Your agenda is here.

The agenda is here.

The staff report is here.

The staff is seeking feedback on their ideas on the review process of the Comprehensive Plan itself and the Action/Implementation Plan which will serve as our guide to Elysium (the Greek word for a Comprehensive Plan that has been accomplished). I’ll leave this one by clipping the meat of the staff report:

Staff is working closely with consultant Jason Robertson, J Robertson and Company, to design public involvement opportunities that engage a diverse cross-section of the Olympia community, and result in valuable and constructive feedback on the proposed Plan updates.

The details of this process are still being determined, but in general it is likely to include two public forums with opportunities for community members to review the updates and engage in in-depth discussions with the team of staff writers. Staff would also like to introduce an Action Plan framework to affirm for the community that their ideas for implementing the Comprehensive Plan were heard and will form the basis for developing the content of the Action Plan in 2013.

***Update***

See the staff briefing paper about the substantive public involvement sections of the comprehensive plan which was presented last fall. The policy proposals in this document may be applied tonight, but the meeting itself is about the process of public involvement in the draft release, not the substance of public involvement in those sections of the comprehensive plan.

In an effort to complete OPC review prior to the termination of the commission terms on March 31, 2012 (through which there will be a turnover of at least three commissioners who did not re-apply), the commission leadership proposed eight additional meetings for February and March. There are certainly reasons to undertake that kind of schedule, but as I said last night, commissioner turnover needs to be weighed against the extreme likelihood of absences due to previous commitments and the likelihood of falling short of the March 31, deadline despite our best efforts. Some commissioners argued that the Council is champing at the bit to get the SMP. While I imagine it’s possible that some councilmembers have said so privately, the most recent staff report to Council left no official pronouncement and without that, I’d call this concern irrelevant speculation. Commissioners stressed the need of additional staff time in order to meet the demanding schedule, but the response was staff reports from a Monday meeting cannot be prepared by a following Wednesday meeting even in the best of times. Staff resources are also currently tied up with drafting the Comprehensive Plan Update, leaving them less time than usual. We’ve also left most of the extremely controversial issues—heights and views, and the Parking Lot—to the end. As one commissioner astutely pointed out, the Parking Lot, a group of issues that were deemed too confusing, too consequential, too dependent on other decisions, and simply those issues we didn’t to take on when they came up, is still out there and it will take loads of time to sort through. Given our inability to meet any deadlines at all up to this point it simply beggars belief that we would be able to do so now with these shortcomings. Finally, and most importantly, if we cannot meet this schedule by even one meeting because there aren’t enough Mondays and Wednesdays in March, we’ll have at least three new commissioners who will be responsible for voting on the entire package without much of a clue about what they are voting on. Ironically, while we collectively convinced ourselves of the need to hurry, except for the personal desire that the departing commissioners had to complete this during their terms, I didn’t hear another argument in favor of an expedited schedule. As we left it last night, if we cannot complete the SMP on this new timeframe, we’ll defeat the purpose of a condensed schedule anyway and will waste up to 24 hours (assuming that meetings do not exceed three hours) of meeting time and staff hours. Our collective response was: “we should try.” Thus, Fonzie sailed over the shark.

Ironically, the alternative proposal which stretched out the SMP meetings to July was actually realistic and I thought desirable. Not only did it allow plenty of time for deliberating the controversial issues, it also allowed much more time for new commissioner learning curves. Indeed, it would have taken the SMP several months but at least it took into account our track record and the pile of work on the commission desk which I believe are the only relevant data points in the analysis.

Next, the commission jumped into the Shoreline Modification chapter where one commissioner illustrated perfectly the problem with this SMP deliberation. The issue of docks on waterfront residential properties is contentious because it congeals within itself collective and individual rights. Thanks to the commissioner who brought it up for discussion, the commission actually had an illuminated discussion on what it means to restrict the permitting of single family docks, what the proliferation of docks means for marine and freshwater ecology, and what options the commission has in dealing with these issues. Naturally, we shelved the issue for subsequent consideration.

This moment of our deliberation reminded me of one of my previous comments to the commission more than a year ago: I suggested the commission formulate a list of broad issues just like the use of docks that is well within our discretion and our competency. I suggested that we discuss and vote on these issues not as SMP legal or ecological experts, but as community members on a citizen advisory committee. I believe that had we done this, we would have had perhaps up to a hundred issues (but I bet less) of which some would have taken some time to digest. We could have offered minority reports where we disagreed. Finally, we could have relied on staff to embed those decisions into the draft, reviewed that draft on our own time, and asked questions on our areas of concern. This would have taken time, but I doubt it would have taken nearly as much time as it did. Most importantly, the OPC would have given the City Council a draft program that would be much more complete and much more reflective of the community’s desire than what they’re going to receive from the OPC. Instead, we have spent the last 12 months doing glorified copy editing not because we decided that it the best thing to do, but because as a group, we didn’t know what else to do but turn the pages of the SMP draft one at a time with the chair reading off section numbers and asking for comments.

Finally, last night the commission took in a presentation of sight lines mentioned in the previous post. There were ominous comments at the conclusion of that discussion which led me to believe we have under-scheduled (perhaps severely) the time that will be necessary to complete our discussion of heights and views. Please review the second paragraph of this post.

We left off the discussion of heights and views last time after attempting to determine which “site-lines” the commission believes are worthy of special attention in the context of general heights and views policy formulation. The staff report explains that these viewsheds are: 1.) west from Rotary Park to Mt. Rainier; 2.) From East Bay to the Capitol; and, 3.) from Olympia/Plum Streets northward to edge of the Port Peninsula in order to see the Olympics.

The commission had several options for dealing with heights and views and chose this one. The OPC will have a much broader grant of authority to deal with them under the Comprehensive Plan Update process. It will be very interesting to observe whether the approaches to views and heights now will be useful later on.

The pressure is on to complete the SMP before the current commission term ends if for no other reason than to avoid another relatively steep learning curve for new commissioners. The counterargument to rushing to the finish line is that a new city council should have a free hand in formulating community policies every step of the way. Given the work that still remains to be completed and the few slots still available for properly noticed meetings, I’m skeptical about finishing the SMP before the end of March anyway.

If the OPC is sincerely attempting to approach heights and views, our discussion will be deeply embedded in the context of both our collective rights and individual rights. Personally, I love issues that require this contextual apparatus—perhaps not in a citizen advisory committee—but I do love thinking about this construct. By collective I mean the rights that we all share in common, as a group, or at the very least the rights that one individual within that group cannot appropriate to her individual benefit. An individual right of course is the converse: a right that someone holds individually and has the power to do with as he pleases.

Heights and views are a perfect example of the intersection of these rights. From the perspective of individual rights, a private property owner can do whatever she wants with her land. On the other hand, the actions of that individual on that land have collective implications, and sometime those implications may impact the rights we share in common. (I know that some people don’t like the word collective. May the Cold War rest in peace.) What about the converse? Do our collective rights ever impact the individuals which comprise the group? Perhaps someday we’ll consult Thomas Hobbes, Jean Jacque Rousseau, John Locke, Publius Valerius Publicola, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx (May the Cold War rest in peace), Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim on that extremely complicated but most enlightening and ultimately beautiful question.

The long and short of it is we have organized ourselves over the last millennium in such a way that we try to maintain individual rights, but we understand that those individual rights are subject to the actions we take as groups, and most importantly it’s not going to work perfectly to make everyone happy. In theory, they work together to ensure the greatest potential human freedom.  That’s essentially the argument for government, from the constitution to your neighborhood association bylaws. Our collective rights usually maintain the kind of language you hear in the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address (“For the people.” not “for the individual.”), and the Consitution (“We the People” not “I the individual”). The basic idea is that we understand that without some kind of basic rights, guarantees, and rules on a collective scale, we cannot ensure that any single individual can maintain those rights beyond her ability to enforce that with the means at her disposal at any given time. The fellow down the street with the private army could do whatever he wants until someone else comes along with a bigger private army. In our less than infinite wisdom we have progressed at least to the extent that we understand it is not desirable to appeal to force in order to create a desirable society. (Although in many sociological designations, warring clans are every bit as much a feature of modern society as they were in the days of marauding Danes.)

These ideas are embedded in us as residents of the United States and more particularly, as Olympians. They are there regardless of whether we acknowledge them. When Olympians discuss views and height limits, or any land use decision, they are actually discussing the application of these issues to the piece of dirt in question.

That is how I see it anyway. Some, perhaps most, disagree with me. There is a very powerful current of thinking that individual ownership, particularly in land, is the right to exclude others from it entirely. Thus, if someone wants to build a 25 story building in front of the Capitol, it should be their right to do so subject only to the constraints that the market (i.e. the desire and ability of people to rent the apartments or offices in it).

Removing the intermediary steps in this analysis which would probably only bore you anyway, the real question becomes is a view a collective right? If so, what are the limits to those rights? Which laws ensure those rights? Does someone have a right to see the Capitol or anything else an individual might personally treasure from any point in Olympia? Should some areas be protected because they are exceptional views? Is there a right here to a view at all? See how complicated this gets?

If there are rights to a view, what options are available to ensure them? Obviously, we can collectively tell landowners that certain buildings are not allowed in certain places. We can tell landowners that by our collective will, some of their rights to their private property do not exist.

Does it seem odd, unfair, or at least a little unsettling, that your individual rights to your land could be deprived entirely by a collective will with which you may vehemently disagree? It’s more common than you think, and it doesn’t happen just with land. A few quick examples: we don’t allow smoking in public bars (not to mention drinking alcohol in public); in Olympia we actually have a law—enforced by jail time not just fines—that prohibits people from sitting or standing in the middle of sidewalk in downtown if someone else thinks they might have to walk around you; we’re evidently about to tell downtown businesses, that they cannot sell certain types of alcohol; we’ve already decided that starting in 2013, most fireworks aren’t allowed in the city limits; we amended the Constitution a hundred years ago to prohibit consumption of alcohol; throughout our history, our collective will deprived basic human rights from the majority of our own population; (What percentage of the human population had any right to participate—via voting—in the collective decisionmaking process in 1850? Not even close to a majority.) And of course, collectively, we order people to die and carry out that sentence on a regular basis.

The issue of collective and individual rights as regards to heights and views is perhaps more straightforward if not much more pleasant to consider (if you’re not a landowner subject to them). Tonight the Olympia Planning Commission will consider our general policies about how to deal with heights and views in the SMP jurisdiction. What about the heights and views outside the SMP jurisdiction? That will come with the Comprehensive Plan update which is already in progress and will see much more light over the next year.

The Agenda is here. The staff report mentions a briefing paper which can be found here. This was used in the Summer 2010 SMP subcommittee briefings on the SMP topics. (The staff report says that this was attached to the December 19, 2012 meeting, but I was able to find only an excerpt of it there. Through some impressive search engineering, I was able to find despite its banishment to the nether reaches. Pauses. Pats self on back.)

The meat of the update appears to be this technical report.

As you may have noticed, the planning commission meeting was cancelled last week due to weather while this week’s meeting was rescheduled so the planning commission could attend the Sea Level Rise presentation. I’ll be there at least for a little while in the hopes that information not in the report might be presented.

As for change in which I can believe, the OPC took on a commendable process of heights and view limitations for purpose of the SMP update. As some of you may be aware, this is a contentious issue in Olympia and the OPC decided first to establish working policies about heights and views before allowing their thinking to be caged into regulations provided by the staff. This takes more time now, but if we don’t do this correctly we won’t save any in the long run anyway. There is nothing the OPC is better equipped to do than provide policy recommendations that are representative of the community. (If you ask me, they shouldn’t be doing anything else.)  While some may disagree with me, I think the divergence of views on our commission will represent the community well in our deliberation over this issue.  Naturally, we have received voluminous public comment over the last couple of years about this heights and views so we should be well prepared.

The single public comment last night expressed dismay over the application process for the 2012 year in the OPC.  This year, just like last year, nine of the 11 terms have come up for reappointment. In contrast to last year when the council simply allowed the commissioners who wanted to continue their terms to do so, this year those who want to serve another term are required to reapply and interview with the General Government Committee of the City Council. Once the commission has been selected, the terms will be staggered so that this problem does not arise again soon. If the there are to be nine new members, it might throw a wrench in the 2012 work plan. Point well taken.

The agenda is here.

As you can see, this meeting will continue the discussion of the heights in the SMP jurisdiction, and will review the revisions to Chapter 7.

The major items are a briefing and action plan on the Comprehensive Plan update which will be a huge chuck on the OPC”s work this year; and, the Shoreline Master Program. Most of the latter will be voting on the issues (setbacks) that were not consensual at previous SMP Subcommittee meetings.

When I joined the commission in early 2010, I started attending SMP subcommittee meetings during which we heard briefings from city staff on subjects such as the environmental designations, mitigation sequencing, setbacks, height limits, administration, and various other issues concerning the first 200 feet of shoreline starting from the ordinary high water mark. During the entire summer of 2010, many citizens, staff people, and several other commissioners spent each Wednesday night on these briefings, asking questions, and generally learning about the SMP and its purposes and requirements. It was a collaborative environment that I now recall with some fondness even if at the time I wasn’t happy about missing the ODA’s Music in the Park so I could attend additional OPC meetings.

In the fall of 2010, we had a SMP draft reception with homemade cider, refreshments, and several easels with glossy posters; a throng of people crowded into the council chambers at the old Plum Street City Hall. Smiling faces abounded and classic corporate networking, with card swapping and guffaws, was in full effect. (I didn’t stay a moment longer than necessary.) That was another strange milestone in this SMP saga. The draft SMP was complete, the OPC could now review it in its totality armed with the information gained during the summer briefings, and pass on their recommendations to the City Council. If I recall accurately, we planned only a handful—three or four—meetings for our deliberation. In 2011 after all, the OPC really needed to take on the Comprehensive Plan update and there were some very controversial land use deliberations looming on the work plan’s horizon.

I recall a question one commissioner asked around the time the city staff’s draft was released to the public: “How will the subcommittee unpackage the SMP so those of us who didn’t serve on the subcommittee can access it?” The answer, in two words, has become tragically obvious: “Not well.”

The first meeting during which the OPC actually attempted to deliberate the staff SMP draft was a disaster. Our deliberation process, conceived in the belief that peoples’ ideas naturally flow to consensus after discussing the issues in some kind of mythic dialectical logic was pitifully inadequate for the task it was then called upon to perform. Yet we continued to slog through at least two more meetings, using it to debate some minor points, until it became obvious that that square peg wasn’t going into this round hole.

If it had only been a matter of correcting an in adequate procedure, we might have been able to do so with some expediency, but a majority of commissioners needed a crash course in the SMP, if the questions they asked in that first meeting were any guide. In fact, we used our allotment of initially planned SMP meetings in 2010 to re-conduct some of the meetings that we had during the summer SMP subcommittee meetings, much to the frustration of those who had attended them and were now required to do it again.

By the spring of 2011, after a few more discordant meetings, we resolved to establish a more appropriate deliberation strategy. Essentially, we formulated a process by which the SMP subcommittee takes a look at each and every page of the SMP and should they agree on a change or revisions, it was to be forwarded to the full OPC as a consent calendar item, subject to removal should enough commissioners desire it. That smoothed some troubled waters. At the following regular planning commission meeting, the commissioners would take all non-consent items from the subcommittee and vote, with a simple majority prevailing. In theory, it was relatively clean: let the experts, well versed in months of preparation, tackle the details and when they cannot agree, ask the entire commission weigh in.

While we sort of resolved the complete lack of a deliberation procedure, that caused other major problems to surface which I will summarize below. Looking back, we should have known that this would be the inexorable result. Funny how hindsight is so obvious. What follows is certainly not the official account, which I can only imagine would never be completed even if those who participated in this debacle had the fortitude to reconsider it again in all its grizzly details and surmise conclusions that could be passed on to subsequent generations.  This is certainly not a question of intellectual laziness or lack of desire, as attendance and participation in most meetings was exemplary for any volunteer committee. Questions were always sincere, and even substantive disagreements were rooted in the best interest of each commissioner’s respective constituencies. I certainly cannot see parallels of the congressional gridlock in our own commission.

As I said at the beginning of this post, this is a general lament, not a recipe for improvement. I believe that we have neglected criticism because it’s difficult to dish out and most people take it as destructive even when utmost effort is expended to make it constructive. Nonetheless, without some idea of what went wrong, we cannot hope to improve. Thus, in this post I will not offer solutions because I believe we need to understand the problems first. My conclusions as to what went wrong follow.

No clear limits on OPC discretion. For most of the process, we acted as though our job was that of a compliance committee ensuring that the law was correctly applied to the SMP. Fascinatingly, members of the OPC at times argued from both sides of a position, claiming that the law either did, or did not allow us to do something in a haphazard manner that forced me to conclude that the constant reference to law was nothing more than a rhetorical device. Unfortunately it probably worked more often than not. These kinds of arguments and debates quickly coalesced into a mode of operation that would have led a disinterested observer to conclude that we were acting as a compliance organ. One of the first posts I ever wrote discusses the statutory authority granted to the OPC. Compliance isn’t there.  It is the research and fact-finding agency of the city: the jury, not the judge.

The other problem with the ambiguity about our discretion is that we never tried to define the concept of an OPC Recommendation. This is a serious mistake both in terms of efficiency and clarity. For example, should the entire OPC vote on a typographical error in the same manner as they would vote on an environmental designation? Setback? Or height limitation? What about the phraseology of a particular sentence? Much to my personal chagrin, prolonged discussion by the entire OPC in preparation for voting on trivial details was a constant feature of our deliberation.

No clear objective. Early in the process, we spoke constantly of approving the SMP. Frequently in practice, the OPC treated this process as a quasi-judicial proceeding instead of a legislative one. In the former, an applicant requests a favorable decision from the OPC to proceed with a project, a comprehensive plan revision, or some other kind of permission to act. This is the authority that the municipal code vests in the Planning Commission. It is completely inapplicable to a legislative action, like the revision of the SMP because the OPC serves only as an advisory body to the City Council in that capacity. I believe that enough commissioners viewed this as a quasi-judicial proceeding so that it resulted in an ineffective deliberation. Instead of broad visioning and formulating recommendations (which the city council ultimately has authority to reject and/or implement) we took it upon ourselves to “pass” the SMP. This resulted in an unshakable fixation on compliance issues and/or a desire to adhere to scientific conclusions whichever appeared to suit the rhetorical needs of a proponent at the time, adding significantly to the problem of opaque discretion that I described above.

No viable deliberation procedure. A lack of clear objective, buttressed by a fluid definition of the areas within which we could offer our recommendations, led to our inability to create an adequate procedure for formulating our ultimate recommendations to the City Council. Without a clear idea of where we are going, it stands to reason that it might be difficult to decide where to start and how to get there.

The greatest problem with our deliberation procedure as it was conceived was that there was no provision for disagreement. It assumed that all 11 commissioners would agree most of the time or at least enough of the time so that minority voices would be well enough represented through the deliberation procedure itself. This is a staggering shortcoming. I think the commission has essentially overcome that hesitation to agree to disagree, but it required a panicky re-culturization of the OPC itself which at times took us through several painful meetings full of incomprehensible actions like protest abstentions.

Inconsistent approaches to policy guidelines. Two people see different things in the same object. That is the beauty of individuality, and different points of view are necessary in a representative body. However, without a basic approach to the interpretation and application of the SMP policies and guidelines, those disagreements cannot be contained in their proper place. Instead they seep out into endless discussions about the broader objective. They cloud that objective and once that is opaque, the scope of discretion becomes murky and infests the process itself. These shortcomings are interrelated and unfortunately, the OPC managed to experience each one of them before all of them together resulted in a mass of confusion and frustration.

In more concrete terms, this means that each commissioner appeared to weigh the policies of the SMP in a haphazard manner. In a general interpretation of the statute, the various environmental designations should be examined and those policies which are most applicable to each of them should be applied. Instead, we heard the same pet policies applied over and over again to every designation. So for example, one commissioner might hammer on the ecological concerns or economic concerns regardless of the optimal use applicable in the area. It’s difficult to blame anyone for following this path because the procedure, visioning process, and definition of discretion were so inadequate that most fell back onto their general dispositions anyway.

Inadequate direction and preparation. Especially early in the process, the commission as a whole was unprepared. I take this to mean that we suffered from a lack of familiarity with the SMP itself as well as the guidelines that govern it. I could point a finger at myself, along with every other commissioner, but I don’t think the problem was failure to complete our homework. Instead I think it was never clearly communicated to the OPC as a whole that the SMP deliberations at the full OPC level would require an extraordinary amount of preparation and where that time should be dedicated in particular (i.e. those areas where OPC discretion should be concentrated). We had helpful SMP briefing papers but were also encouraged to read several technical studies that were hundreds of pages long for basic background. (I’m sure the subcommittee read this material, but by the time the SMP was introduced to the full OPC, the latter had thousands of pages of public hearing documents for several unrelated deliberations including Larida Passage as well as the SMP itself.  I doubt that those background documents got more than a passing glance by the time the deliberation began). The OPC also had the focus meetings going on at the same time in addition to the usual work plan. That is an impossible amount of work to do in the schedule set up (unless of course it was never intended that commissioners read the documents).

It wasn’t until a few months of deliberation that the commissioners began to became familiar with the salient issues, and only much later that we were able to competently look at the details. As frustrating as it was, we cannot expect commissioners to vote on issues with which they are unfamiliar, but on the other hand this issue in particular was foreseeable and correctable as far back as the spring of 2010 when the first commissioners serving on the subcommittee started the SMP subcommittee meetings.

Lack of a visioning process. While there was, of course, a public hearing on the SMP, there was no overall visioning process that elicited what Olympians really wanted from their shoreline. A hearing allows people to comment on the documents, but responding to a document does not necessarily provoke aspirational thoughts, comments, and feedback upon which an advisory board serving a function of a legislative adviser could rely.  (That will hopefully become one of the strengths of the Comprehensive Plan Update process.) Most importantly, a visioning process allows the commission to solidify overarching policies and comfortably deliberate within those formulations. As it was, there was constant appeal to shifting policies that seemed to surface primarily from the predilections of the commissioners themselves rather than from a visioning process. Of course the response would have been, “There isn’t time for a visioning process.” This might be one of those few times I employ a much-hated phrase: “There wasn’t time not to do it.”

No conception of a deliverable. It wasn’t until about three months into our final deliberation that we had a discussion of the actual tangible object that the City Council would receive from the OPC. No one had considered that question until we were well into the deliberation! What would this deliverable be? (And more importantly, the OPC has spent more than two years on the SMP. Will the City Council be able to absorb this document on top of everything else they do in a fraction of the time it took the OPC?) Will a letter of explanation and recommendation similar to our annual CFP letter suffice? What does the City Council need from the OPC? It’s unlikely that they will have the time to consider the policy ramifications beyond the public hearing and legal challenges from parties calling themselves aggrieved. The OPC has still not resolved this issue and without an idea of a deliverable, it’s difficult to imagine that the objective could have been clear. Without a clear objective in this deliberation, we could not have properly scoped the deliberation. Without a clearly defined scope of discretion, there was no possibility of formulating a reasonable deliberation procedure. All of these issues are interrelated and once they were triggered, they cascaded through everything else. More than a few times, in fact.

No milestones. OPC’s deliberation schedule shifted constantly, which I think began to give the impression that a deadline (or any milestone for that matter) was unimportant. The first date of completion that I ever heard was August of 2010. The second was December 2010. Then, after we really dug in and learned how long it would take, we agreed on June 6, 2011. Now the plan is to send the document to council in January 2012. Stay tuned. Or don’t.

The major problem with loose scheduling is that the OPC never had intermediate deadlines by which we had to finish for example, the definitions or administration chapters. Intermediate milestones would have allowed us to consider more thoughtfully the dynamic issues that comprise setbacks on the basis of OPC-vetted preliminary issues. That would have allowed us to tackle the more complicated issues later on. (I use dynamic here because while we are undertaking this effort, the City Council is studying sea level rise. The two are inextricably interrelated. To wit, the planning commission is deliberating and recommending regulatory issues that will become guiding policies concerning sea-level rise at the same time the city council is formulating conclusions and management issues on sea-level rise. That makes no sense.)

All of these problems were correctable and most of them were foreseeable. Of course, people don’t think of everything before the fact and most people don’t pay attention to naysayers. Project management is an art, but it’s obvious that it was either not employed on this project or done so inadequately that no one noticed it. As I have repeated numerous times, any one of these problems in isolation would have been surmountable, even as they bobbed along just underneath the surface. However, once any single one of them arose, they had a horrible habit of creating a chain reaction that drew all of them back up in plain view comprising an impasse far too often. Like responsible and dedicated voluntary committee members and staff, we attempted to resolve the most glaring issues as soon as they were articulated. As we did so, we usually exacerbated other problems. For example, we attempted to resolve the visioning process by breaking out the setback tables reach by reach. That singlehandedly broke our deliberation process and revealed the extent to which our preparation and inconsistent approach to the policy guidelines were insufficient for the task at hand. This is one example of many.

***

I am not trying to criticize the OPC or staff and certainly not any individual. I am lamenting the number of factors that colluded against this planning commission and staff on this particular deliberation. For the last two years, each week required at least two three hour meetings if one includes the Comprehensive Plan, the Shoreline Management Program, the Finance Committee which handles the annual Capital Facilities Plan, coordination with other advisory committees, City Council meetings, and of course, anything that comes before the OPC as a matter of course. In 2011 for example, we had briefings, hearings, and deliberations on the permanent Camp Quixote site, Mobile Food Vendors, and of course, the famous Isthmus/Larida Passage and all of this required considerable time in the form of multiple meetings. Most commissioners have families and other volunteer activities. At least half have full time jobs. Commissioners cannot show up to meetings ready to participate meaningfully without substantial preparation time. I would imagine in most cases we’re talking about at least two preparation hours to one meeting hour. Those in leadership positions require all the more time. The time involved isn’t the problem nor is it here presented to draw any sort of sympathy from those uninvolved. I hope it does however, illustrate the nearly impossible task that any commissioner faces—there simply are not sufficient hours in the day to be involved in the planning commission and live their lives such that they would be able to bring a non-institutional approach to their commission responsibilities.

Do I really want a planning commission that doesn’t have time to interact with their neighbors (not friends), shop at a local business, wonder why traffic is so lousy in this or that intersection, or take a leisurely (dog) walk in their local park? Do I really want one that doesn’t have enough time to approach sea-level rise, the practical and the philosophical distinction between individual and collective rights involved in major land-use planning like the SMP thoughtfully? (Reading Atlas Shrugged in college doesn’t count.) How many people have the time to get involved in the esoteric world of shoreline management regulation, let alone appreciate the inner workings of the city government to such a degree that our actions are explicable? How much of all of this is a deterrent to getting involved for those who are genuinely interested in or concerned about their city government, civic responsibilities, and their community? The path of least resistance is to shrug it all off and embrace one’s cynical side, perhaps limiting one’s civic involvement to anonymous and inflammatory message board comments.

What do we learn from all of this? First, we have a catalog of pitfalls that are staring us in the face as the OPC prepares to take on the Comprehensive Plan update. Every problem, except the public visioning process, that I articulated above is magnified in the Comprehensive Plan update. I hope this experience, and my discussion of it, have helped clarify what not to do. If so, the question becomes, “Will we fall victim to the same problems again, or will we learn from the mistakes we made during the SMP deliberation?” As I mentioned earlier, the Community Planning and Development staff’s solution is conducting another day long retreat apparently to debrief and head off these problems before they arise next time. I think we’ve started to get a basic deliberation procedure together, but whether that will be used during the Comprehensive Plan deliberation remains to be seen. There was considerable resistance to that idea early last year from the subcommittee chair. Further, the Comprehensive Plan is more easily accessible than the SMP, and most of the commissioners are familiar with it (or they would not have had interest in the commission in the first place), so if nothing else getting up to speed on it won’t be as cumbersome. On the other hand, I predict that our personal predilections will be adverse influences on the process just as they have been. I certainly don’t have a problem with competing opinions—I love them in fact, but I don’t think our current commission is at all comfortable with dealing with them.  In fact, candidates for leadership positions in 2012 illustrated their qualifications by their willingness to vote with the opposition from time to time. (I personally believe commission leadership means an ability to get through agenda items timely by ensuring all the work that requires beforehand is completed. That has not been a feature in my experience on the OPC.) Finally, in my observation the OPC implicitly considers success to be consensus or close to it, not presenting viable policy recommendations to the City Council through a process that ensures consideration of all views presented. If we’re not able to overcome that issue, 2012 will be as metaphorically endless for the Planning Commission as was 2011.