| San Diego County, CA | November 7, 2000 Election |
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Community CharacterBy Jerome StocksCandidate for City Council; City of Encinitas |
This information is provided by the candidate | |
Don't micro manageAs a resident of "New Encinitas", I attended the "Community Character" workshop that the city council recently promoted. While preparing for the meeting I spoke with some of my neighbors and we were all looking forward to finding out what our fellow New Encinitan's felt the "character" of New Encinitas was all about. The invitation to the workshop was fairly vague, but we were supposing that the outcome of the meeting would somehow help future civic improvements, or even private developments, better meet the needs of our community. Imagine my surprise when, instead of holding a meaningful public dialogue, the consultants that facilitated the meeting proceeded to show us 83 slides of landscaping, roofing, fencing, signage, set-backs, and street-curb designs, then asked us to grade these on a scale from best to worst. They explained that our input would be used to establish a list of design requirements, or codes that would in the future be used to further define the details required to make a project acceptable in "New Encinitas". It would be essentially the same program for all five of the Encinitas communities, ultimately creating least five new lists of acceptable attributes..easier for developers to do whatever they want. It will also make it harder for regular folks to deal with the city on a human level. Basically, if there are hundreds of detailed rules, then these rules become hundreds of trip-wires for the average person attempting to deal with the city for a simple re-roofing or room addition permit, and they become hundreds of loopholes for the development professionals to exploit. An excellent example of this type of folly is the U.S. tax code. Professional bureaucrats have carefully crafted thousands of detailed rules to address every possible situation and circumstance. As a result the U.S. tax code contains over 7million words, but millionaires and corporations routinely manage to avoid paying income taxes. Even the I.R.S. isn't sure what's in those thousands of pages of complicated rules and regulations. Unfortunately, the micro-management approach to societal problemsolving rarely works; in fact, it tends to become just a full employment act for attorneys, consultants, and lobbyists. When will we learn that the more detailed and intricately we attempt to craft our codes and rules, the more "wiggle room" there actually exists to subvert the intended goal? By comparison the U.S. Constitution is a fairly short document of general principle that has no loopholes, and Lincoln's Gettysburg address, which beautifully defined our nation, was only about 230 words long. I call upon the city council to take this opportunity to reject a"design review/ micro-management" course of action and instead adopt a "goal oriented" approach. Establish a series of "mission statements" to define the essential character elements of each of our communities and ask that future proposed projects outline what they have done to fit in with that community's specific mission statements. Protecting "Community character" should not be confused with forcing people to get city-sponsored approval for the color of their new garage door or roofing tiles. I believe that by using a simplified, goal-oriented approach we can truly protect the character that exists in each of our wonderful Communities. Jerome Stocks 760-815-7787 760-931-1144 |
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ca/sd Created from information supplied by the candidate: September 26, 2000 17:45
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