Thick As A Brick, Radio Edit

A little history...

First we were met with the planning eggheads in their ivory towers. The ULI “plan” produced shortly after Katrina, aka the “green dot” plan, wasn’t much more than a collection of loose ideas, and ham handed at best. Then came the Bring New Orleans Back commission, which was largely a dead letter at the time, mostly because it did not involve any public input. That changed with the “Lambert” plan, called for by the City Council.

That ditch is Boss Kean's ditch. I told him that dirt in it is your dirt. What's your dirt doing in his ditch?
I don't know, Boss.
You better get in there and get it out, boy.

The Lambert Plan was limited to specific heavily damaged areas, and was rather inconsistent in approach, scope, and the quality of the material produced. Some loved it, other hated it, but it was a plan for the devastated areas. The LRA, however, decided it wanted a citywide plan.

Luke, what you think you're doing?
Just getting my dirt out of Boss Kean's ditch, Boss.
I'm damned if you're going to put your dirt in my yard. You hear me? Now let's get it out of here.

So we moved on to the UNOP plan, which incorporated, or was to incorporate all of the previous planning efforts, and was by all estimation the largest citizen driven planning effort ever undertaken. But the 2008 Charter Change that sought to change the focus of land use from the political arena of the City Council to the professional City Planning Commission (as is customary in the rest of the country) mandated yet another citizen driven effort, supposedly to be the culmination of all these past efforts.

I told you to get your dirt out of Boss Kean's ditch, didn't I?
Yeah, Boss.
Then how come it ain't out?
I don't know, Boss.
You don't know.

We’ve been digging this ditch for a long time. Even as a draft, the Master Plan is a monumental work. So monumental and so far reaching and so utterly and impossibly complex that it can be easily tossed aside with little fanfare. After all, you need several more years of planning simply to understand what a lot of it means.

At face value, the Master Plan is the apotheosis of planning, seeking to enshrine weekend meetings with cold pizza in dingy multi-purpose halls to draw circles on maps and discuss important issues into the culture of the city for the next twenty years (the window of time the plan addresses).

I am sure some good beyond the CZO will come out of this effort. There are some very good proposals and ones that can and likely will be implemented. The plan will be consulted for decisions in the future. But I suspect that much of it is just so much dirt. Who is going to tease out something actionable, form all the requisite panels and committees, conduct all these studies and ultimately formulate the policies, is a real question. And why they even would is another. “Because the Plan says so” seems a rather weak motivation, and the bologna has been sliced rather thin for there to be much more than niche support of a lot of it.

I certainly understand the argument that freed from land use issues the City Council can take up all these Master Plan issues and continue to neglect the oversight and other charter mandated functions that are traditionally ignored by our City Councils. And much of this would require a wholesale rewrite of the City Charter, which is not a bad thing, but can we afford to put what passes for a recovery on hold to work on that Gordian knot?

What would inevitably have to be sacrificed on the high alter of planning to do this is another big question. Unfunded mandates, and saddling agencies with new functions for which they neither have funding or manpower seem to be a cornerstone of the plan, despite its claims otherwise. And somehow I don’t think the diligence of the inspector general is going to make up the difference.

Sorry, but what we needed was A Tale of Two Cities, what we got was Ayn Rand’s outline for her rewrite of the collected works of Charles Dickens (no political illusion meant in the Rand reference, only that she needed an editor really, really badly).

What's all this dirt doing in here?
I don't know...