The Lively Lowdown

You know that sinking feeling we get driving by our favorite orchard and seeing rows of new houses replacing cherry trees? Or when we shop at ugly, new, big-box stores for low prices even though we know we are helping to drive small, local stores out of business? Or when we find ourselves stuck in long lines of traffic just trying to get home for dinner—or take the kids to the beach?

LUTS—the Land Use and Transportation Study—can help us get rid of that feeling for good. LUTS may be an unfortunate acronym, but it stands for what will be the most important, sophisticated regional visioning and planning process Grand Traverse—or any other part of Michigan—has ever seen.

Hopefully, it will get a better, more memorable name when it finally gets rolling, because every citizen that cares about the Grand Traverse region needs to know about this historic opportunity to guide growth in our region for decades to come.

Lots of growth is coming to this area--lots. By 2020, the 5-county region will add 50,000 more residents to the more than 150,000 that live here today. If we don’t take our civic responsibility for community planning to heart, this place that we love so much (no one who lives here secretly wishes they could get out—except a few 17 year olds!) will lose its luster.

LUTS will allow us to figure out where to put the newcomers to the region without screwing up our beautiful home. It will invite us to collaborate as a region, instead of competing as isolated townships and villages. LUTS will map out future growth that is fiscally, socially and environmentally sound. Using cutting-edge technology, some of the nation’s leading community planning experts will help us look beyond fights about re-zonings, strip malls, and highway widenings and see the big picture.

LUTS will show us which community investments will lead to the growth we want; which will lead us to more new housing in cherry orchards, more big-box malls, and more lousy traffic; which areas we should preserve forever; and which areas we should develop.

Most importantly, though, LUTS will be profoundly democratic. It will remove the politics and decision-making power from local officials who may or may not get what the community really wants, and place it squarely in the hands of citizens who care enough about our region’s future to become actively involved “LUTS stakeholders.”

It’s pretty simple: The more people get involved, the better LUTS will work. Unless everyone contributes and sets the highest, best community standards, we will be left with merely the sum total of everyone’s self-interest—which looks a lot like South Airport Road or Chums Corners.

We can do better. With LUTS, we will, because it will be up to us. 

Nearly two years ago, 34 people, including yours truly, formed a new community group with a big mission: launch a Land Use and Transportation Study that would allow people in the Grand Traverse region to work together to figure out how they want the area to grow in the coming decades. We were appointed to the LUTS steering committee because each of us is a “community stakeholder” representing a certain group of people with a stake in our community: realtors, environmentalists, business people, government officials, and so on.

Two years later, still no study under way, and people are asking: What’s the big holdup?

Even for many of us on the LUTS committee, the progress has seemed achingly slow—as if we’d never get started.

But let’s step back and consider a little local history.

Just three years ago, the folks who are now working as a team to launch LUTS were bitter opponents in a battle over a proposal to put a bypass, complete with a big bridge, through the Boardman River valley. When the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality found that the studies supporting the bridge were flawed, pro-bypassers agreed to work with anti-bypassers to figure out the best way to deal with the traffic congestion that the bypass was supposed to relieve.

So, while everyone saw the wisdom of working together, for the first few months the level of trust in the room was so low that even agreeing on an agenda could take an hour.

Another thing that really slowed us down was the decision to use formal consensus, not voting, to make group decisions. That is because, when your position loses by even one vote, you’re closed out and your voice is silenced because the other side “won.” It doesn’t make for good, cooperative decision-making.

So, I’m proud to say, our group received formal training in consensus, and uses a facilitator who’s expert in the technique.

Consensus takes longer because it requires every member to be in agreement—or at least agree to ‘stand aside’—before the group can adopt a proposal. But we have found that the extra time the consensus process requires actually saves time later by avoiding conflicts later on.

We also had the mixed blessing of $3.3 million in Federal Highway Administration money to fund the study. It’s good money, but it comes attached to both federal and state procedures—including those of the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT). We managed to navigate those mysterious waters and select a world-class consulting team last November. But we’ve been stuck in a holding pattern ever since, while MDOT bureaucrats who are used to reviewing paving contracts try to understand what it is they need to approve.
 
Yes, it’s taking a long time. But we’re doing it right.