The upcoming Citizens Congress illustrates the influence of what I believe to be an inherent conflict of interest in our city government between the development community and the city staff. As a natural course of business, developers have the ear of the planning department on a daily basis. Citizens and citizens’ interest groups do not have an opportunity to bring business before the city on a daily basis. This is not a conspiracy; it is the natural course of business. Nonetheless, it is a natural occurrence that we must create balance for, just as we create air conditioning to deal with the natural occurrence of Texas heat.

There were two full days of focus groups to hear citizen input on the Comprehensive Plan. But of course these focus groups were held during the workday when the vast majority of citizens are unavailable to attend. Who was available, because it is how they make their living, were developers. While we recognize the importance of the voice of the development community in these dialogues, that voice has been given too much platform.

I want to emphasize that this bureaucratic symbiosis is not a sinister design of our city staff. It is clear to me that our city staff has good intentions. But with daily contact from developers, their sense of balance is not the same as most of the rest of us. Unfortunately they view their job as responding to those who come forward. Because of the natural course of business, developers are at that line far more than the citizens who will ultimately live with the decisions that are made. Because the city sees its roll largely as addressing the concerns of those who speak up, we are caught in a vicious cycle in which developers are defining the discussion in a way that makes growth in profits the end, rather than one of the many means to achieve the city’s stated objective of growth in quality of life. This stated objective, and not necessarily the actions of the city, reflects the will of the citizens.

The city seems to be operating on the assumption that this is a two-sided discussion in which the development community is entitled to at least half of the dialogue. Not only does this perspective fail to acknowledge a difference between community interests, which benefit all, and a profit motive, which benefits a few, it also overlooks its own failure to provide balance even in this skewed sense.

There were days of focus groups that were disproportionately accessible to developers, who speak with a fairly unified voice. There will be 3 hours of a “citizens congress” for the wide spectrum of citizens to be heard along with the developers.

This same level of imbalance exists on the Comprehensive Plan Action Committee, which has disproportionate representation of the development community.

We have had a glimpse of the result of this sort of minimizing of citizen input as huge incentives have been given to attract national chains that will compete with local businesses, which get no subsidies. These decisions are made with no attention being drawn to them. And recently the city staff recommended that a Super Wal-Mart in a strip development be pushed up against a neighborhood. The staff made this recommendation, not because they don’t care about the citizens, but because they had not heard from the citizens. Citizens were up in arms that they had not been previously involved in important decisions about the development of the land use map.

Again, this is partly a matter of how the staff sees their job. The staff, at the time, saw their job as providing an opportunity for citizen input. Never mind that this meant sending notices only to those citizens who live within 200 feet of a huge section of uninhabited land, which meant that almost no one knew. The bigger issue is that the city does not seem to recognize the need to educate citizens, especially those most directly impacted, about the complexity of development issues.

Please provide comments here on issues that are important to you as we think about the future development of College Station.