Sunday’s NJ featured a fantastic piece of reporting by Adam Taylor and Maureen Milford. Called Influence, Access Taint Land-Use Decisions, this is a remarkably detailed look at how the NCCo land use planning process — from both the county and the DelDOT side was apparently captured by the developers, their lawyers and their lobbyists. Not only that, but Pam Scott’s showy leaving of Saul Ewing was just for show. So not only is the land planning process broken, but so is the Ethics Policy in the county.
This was choice:
Scott said she doesn’t believe that she and Roy received greater access or favorable treatment.
“People know who the players are. Delaware’s a small state,” Scott said. “My colleagues in the land-use business know who to talk to. I don’t think the access we had was any different than any of the other people.”
Indeed they do. And I expect the gleeful outrage expressed by other land-use attorneys in this article indicates that, as well as a number of players getting their licks in. And again, Pam Scott was doing her job, one I expect she was paid for pretty well. The people who failed here were the NCCo and the DelDOT people who let Ms. Scott and Roger Roy just hijack the entire process. Any regulator who is waiting to make decisions pending input from attorneys and lobbyists very likely should be out of a job. Period. One of the biggest quality of life issues anywhere is the difficulty of getting from place to place. Traffic studies AND accompanying mitigation to not deteriorate the current traffic situation in any targeted area is supposed to be one of the jobs of government. Just building everyplace while not upgrading the traffic infrastructure is a planning failure. If you’ve been to Christiana Mall (before the construction), you get what bad planning looks like. I’ve often thought that the cure to bad planning decisions (or just ignoring it) is requiring master planners to be licensed in the way that engineers are. Professional licencing comes with responsibilities AND liabilities for not doing the right thing. Certainly runaway suburban building with no improvements to traffic infrastructure would slow way down.
Governments taking their cue from corporate interests at the expense of the rest of us isn’t new. But it does deteriorate the quality of life for the rest of us. I’m very glad that there is finally light on the shenanigans of Scott and Clark as well as the NCCo planning process and DelDOT’s failures. Both NCCo and DelDOT need to revisit how they do business so that they aren’t a wholly owned subsidiary of Delaware’s developers.
What do you think needs to change?