A few, quick observations on Monday night’s planning and architectural review commission meeting.
Where we are weaker than nearby cities, we should be less restrictive than they are; where we are stronger, we should be no more restrictive.
We live well, as beneficiaries of a free market, but we quickly forget how dynamic and innovative our markets truly are. Planning often takes place as though there were no free market. We might as easily be manorial England, or bureaucratic France, as free enterprise America. (These three are neither morally nor practically equivalent.)
Planning does not go wrong for lack of rationality; it goes wrong for hyper-rationality.
Appeals to public policy as an obstacle to private development are banal and trite unless they are enumerated and detailed.
In a more productive arrangement, a private owner could present his or her ideas to a municipal commission like ours without requiring a lawyer. That was possible only for some Monday night.
There will always near hundreds of details to consider; most of them should be left to private parties, without the interference of the state.
Knowledge and instinct vary. A more sensible, less capricious, person will know to look to other communities for evidence of the success or failure of a like proposal. A less capable person will rely on one or two vague principles, or — far worse — scramble to raise stalling objection after stalling objection.
This sort of meeting makes sense, of course, but in more than one way. The arrangement provides order, but also personal benefit. It’s a cost to productivity, sometimes small, sometimes large. A salaried public official or lawyer accustomed to this forum, benefits. The only important matter, though, is that we can say the same for our small city.
Theoretical concerns about safety that are not experienced in like situations elsewhere are dubious. If experience tells us that, elsewhere, there’s no harm in a like measure, suggestions that the proposal might be harmful in Whitewater are ignorant or attention-getting. Either way, we may confidently ignore these meddlesome objections.