the-eldest-woman-on: the-eldest-woman-on: The crowd at this zoning board meeting is wild. Holy…
The crowd at this zoning board meeting is wild.
Holy shit was that intense. Zoning, man. The people who come to these meetings are insane.
Zoning probably ranks at or near the top of the metric for “most-consequential while least-noticed-by-the-public” lever of power. Before I was appointed to the local planning commission I had only a vague idea of the role zoning plays in the long-term evolution of the places we live. But I’ve seen over and over how decisions made largely in a vacuum by a tiny handful of people end up dictating outcomes that scores or hundreds of people eventually get motivated to try to influence – but only after the die has already been cast.
A corollary of that is that for those who *do* appreciate how important it is, battles over zoning changes can end up being really emotionally charged.
I’ve been on the planning commission for about 10 years/100 meetings. In that time the most open anger I’ve provoked (as measured by a feisty letter in the local paper, and the letter-writer’s refusal to respond to my request to discuss the issue one-on-one, such that someone I’ve previously known and volunteered with on local campaigns to this day won’t talk to me) was related to a zoning change, where I thought the balance between competing concerns should have been struck slightly differently (and really, only slightly differently) than how they thought it should have been.
Which on one level seems like a pretty small thing. But not to them.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/2nGpMhu.
