Democracy in action... working hard and fast to quell democracy

Friday night, on Informed Sources, Erroll Laborde beamed over the passage of a change to the city charter giving the as-yet-to-be-written citywide master plan the "force of law" Erroll was excited because in his (approximate and paraphrased) words, "The way it works now if, say, Donald Trump wants to come and build a high rise building in a neighborhood, he first has to deal with the City Council and the neighborhood people and other City officials and the process gets bogged down. But if there's a plan, then Donald Trump can just pick the neighborhood he's automatically allowed to build in and then do it."

And... to finish Erroll's sentence... anyone in that neighborhood who may not care for Mr. Trump's hypothetical building, no longer has any recourse because we've all agreed upon a binding plan drawn up by some consulting firm the city hired.

This is, to put it neatly, fucking stupid. By voting for the charter change, New Orleanians will have ceded their right to object to wide categories of future development that might threaten their neighborhoods.

Charter change proponents have argued that this wholesale forfeiture of democratic process is mitigated by the notion that the plan itself will be created "by the community" through a series of public meetings. If you believe that, the city has some high yield bonds it's looking to unload which you may also be interested in. One would expect that by now, we'd all be familiar with just how condescending and pointless "community planning" meetings are. No one in New Orleans who has been paying attention for the past three years has any excuse to believe otherwise.

But more to the point, is it not obvious that the sense of a community in regard to hypothetical future development is a very different and less relevant thing than its reaction to actual development at the time that is proposed? A master plan that claims to articulate the undefinable "sense of the community" this year should not be given precedence over the considerations of aggrieved neighbors should a developer seek to build a plan-approved encroachment upon them in the future.

Here's how the farcical process we are currently engaged in works. First the city will hold public meetings which will be sparsely attended by a few of the more active property holders in each neighborhood. Those attendees will be handed stickers or crayons or tongue depressors or whatever and asked to create some sort of craft representing their "vision" of their community in the future. The inevitably incoherent results of these craft projects will be handed over to the planning consultants at Goody Clancy who will immediately toss it out the window, draw up their own plan and present it to the City Council for approval. The Council approves the plan (to the cheers of an odd combination of plutocrats AND "good governement" types... the politics of all this is another topic though). Two years later, Donald Trump (or somebody) decides it's time to build six high rise condo along the riverfront in Bywater. The neighbors are outraged. But now that they have reason to pay attention, they learn too late that the planners wanted to encourage development along the underutilized waterfront. Unfortunately, there's not much that can be done at this point, since the "democratically designed" master plan has been democratically assigned the force of law.

You may wish to call me out for criticizing an imaginary aspect of a plan that doesn't exist yet. I figure, though, that makes about as much sense as asking voters to approve that same non-existent plan.