Home

    Volunteer or Contribute
    Contact Marc

Inside the Campaign:

About the Candidate:

What You Can Do:

Sign Up for a Yard Sign

January 19 Testimony Before Park and Planning Board

Chairman Berlage and Members of the Planning Board,

I want to thank you for the opportunity to come before you tonight and to have the opportunity to discuss the public hearing process. The City of Takoma Park has sent a letter outlining a series of steps that we feel might improve the process. Those steps are as follows:

1) Televise and/or webcast all public Planning Board Meatings. We have found that web-streaming software is now affordable and offers viewers incredible flexibility in terms of being able to track issues over long periods of time. Little of the Planning Boards activities reach the public view and the decisions you make are simply too important to be played out before such a limited audience.

2) We recommend better and wider timely proliferation of Planning Board Agendas including approximate times when matters will be considered and the provision of a rolling agenda that provides a tentative future schedule.

3) Affirmative notification of concerned parties when issues are continued or rescheduled.

You will notice that the above steps are primarily process steps.

I have spoken to many neighbors and constituents who feel that the problems will not be addressed by the steps outlined above. I have been involved in the planning process now for over two decades, in one or another, and around a variety of issues, with this Planning Board and your predecessors. As an elected official, I have had to deal with public hearings myself - and one more than one occasion it has been your staff that has been a participant in our process. All of what I've seen and observed tells me that the problems are more fundamental and cannot be so simply addressed by some tweaks to the hearing process.

It is my belief that we need a broader rethinking of the public hearing process and perhaps of the role or nature of the Board itself. I recognize that you have too few staff people, doing too much work in the planning stage, compounded by too few staff people providing supervisory support in the implementation stage. Processes driven by speed and quantity quickly find themselves at odds with people who desire processes to be driven by thoroughness, accuracy, and inclusivity. This is compounded by the problem of having a part-time Board saddled with the demands of a full-time job and no time to carry it out. The result is a truncated process with truncated public sessions because in the end, you have a lot of work to get through and a finite amount of time to do it in. To my mind, no matter how you deal with notification issues, you will continue to have process issues. I don't see how you can do this job right without committing to a longer, not shorter, public process.

Citizens are frustrated about the lack of public input, by the impression that decisions are made before they ever walk in the room. They are frustrated by the sense that is given that, of course, the staff has considered public opinion in its recommendations, all of the public arguments have already been heard by the professionals and incorporated, as appropriate, into their reports and recommendations.

So our three-minute statements, are almost redundant, they are our public protest against a train that is perceived to have already left the station. I know that, in comparison to the processes we use in the City, there is far less public give and take and questioning of staff occurring at the Planning Board and in public, than we permit in our own discussions. The three-minute clock and the drive to make the point before the red light pops up do not contribute to a full discussion and vetting of concerns and issues. And Staff has to answer citizen points publicly, only if one of you chooses to ask our questions. That's not good.

So the conclusion that I reach here is that we need a hearing process that is more like a hearing and less like a parade of speakers. A hearing implies some kind of cross-examination of witnesses and the ability to question facts and assumptions, yet there is no guarantee that any of that will happen within the process. There is no public side here that has the power to question and contest statements of the planning staff.

Why is this important? Because access to planning staff is so unevenly weighted toward the developers before issues even get to sit on your agenda, that we are effectively deprived of our one best opportunity to make the case before you. Developers have paid representatives plying these halls, meeting with staff, while citizens are left to react to their proposals, while trying to take time off from work to make sure their voices are heard. It's just not a level playing field and it's not fair. We need a process that invites more questions, more dialogue and more opportunity for citizens to speak. I know that the implications of that are that you will need more hearings, more evening hearings (or weekend hearings) in particular and we, the community, will have to disabuse ourselves of the notion that this is a part-time job. I for one would be willing to pay for a process that was more meaningful and inclusive, and I don't see how you can do that within the time constraints underwhich you currently operate.

The second point I want to make speaks to the heart of the matter for a lot of us. You can add more inspectors, you can have longer hearings, you can even hear more voices in those hearings, but there is something wrong in the culture that has grown up here in the last twenty years. The most prevalent non-profane comment I hear from people is that encounters with staff regarding developments invariably produce staff comments to the effect that "we need to make it (meaning the proposed development) fit." No you don't. If something doesn't fit, you don't have to make it fit, but if that's the message they're getting, then that's what they'll try to do. I have heard it myself. It's wrong. Not everything fits.

But you, to some extent, and the Council to an enormous extent have sent that message. Your staff knows, and I've heard the rumblings, that the changes to the APFO sent the loud and clear message that the theme in Montgomery County is no developer left behind. When you have traffic tests that don't count the cars that are going to be on the road, that the planners agree will be on the road, and you do it for the sake of assuring that projects won't fail then you have sent the essential message - full speed ahead, damn the regulations. The ones you can't change, you can ignore. And ditto the school test.

So you have staff, getting beat up by citizens, defending themselves by saying we're only implementing the policy enacted by the Council, knowing that the tests don't pass the sniff test, and you wonder why you have a morale problem. And people wonder why there's talk of a culture of just giving developers what they want. If your own tests lack integrity, if they're not the product of reason but rather the product of politics, then what you see in the frustration vented over the public hearing process is really the frustration people feel over the whole process.

Things are way out of balance. If you want to fix the process, and I believe you do, then put this thing back into balance - starting from who and how people get access to staff, how that access is recorded, but most importantly - go back and give the Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance some integrity, or tell the Council to at least have the decency to change the name to something more appropriate.

Marc Elrich Councilmember, Takoma Park