at risk to the larger process.

Most grad and undergrad  students in planning programs are told to avoid politics, that planning is or should be above the political fray. The unfortunate reality, however, is that planning is too often at the center of the political fray, especially at the local level.  The battle lines, when drawn, are neither simple nor neat.  Every planning decision is inherently political. Every proposal involves stakeholders, some direct and some on the outskirts; some who benefit, some who are impacted by tangible and intangible externalities. We send junior planners into this fray often woefully unprepared. This is especially true in jurisdictions where the political winds shift based on the makeup of the local board. Nowhere is this more evident than in the comprehensive planning process.

Comprehensive Planning and the tools that help jurisdictions implement their plan pit those who value community over individual rights, or who at least acknowledge there is some legitimacy to planning for the public good, and those who value individual rights, including property rights, over all else.  Anytime a plan is developed and a future land use map is designed, everyone’s property is impacted. The plan may call for widening certain streets, building a new fire station near a residential neighborhood, or implementing new approaches to stormwater management. Some residents accept that the impacts on their property or their neighborhoos may have long range benefits to the community as a whole; others will see any impact as a direct threat to their rights as landowners. Both sides are equal parts of the planning debate.

In many respects, the inclusion of citizen participation in the planning process is an act of political courage, although very few would define it as such. It is an open invitation for what amounts to the makings of political chaos, especially in communities where power is tightly held and control is only grungingly relinquished. Left to their own devices, elected officials are often reluctant to involve the public in the decision-making process precisely because it is messy and can potentially result in plans that may run counter to local political wisdom. At the same time, they are reluctant to not include substantive public participation because of the message non-participation planning sends to the voting public.

The fall issue of The Community Planner (Volume 2, Number 1) examines politics and planning and includes articles on mediation techniques, small group workshop methods, and a host of other materials to help planners and citizens survive the political windstorm. It is an issue, as one of our contributors says, that is both interesting and painful at the same time.

 

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…You can’t hold a meeting on that day!

Posted on 30 July 2011 by mhdorsett

In Montgomery County, Virginia, Virginia Tech football is sacrosanct, so scheduling a public meeting on a “game day” is roughly equivalent to scheduling a public hearing on the budget on Christmas Day. Not only will you have no one present at the meeting, but you are likely to read at least one Letter to the Editor accusing you of a conspiracy to suppress public participation. I know this as fact because I made the mistake my first year working for the county planning department.

Every planner has a list of days to avoid: major holidays, football games (or Lady Bears Basketball if you are in Springfield, Missouri), street festivals, and other major community events. If you are designing the public input process for your comprehensive plan or another major project, start by marking out the weekends and the extended periods of time when planning takes a far second seat to community life.  Here are some rules of thumb I have found particularly useful over the years:

  1. Do not schedule anything between the weekend before Thanksgiving (the start of Christmas shopping season, although admittedly the start time seems to be creeping sooner on the calendar) and a couple of days after New Years (allow for some recuperation time). While planners and those adamantly committed to the planning process may well be willing to meet during the holiday season, the chances are your meeting will fall victim to a school pageant, a church pageant, a work-related party, or a whole host of other events not generally seen during the rest of the year. Better to set aside the time for research and for catching up on the record keeping you’ve been putting off.
  2. Don’t schedule anything on Friday or Saturday nights. While planning meetings can be a great deal of fun, they do require some serious thought. American culture dictates that serious thought should be banned after 5 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays and that the evenings should be maintained for other purposes, most notably dating. Comprehensive planning meetings really do not make good first dates. In addition, if you live in a small town, a rural county, or anywhere in Texas, don’t schedule a meeting that overlaps with the Friday Night game.
  3. You can schedule for Saturday during the day (unless you live in an area where time and activity is dictated by a college football schedule–the rule applies only for the period from pre-season to the bowl season), but make sure you are not competing with any significant local events.  Your meeting will lose in a toe-to-toe battle with chili cook-offs, community and county fairs, and almost any other event where food is served.
  4. You can also relatively short meetings (2 hours or less) on Sunday afternoons. If you do this, make sure your start time is well after the “Sunday Dinner Hour,” which means no earlier than 2 p.m. and no later than 3 p.m. Be aware that some members of your community who will not attend a meeting on Sunday.  You should be okay, however, as long as you have scheduled some alternatives on days not associated with church services (which generally means Wednesdays are out).
  5. For political reasons, avoid scheduling meetings that are in direct competition with any elected board (county board, school board, etc.). Most elected officials take exception to having their meeting times tromped on or upstaged by the local planning department or by citizens. Fortunately, most boards do not meet weekly, so you do have some flexibility for Mondays and Tuesdays.
  6. Thursdays are usually good, with the exception of the occasional night football game. Check you local university’s schedule before you set dates. Fortunately, weekday football games are relatively rare. Most major events (festivals, concerts, tailgate parties) do not get scheduled for Thursdays, nor do most public meetings, prayer meetings, or school events. With the exception of Thanksgiving and occasionally Christmas and New Year’s, most government recognized holidays do not fall on Thursdays If, however,  you are in a jurisdiction with a significant Jewish or Muslim population be mindful of their holidays as well.
  7. Always have a designated an “inclimate weather date.”. Even the best laid plans will go awry is snow or ice are in the forecast, at least in the South. In the upper midwest and the high plains, the possibility of flurries is less likely to dissuade people from participating.

If you have a public information officer, ask him or her about the “dates to avoid.” Part of their job is to know what is happening in the community. While it is unlikely that you will ever get 100% citizen involvement, avoiding the major dates will help create the impression that you are thinking about your citizens and caring about their lives rather than your convenience. A few of them will notice and thank you for your efforts.

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Posted in Nuts and Bolts, Public Input, Tools of the Trade | Leave a comment

You Want Me to do What????

Posted on 30 June 2011 by admin

My first day as a professional planner, newly-minted graduate degree in hand, started with “I’m in charge of what?” My boss was sitting on a folding chair in the doorway of my office. The conversation had been what I had expected–nice, tidy, “junior planner” activites…staff reports, newsletter, press releases, special projects as assigned, and the capital improvements program. He pointed to the filing cabinet and said, “I think there is still an example in there, but we are changing the program so it may not help.” He left, chuckling.

Capital improvements program? I spent the next week digging through still packed boxes, looking for class notes from my graduate planning courses. From what Joe had said, the CIP, as he called it, was one of the major planning tasks performed by the department. CIPs were never mentioned in any of my classes. I looked at the example in the filing cabinet, looked at examples online, dug through books on planning and administration. I found descriptions of CIPS, discussions of the merits of CIPs, tales of CIPs gone wrong (and the alarming consequences of poor decision making), and brief academic discussions of the nature of CIPs (generally about two paragraphs in length). Nowhere did I find a single explanation of how to actually develop a CIP. When I walked into my first meeting with the Assistant County Administrator and the Director of Budgeting, I had no more idea of what I was supposed to do or how it was supposed to work. It took a crash course in the use of spreadsheets (also not covered in graduate classes in theory and site design) from the Director of Budgeting, two years of flying by the seat of my pants, and a graduate course in capital budgeting (and a crash course in finance math after class) before I had a full grasp of the process.

While I entered the planning profession with a head start in writing, research, and public presentations (the result of a graduate degree in English and nearly a decade of university teaching experience), I was woefully behind the curve in other areas: most notably anything having to do with numbers. University graduate programs assume that you bring basic skill sets to the table, including the ability to write and knowledge of basic mathematics. In my case, it had been nearly 20 years since I had opened a math text.

I don’t blame the graduate program for my lapses in knowledge. Planning requires a broad knowledge base and a wide variety of skill sets, most of which are learned on the job. I lucked out because my first boss believe in education and had the patience of Job–a good thing, since he spent a significant portion of his time during my first year teaching me statistics and helping me overcome a fairly major case of math phobia. The county paid for additional graduate courses, so I could fill in the gaps and maintained an impressive “in-house” library of planning-related books and journals.

But what happens to newly minted planners without the benefit of bosses like Joe; to non-planners hired to run a planning program; or citizens who want to know more about planning but lack access to the necessary resources. While the internet has made planning information more available, it can also lead to greater confusion. Much of the available information is descriptive or narrative in nature: it describes what has been done, but doesn’t explain, step by step, how to do it and what to watch out for. The information may illustrate the latest rage in planning, but it leaves out the practical advice on how to get from point A to point B without losing your sanity.

While The Community Planner may not cover all of the tricks of the trade, we hope that it helps planners and citizens have a better grasp on planning tools and techniques or at least enough of a grasp that they don’t leave the conversation thinking “you want me to do what?”

 


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