Last week I attended the mid-Shore PlanMaryland forum (my apologies for the delay in writing about it).
I arrived early, so I took my time perusing through the various presentation boards and the materials laid out. There was quite a bit I found objectionable, but I regrettably don’t have access to all the materials I saved right now and probably won’t for a week or so, so any discussion of them will have to wait until then.
When each person checked in they got a name tag with a number on it. That number determined which discussion group you were a part of (I believe there were 6 total). Once it got to 7 pm, we were all told to take our seats so the event could begin.
The event began with several addresses to the whole group. None of these were particularly noteworthy, with the only significant item being the complete and total assumption that “planning” is both good and necessary. As I tweeted, apparently no one in the Maryland Planning Department has read their Hayek or heard of the economic calculation problem.
After this we broke into our discussion groups. Each group consisted of two state government representatives, one a facilitator, who helped guide the flow of discussion, and a recorder, who just took notes. I didn’t catch our recorder’s name, but our facilitator was Shawn Kiernan, from the Maryland Department of Planning. Besides this our group consisted of Lee Schnappinger, who works with McCrone; Les Knupp, from MACO; Jim Voss, a retired farmer; John Draper, with the Farm Bureau; and Debbie Stanley, a private citizen and planning proponent (also a recent arrival from PA).
From the start I found myself amazed by some of the things I was told by Shawn. Apparently I’m the first blogger he’s encountered at any of these events. Considering the degree to which planning impacts people’s lives, I found this pretty stunning. Even more stunning to me though was that I was supposedly the first person he’s heard question the idea of planning or encourage the use of decentralized market mechanisms instead of centralized planning to determine land-use policy. Suffice to say, that doesn’t give me much hope for Maryland.
On the other hand, it was encouraging that I while I wasn’t able to get my group to go so far as embracing the Texas, no zoning laws model, I was able to get an overall agreement that we may in fact plan too much and that we should look to more flexible approaches. One particularly popular idea I floated was doing away with “1 house per X acres” limitations and instead embracing property tax credits for property development in areas of desired density levels.
However, my triumph with my group shouldn’t be read into too much. Compared to the other groups mine was probably the most market friendly; besides me there were two farmers, a MACO rep, and someone involved in construction/development vs a carpet-bagger from PA (incidentally, I think the forum proved well my theory that people who move to the area are far more likely to be supportive of centralized planning of land use policy). The table next to mine also had some good market-friendly things to say, but it also had Andrew Langer, president of the Institute for Liberty; David Dunmyer, who is apparently pretty growth-friendly; Del. Dick Sossi, also fairly friendly to growth; and my father, Barry Waterman.
However the other groups, filled with anti-growth, pro-planning stalwarts like Sheila Tolliver, Richard Altman, and Mary Campbell put forward completely insane tripe. The other groups pushed, pretty much unanimously, the idea that we need to protect even more farmland from development (either they never considered or simply don’t care that we shouldn’t be trapping farmers into a livelihood that isn’t competitive even with about $20 billion in subsidies a year). One table, I believe the one with Mary Campbell and Richard Altman, put forward the idea of creating a special designation for Eastern Shore farms, equivalent to New Jersey’s designation for the Pine Barrens (worth noting, I told my fiancee, who is from NJ, about this idea and she thought it hilariously stupid).
So concluding thoughts? I am strongly convinced that the Maryland Department of Planning is looking to issue a broad and expansive vision of how growth in Maryland should occur in the future. Private property rights, economic logic, and the fundamental inefficiency of central planning are never even going to be considered. However there are several more meetings left, so I encourage everyone who can to get out to them and speak out on the importance letting the market determine land-use policy rather than having it be centrally planned by some bureaucrats in Annapolis with grand visions of Soviet-style economic planning.
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