Leave Urban Planning for Professionals

In New England hamlets, people still govern themselves by town meeting. The local folks get together and vote on municipal needs, even such things as the purchase of a new fire engine.

For some reason, Californians in increasing numbers have become enamored of this concept, at least as it relates to land-use planning, even though the scale of our problems is way beyond such quaint forms of governance. They wouldn’t dream of writing the city’s fire code but, when it comes to land use, everyone’s a maven.

Orange County’s recent lurch toward such planning by town meeting is now before the courts, as a judge is about to decide whether Measure F (designed to give the populace-at-large control over the reuse of the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, as well as jails and hazardous waste landfills) is a legal way to deal with some of the county’s most complex land-use issues.

We have no vested interest in either side of the pending litigation. However, we have been struck over the past several years by the increasing numbers of communities that are opting to wrest land-use planning control from the professionals and do their planning via the ballot box. It’s a popular notion, but it suffers from the familiar downside of skilled work being done by rank amateurs with personal axes to grind. Whether one agrees with the planners, this shift removes land-use planning from the deliberative process and measured pace of those who have been trained to do the job, and places it into the raucous arena of political campaigns conducted by emotional tyros.

Why are we doing this? Land-use planning in the 21st century generally is not something that can be done on the backs of shopping bags by community activists, no matter how well-meaning. As a matter of state law, it isn’t supposed to be--and hasn’t been for years. Those who practice in that field endure years of education and training in planning and law, and have their professional organizations (the American Planning Assn. and the American Institute of Certified Planners) that supervise and certify their skills. Comprehensive land-use planning, including general and specific plans, is required by statute, and its parameters have been laid down in great detail by the Legislature. Not only that, but no plan (or plan amendment) gets to sneak by without mandatory environmental analysis. And after all that is done with, those who feel aggrieved by the planning decision are free to seek judicial review.

In short, the preparation of municipal land-use plans and zoning ordinances is not supposed to be the product of whim. No such decisions can be made legally without significant public airing. The public’s input is patiently sought and balanced against professional planning considerations. (If you doubt the endless nature of this process, just mention the subject to anyone who has tried to develop a major project that required a change in either the general plan or the zoning ordinance or the issuance of a discretionary land-use permit.)

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There are a number of possible motivating forces at work here. One is that some people simply cannot believe others can do any job as well as they can.

Their need for control knows few bounds--and when it deals with a project on their turf, the urge to take over becomes insatiable. They have tasted political power and they like it. These people have become so omnipresent that they have spawned a minor industry in creating acronyms for them: NIMBY (not in my back yard), BANANA (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything), NOPE (not on planet Earth), and NOOSE (not on our street--ever), to name a few.

It is noteworthy that all of these generalizations flow from the actions of people who want to stop development in its tracks, and do what they can to raise the regulatory drawbridge over the figurative moat encircling their little worlds. In effect, they seek their sort of minor secession from the larger community. They have got theirs; let the rest of the world (or the county) fend for itself.

There is no one sacred way to control land uses. California has chosen a complex land-use control scheme that relies on law--rules that in theory have to be followed and respected so people can tell what to do as they go about their lives and businesses. If that legal system is to be meaningful, it must be reasonably predictable.

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But California now suffers from a sort of cognitive dissonance. We have a raft of land-use laws that are complex and costly to administer. Yet, when it comes to their implementation, all too often it turns out that they have the substance of cotton candy that can be blown away by any vocal group of “community activists” who talk a good game about the environment but, in reality, are out to protect their privileged positions and fatten their bottom line as the market value of their suburban homes soars out of sight of most Californians.

Such ad-hoc decision-making by the whim of a momentary electoral majority cannot serve the larger, long-term community goals the Legislature sought to advance through the complex planning scheme it designed. In the long run, that is a prescription for social and economic disaster.