|
Daily
Sun helped sabotage growth management
Guest Editorial
By
John Grahame,
Flagstaff
Resident
In
the Nov. 7 election the Citizen's Growth Management Initiative (CGMI)
went down to defeat at the hands of a deceitful $4 million
television campaign paid for by what the
Arizona Republic's business writer John Talton calls
Arizona's "real estate-industrial complex." So much for
managing growth in Arizona.
The
Arizona Daily Sun contributed its part to the campaign in a
Sunday-before-the-election editorial by describing CGMI as "Orwellian"
and the Grand Canyon Trust as 'elitist' for helping to write and
campaign for the Initiative. The Sun went on to accuse the Trust
of "driv[ing] a wedge into the coalition that worked in good
faith to adopt local growth controls."
As
a member of that coalition (I was on the Task Force that wrote the
Flagstaff regional growth management plan) I now know more than a
little about the Orwellian nature of Arizona politics. And having
observed the campaign against CGMI, including the Sun's
contribution, I have now heard more Orwellian double-speak than I
thought it possible to devise.
Flagstaff
was the first community in Arizona to undertake a true coalition
planning process. It began with the 20/20 Vision for Our
Community, got specific with the Open Spaces and Greenways Plan,
and became a real blueprint for action with the Flagstaff Area
Regional Transportation and Land Use Plan. The Grand Canyon Trust
was involved as a coalition partner every step of the way.
The
Task Force was assisted in its work by a Colorado consulting firm
which found itself in the uncomfortable position of having to
advise our coalition that most of the common tools used by
communities to manage growth in other states were not available to
us in Arizona. The frustration shared by all of us involved in the
process was palpable, but we did the best we could under the
circumstances to propose a regional plan that would have
translated the community vision for growth management into action.
We
knew when we were done that much of what we had proposed could not
be accomplished legally under Arizona's extreme pro-growth
land-use laws, but if we had limited ourselves to what could be
done under those laws, we would have been able to propose nothing
of substance.
CGMI
was written by, among others, Brad Ack, a member of the Task Force
and Program Director for the Trust. The proposed legislative
changes were designed to address directly the frustrations faced
by the Task Force. If passed, CGMI would have for the first time
given the citizens of Flagstaff and the rest of Arizona some of
the tools we need to manage growth in our communities.
Has
anyone noticed that it has been a year-and-a-half since the
Regional Plan was given to the governing bodies for approval and
that nothing has happened? Frankly, it's not going to be adopted
anytime soon, since with CGMI voted down we continue to lack the
legal means to do what the Plan proposes.
The
Sun now says that for their role in the creation and support of
CGMI, the Grand Canyon Trust "doesn't deserve a seat back at
the table." To my knowledge, no one from the Sun has ever
taken a seat at the table, nor did they ever send a reporter to
cover the work of the Regional Plan Task Force. Had they done so,
they would have observed that everyone on that committee struggled
with the lack of legal tools available to us to manage growth. It
is entirely disingenuous of them to now point fingers at those who
were not only there, but who tried to fix a system created solely
for the benefit of the real estate-industrial complex, Arizona's
ultimate elitists.
John
Grahame is a Flagstaff environmental activist and community
organizer. He has co-founded several citizens groups, including
Friends of Dry Lake and the Flagstaff Dark Skies Coalition.
|
