On Balance
There’s nothing more difficult to achieve than meaningful economic development, and our hats are off to anybody who can make it happen around here. Last week Ulster County’s wise men on the subject came up with some ideas and here’s what they were: Develop strategies and a vision and do it in a non-partisan way, focus on redevelopment & “shovel-ready” sites, support home-grown business, forget the huge projects and make things work small. All good recommendations of course but hardly earth shaking stuff. As we say, it’s hard.
Finding a decent balance between growth and protection of what people see as important is a big thing for any community, and planning and zoning issues are the biggest battles most towns have. Some perhaps quietly wish for a simpler time when community impacts, environmental laws, or the broader public good didn’t need to be factored in. Yes, it would be a lot easier to move heaven and earth, commercially speaking, if nobody had to think about running afoul of laws, making their neighbors’ lives miserable, or mucking up, say, the drinking water. That’s not to detract from the successes of our early industrialists, the railroading pioneers, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, and so on. But they did build those businesses at a time when the only consensus needed on the private-public relationship was between capital and maybe a handful of elected officials. Of course regular fire sales of the public interest were far easier to hold back then than they are today, and that does show we’ve made some progress. But we do live in a different America than our grandfathers, and most of us take for granted that the laws put in place to protect our communities and our quality of life aren’t going anywhere. But that assumption it turns out, could one day be dead wrong.
Oregon, we hear, is a nice place to live, partly some say, because of its reputation for having the most extensive planning and the most restrictive land use laws in the country. Last month however, the pendulum swung back hard there when voters overwhelmingly approved a law, Ballot Measure 37, that’s the most radical property-rights initiative ever enacted. Any property owner who can prove that environmental or zoning laws have hurt their investment can now sue the state, the town - whatever municipality may be involved – either for immediate exemption from whatever restrictions applied, or to compensate them for the loss of not developing their property to its maximum financial potential. So if you bought, say, an apple orchard knowing you couldn’t build a shopping center on it, you’ll now be able to sue to either let you build it now, or pay you off in compensation for all the income the property could have generated. Sound wild? It will be, and the court system in Oregon will be going into overdrive. And if it can happen in quiet, true-blue Oregon, it can certainly happen in many other places, maybe even here.one day. Mostly that depends on how things go in the various courts; but we’ll come back to that subject another time.
The concept that private property ownership confers unlimited development rights seems on its face alien in New York, almost as weird as codifying into law its essential meaning, “and to hell with the neighbors.” Back in the 1970’s, the state’s SEQRA laws were invented to try and create a framework for the rational assessment of development projects. Yes, they do favor the interests of developers but they also provide mechanisms for public accountability which help hold that advantage in check and create a reasonably level field for the review of individual projects. The main leveling mechanism of course is political reality: When something’s proposed that upsets too many people, there’s a political cost that’s often too high for elected officials to ignore. And so the system, though skewed, though slow, generally works as its supposed to.
We believe in the SEQRA process and in the fundamental reasonableness of its outcome, whether it’s for a small project with very localized potential impacts like Andrew Poncic’s water-harvesting proposal for Woodland Valley, or an enormous one like the proposed Belleayre Resort. And we believe in the review process because we think it’s reasonable and responsible and comprehensive, and because the criteria for decision-making are reasonable: You work things through until one arrives at solutions people can live with; if you can’t, the project stops. If you can, it proceeds, but only as something that on balance, is demonstrably positive.
Public policy decisions, these kinds of political decisions, are supposed to be made by people who don’t have private financial interests in their outcome. That’s why we have disclosure and recusal requirements, conflict-of-interest laws, and codes of ethics for public officials. In most places these kinds of things are taken quite seriously, though here in Shandaken, people don’t seem as bothered about them as they are elsewhere. We’re not quite so concerned about which officials own property they vote on the value of, whose spouse gets a paycheck from whom, or if an ethics committee appointed to consider such issues comports itself responsibly or conducts its business lawfully or unlawfully. On the one hand perhaps it’s nice that people are so accepting, but we do pay for that in the quality of government we get, and in the collective disbelief in the integrity of the process. When people feel they can’t trust their elected officials to draw from the top of the deck, they fold, taking what’s left of their willingness to work together and for the common good, and they go home. That’s really bad. Because in a small town we need most everybody to make things work, especially when the tough issues, planning & zoning, are on the line. The year ahead holds many opportunities to do better than we’re doing. We hope folks will see them, and stay interested enough to affect how, on balance, they turn out.