Gall and ignorance in equal measures

As an old fashioned environmentalist and conservationist seeking to find some ways to balance human and wildlife/plant life needs in an urban ecology, I wrestle with faddists, developers and top down idealists who wish to impose a "good idea" based on some recent fad.

I try to shape the conversation towards effective decision-making with a clear articulation and measurement of the problem or opportunity, a disciplined review of measurements and research, a rigorous review of alternative solutions or approaches, an understanding of multi-stakeholder variance in objectives, clarity about trade-off decisions, and informed consent among those affected. Sounds reasonable but is anathema to virtually every central planner who can't stand reasoned and evidenced-based decision making from among the electorate.

The problem is especially egregious in my city where there is a long history of backroom deals, patronage distribution and exclusion of residents from decision-making. They go through the motions of inclusive public sessions but then leave the decision-making to the vested interests in the back rooms.

It has been interesting to view. It is not old fashioned corruption per se with envelopes of cash under the table. It is a new and sophisticated version. The insiders sit on one another's boards, they support one another's grant applications, they advocate for one another's positions. None of it involves citizens and all the cash comes from taxpayers via grants and from private foundations. No cash in envelopes but the city is bought by special interests and paid for by excluded citizens.

Were it not for my conviction that we all have to stand up and hold our elected officials and their bureaucracy accountable, it would be easy to give up because the rewards for holding people accountable are few and far between.

I am currently dealing with a particular situation. The city has a bad habit of setting up quangos associated with private public efforts. We have an Invest Atlanta group and a Park Pride group who are supposed to be separate from the City but who usually receive a material amount of the funding from the City. The big advantage of a quango is that it is free from the sunshine laws which are such an inconvenience to city government.

In this particular instance we have a parks quango running block for a public infrastructure advocacy group wanting to run a new trail through a nature preserve that is in the middle of a residential neighborhood. It is in a constrained space, subject to flooding, adjacent to private property, enormously threatening to the environment (foot traffic and off leash dogs), likely to increase quality of life issues (noise, drug paraphernalia, trash) and crime.

Somehow they overturned longstanding City Parks operating procedures in order to build a new entrance into the preserve and several hundred feet of twelve foot trail where none had existed. No notice, no planning, no communication, no enforcement, no security. Nothing. They just showed up and built something that vested interests wanted despite the rejection by the neighborhood.

So I am left planning how to get this fait accomplis overturned. Much of this rides on good governance issues. This is clearly wrong at many levels. As I am mulling over options and approaches this weekend, it occurs to me that there are five absolutely pertinent books out there that encompass this situation.

There is The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. It is the classic critique of centralized "expert" urban planners running roughshod over the emergent order of bottom up growth which tends to be good for humans and the bane of central planners. We went through this nonsense in the cities. She described the problem then and showed its destructive consequences. We don't need to replicate bad history and yet that is what we are doing.

Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott. The subtitle says it all How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. It makes the case that the central power desire to improve things requires it to collect data (make things legible) but that that legibility is usually only a rough proxy for reality. The emergent order at the local level deals with the realities of a situation while the engineered perfection of the center makes a hash of it because its approximation of reality is not accurate enough to be useful.

Two Cheers for Anarchism by James C. Scott is a quirky defense of local action over centrally planned projects, exploring the dynamics of the intersection between theoretical central plans and chaotic local action.

Doing Bad by Doing Good by Christopher J. Coyne provides the case studies documenting just how pervasive are the failure of projects centrally planned by experts.

The Vision of the Anointed by Thomas Sowell similarly explores how the self-regard of central planners isolates them from the community and blinds them from reality to the detriment of their plans.

These books capture the current dilemma: supposed centralized experts wanting to dictate public policy to the residents while fronting for vested interests with a pecuniary interest and no community presence. The irony is that the local people on the ground have a far greater knowledge and expertise than do the generally low calibre central planners.

But of all these authors, Jane Jacobs' is the greatest indictment of the coercive central planning approach taken by our local parks quango.

That's where things stand on Sunday evening when I get an email from the parks quango advertising an upcoming conference. They are big on low-value, time-consuming conferences where people emit many bromides and feel-good statements which have no foundation in reality or action.

And what is there in the middle of their pitch to get good people to come and spend precious time on a low value conference?

With no self-recognition or comprehension of the irony, they have:

Click to enlarge.

It takes a great deal of either gall or ignorance to be a coercive central planner quoting Jane Jacobs in support of your devious schemes.