George Rebane

The recent spate of social engineering and economic stimulus programs issuing from Washington again motivates communities that hope to get some federal funding to propose and plan local projects that may catch the eye of an appropriate czar in the current administration.  All things ‘green’ seem to garnering most favor, and now everyone claims to have a ‘plan’ on how to spend these freshly minted dollars to create jobs and launch ‘sustainable’ government funded enterprises to save energy and the world.

Russ Steele, my friend and fellow blogger (NC Media Watch), has been keen to point out some of the foibles of this green effluent flowing from the banks (double entendre intended) of the Potomac.  For this he has been taken to task by his progressive readership (as have I).  One of the prime hurdles to communications on this particular issue seems to be that few know the difference between a statement of objectives or end goals, and a description of how, when, and with what these are to be achieved – in short, a plan.

Unfortunately, in our land this ignorance starts at the very top.  Our fearless leader does not have a clue as to what a plan is, and is going around the country telling everyone that he has a plan to do this and another to do that.  And all of this is much to the chagrin of his own party’s leadership who would love nothing better than to form up, fall in, and march behind the banner of anything that may remotely look like an Administration plan.

To short circuit this kind of federal leadership, perhaps we at the local level can do better when it comes to planning for such things as, say, green jobs.  In my long and checkered career, I have given many seminars on planning to communities, corporations, government agencies, and development teams.  Several years ago I wrote a short monograph on community planning in the attempt to fill an obvious gap that I saw when attending local public ‘workshops’ and participating on various committees of charitable, NGO, and county organizations.  This was published as TN0605-1: A Foundation for Community Planning by the Sierra Environmental Studies Foundation of which I am currently the Director of Research.  In part, its abstract reads –

Generating plans to deal with a community’s development, traffic, air quality, workforce housing, growth, safety, health, and other issues continues to be an exercise that ranges between comedy and farce. In this technical note we seek to introduce the notions of systems science to planning for smaller communities. The established principles and ‘rules’ presented here have long served in institutional planning employed by corporations, leading non-profits, and, more recently, even some departments of government.
 
This is not a cookbook but a structured smorgasbord of prescriptions, homilies, and ‘laws’ from systems science that suggest a new way of doing planning in a participative community. A participative community is one in which there is always significant public exposure of the planning process sometimes accompanied by an emerging consensus that actually informs the exercise. We claim here a realistic, some may say cynical, view of such participation based on the manner in which public input is usually solicited and the public’s demonstrated level of critical thinking acumen in early 21st century America. Nevertheless, the hallmark of our democracy is that the people must and will be heard.

For completeness, we preamble a short tutorial of systems concepts with a compendium of tenets that underlie the idea of the surprisingly hazy notion of ‘community’. Careful readers will draw their own conclusions about whether/how these tenets will affect the likelihood of satisfying the popular sop of ‘we need a plan that will be fair to all’. The report concludes with two checklists – items to improve the likelihood that the process and the plan will evade the comedy-farce spectrum, and a compendium of actual planning procedures that will infuriate some and may bring a smile to others who have seen it all.

The complete, if somewhat technical, report for the serious reader may be downloaded here.  Planning projects to be funded by public monies is not for sissies.