Q. I keep reading about new apartment buildings and housing developments, converting golf courses into new, expensive neighborhoods my children can’t afford. Do you know anything about how the county plans to handle all the traffic? I hope I’m not living here when the roads are choked with more cars.
A. I haven’t seen government working to coordinate or steer development. In the years I’ve been involved as a private planner and public reviewer, I’ve observed parts of the review process in your county government, but haven’t seen officials combining data, calculating infrastructure — such as how to handle all forms of water, sewer, roadways and traffic frequency, utility delivery or terrain analysis — or how schools, businesses and taxes would be affected. This is a monumental task that isn’t being done by public planners.
Our system is geared more toward letting private developers propose something and then waiting for citizens to react. We all have planning concerns and opinions. Some of the best questions come from people who express real fears about our drinking water, sewage treatment and traffic on such an enlarged scale.
In public hearings for the Mitchel Field 64-building Lighthouse project development, I wasn’t impressed with planning presentations, noting that the developers hadn’t addressed the big picture of combining public and private funding, enlisting cooperation or how their proposal would be an improvement. They could have been much more convincing with phased-in stages of development, showing how infrastructure, such as widened roads and new sewage and power plants would be built and paid for. Of course, government needed to cooperate and coordinate, by leading for the good of the communities it serves, but it did not.