This is the first of a series of posts on the October 20th Planning Commission meeting. In this post, I’ll consider Item 5 from the meeting agenda, Applicant Tom Germundson’s request for a conditional use permit for a home occupation (so that he could make sheet metal duct work for heating and cooling installations).
Germundson’s application involves a limited use of the property, with testimony from neighbors that his proposed use was unobjectionable. Representing Whitewater in the role of planning consultant at the hearing, as previously, was Mark Roffers of Vandewalle and Associates.
I’ve been critical of Roffers before.
(See, Planning Commission Meeting for August 18, Part 3 “To serve the city well, a document for display should not have too many markings regarding a church or charity. It should have a minimum of notes, as brief as possible. Marking up a document for a proposed orphanage, for example, would just be giving a hostage to Fortune. It’s too risky that someone might grandstand on the issue” and Live Blogging the July 21st Planning Commission Meeting “A resident complains about water runoff from the storage units, and the consultant responds in ways that show he has no feel for responding to ordinary people,” Planning Commission Meeting for September 15, 2008, “The initial re-zoning proposal from a consulting firm that our city retains was amended before the evening was over; the proposal as the evening began called for the preservation of a small pocket of single family homes in the proposed multi-unit area…
Part of good planning for the consultant would have been to see that a single-family pocket was a bad idea, no matter how much some might have initially wanted it.”)
How long ago was it that a man learned, so that it was easy and effortless, to speak properly to a working person? A long time ago, I’d guess. There stands the applicant, a member of the community, and Roffers lists his concerns in a cold monotone, referring to Germundson as ‘him’ (while Germundson is in the room!), and fumbles Germundson’s name when finally making the effort. (Note the contrast: the Commission’s chair and other members refer to the applicant as Mr. Germundson when speaking to or about him.) This is no small matter — Roffers only distances himself from the community he’s paid to serve with this sort of presentation.
There’s are two larger concerns. Some of Roffers’s professed initial concerns (“my initial recommendation… was to deny approval”) rested on admittedly incomplete information. Germundson’s testimony alleviated some of these concerns. There’s the problem — of what use is an initial recommendation without the awareness of actual circumstances? It’s an arid and unconvincing rationality, that’s all. These zoning categories aren’t abstractions on a map; they’re variously limitations or opportunities for ordinary people to make a living.
If you can live in Whitewater, while America confronts a recession, and think that a denial here serves this community, then I simply doubt your feel for the community, or common sense. It’s not Wal-Mart, nearly insensible to denial for a single store in a vast empire, that makes this conditional request.
A conditional use is a discretionary thing, and that discretion should be leavened with equity.
The Planning Commission made the right decision; it would have done so without any consultant at all.