Public Approval Process

I have always found the public approval process to be an interesting process. You spend months working with various staff members, other consultants, neighbors, and anyone else involved in a development project. During this time most if not all issues are worked out, clients spend large sums of money, and usually you get staff to support your project, working through the issues, etc. Then you go to a public hearing. Since these public hearings are usually quasi-judicial, the applicant is not allowed to speak or work with either a planning commission member, city council member, or what have you.

You get to the public hearing, and you get 15-30 minutes to make your case after months of hard work and negotiations. There is also public input, some discourse among the ruling body, then they make a decision. In some jurisdictions, this goes totally against the grain of the direction you have gotten from staff, and you get denied. Sometimes it goes the other way, and staff gets overruled.

I have been thinking lately, that this process is a little unfair. Why spend all the time, trouble, and money to work through all the issues for months, only to get derailed in a short hour or two public hearing. Why can't you work with the ruling body throughout the process so they are involved, and truly understand what is going on. This does happen with public projects. There are always workshops with staff and city council (or other body), meetings, etc. But with private developers, there is no such options.

Seems to me this process needs to change.

Campgrounds - September fuglies!

This past weekend we went camping for our last trip of the season. We happen to have a tent trailer, which we love for camping. I don't know how many of you go camping, but those of you that do know that all campgrounds have one way loops in them. That is fine, but in the vast majority of the sites we camp in, we have to back the trailer into them. Not a big deal, but invariably, the back in spaces are designed in the opposite direction of the one way loop...so you have to go around the loop in the wrong direction to have a prayers chance of getting into the camp site. I find this idiotic, but have resigned myself to it. Now this particular camping site took the cake...it was actually pretty easy to get into it, but after I backed in, I realized the whole campsite was totally backwards! RV's are universally designed to have the doors on the right side (when you are facing to the front of the trailer) with hookups and such on the left side. This campsite was backwards. The picnic table area was on the left side of the trailer, with the hookups on the right! This was the first time I had run into this. Of course, I had to borrow an extension cord to hookup. Walking around the campground, I notice a considerable number of campsites that were backwards. I am ashamed to admit that it is largely people in my profession that design campgrounds...and obviously, the ones who design them, don't camp! Guess I need to figure out how to get some of these projects.