Though the county was the largest single financial contributor to the Blueprint process (and the largest contributor of staff resources), the funds came from one-time set-asides that were targeted for the re-write of the Comprehensive Plan. With that money now spent, the chances that additional county-citizen tax money will flow to prepare subarea plans is extremely unlikely. The North Ada County Foothills “Subarea” Plan portion of the revised County Comp plan is not a true Subarea plan, in that it falls far short of an actual Specific Plan — its current status is due to the lack of funding needed to develop a true growth plan for the region. It’s simply a list of contraints — and in some places at odds with the City of Eagle’s proposed plan.

The technical staff working on the agency portions of Blueprint’s implementation did propose a work-around that would shift the fiscal burden to the individual cities that would grow into the developing areas. This seemed reasonable since it would eventually be the citizens of those cities that would be expected to provide muncipal services to these areas. This was done through a fine-tuning of the State’s Area of City Impact modification process — via the insertion of a Planning Boundary Area that would establish a communication protocol between all the parties of interest. Within these PB’s the cities would fund and lead the Subarea planning process, with the county invited to participate as a key stakeholder.

One of the most galling aspects of the Blueprint process was the position that some leaders took in regards to regional cooperation. When the hired consultant suggested that an additional level of scrutiny should be applied to proposed developments along strategic transportation corridors and (already defined) preferred development nodes (and only during the Blueprint study), the Valley’s leadership balked and refused to implement the necessary interim statutes. Even though state law would automatically sunset these statutes in twelve months to protect private property rights, mayors and councils refused to cooperate. The county, for one, was prepared to move forward with an ordinance — but the cities unanimously halted any further discussion. The City of Eagle went one step further and wrote an official FU letter to the consultant stating that it felt it had the necessary plan already in place to deal with the situation (its Soaring Eagle Comp Plan) — and it added that if a development opportunity presented itself that deviated from their plan, it reserved the right to countermand its adopted language.

How’s that for cooperation? It should be noted that the mayors of Eagle and Meridian were instrumental in firing that consultant because he had the termerity to suggest that the cities in Idaho really don’t have the legal authority to annex property outside their respective Areas of City Impact. It’s not as if the consultant (Robert Freilich) didn’t understand the legal ramifications of his statement, he’s one of the most preeminent legal authorities in the country regarding land use issues — the American Bar Association even published his book “From Sprawl to Smart Growth. Successful Legal, Planning and Environmental Systems”. He’s also written 26 other publications related to the legal implications of growth management — but I guess an Egg Heiress and an Uber Soccer Mom know best.

Am I sounding grumpy?

You can’t begin to imagine how hard we’ve all pressured the Commissioners for good sub area plans. In fact, a sub area plan for the Central (what some call Western) Foothills was a major priority identified in the recent Comp plan rewrite. But alas, our pleas for same have fallen on seemingly deaf Commissioners, or at least we haven’t heard back from them despite numerous letters (maybe voting them out of office this fall will help improve their hearing).

All the while, planned community and nonfarm subdivision apps in the rural tier continue to be scheduled before P&Z and the Commissioners with alarming regularity. Oh Blueprint, AC Comp Plan and sub area plans, where art thou? Better yet, time for you Commissioners to man up. I doubt that ACHD, IDWR ot ITD will do it for you.

If you mean that I seem to have transformed into a “growthaphobe” then I’m afraid you’re in for a disappointment. There is a legitimate roll for growth to play in the Valley, both in & out of municipalities.

Outside of cities, limited high-density growth can (and should) be used as a mechanism to convert valuable open space and ag land to permanent preserves. The inability to see the correct roll for ex-urban growth was one of a handful of horrible oversights in the Boise Foothills Plan. Further, the existing municipal governments’ inability to embrace the concept of a Transfer of Development Rights by identifying the necessary Receiving Zones is another.

While my short-term stint at the county was enlightening, I was left disheartened by how the concept of growth has been demonized — and how many have chosen to highjack the public process to achieve their own selfish ends.

Though Ada County is the most wealthy county in Idaho, to be the King of Paupers is nothing to boast about. If the tax structure in the state were corrected (with a local option tax), and the individual levy rates were set to address all the problems that face the citizens of the region — then preservation-through-purchase might eventually be a viable option. But even with such a hugh overhaul of the tax system, it’s doubtful that a culture of have-nots will choose to pool their limited resources to tackle the big regional issues.

This leaves preservation-through-entitlement as the only option. So far Ada County is the only jurisdiction that has figured out how to do this, but the process is still overly reliant on the whims of elected officials — and not on the hard science of preservation. To their credit, the commissioners do rely on technical staff to guide them, but even that guidance has its limits.

The best next step is to continue the Blueprint process to the next logical level — the creation and adoption of Subarea Specific Plans that identify the critical resources and best growth scenario for each subarea. These Subarea Plans cannot be a simple McHargian Constraints Analysis, but an actual Specific Plan with listed pre-entitlement rights for individual parcels. No parcel owner would be forced to develop his land as identified in the adopted plan, but if he so chooses then he enjoys a greatly streamlined approval process. If he wanted to do something else, then there’s the whole public review process left to him — with the additional burden of convincing all the citizenry why they were wrong when they adopted the Subarea Plan.

Ultimately, such action would require that each unit of local government respect the authorities and constraints of the others. The one thing we’ve learned through Blueprint is that this is almost impossible. Until elected officials feel the anger of the citizens when they demonstrate an inability to play nice together — we’re doomed.

Not that the traffic issues are anything to sneeze at, but the out provided to any developer is that they can buy all necessary improvements to mitigate the traffic impacts. If a development requires six lanes and overpasses, then when they can reach traffic concurrency (when the supply reaches the demand) then the development gets approved.

But how do you mitigate the permanent loss of local farmland?

It has been argued that growth is inevitable — that it’s just a question of when it all happens and its eventual distribution. This is a specious argument since the capacity to support all these mouths is not limited by manmade infrastructure but by the very ability to grow local crops.

Wasn’t the county’s staff at one point working on a set of agricultural preservation strategies? Wasn’t the Blueprint for Good Growth suppose to address this limiting factor? Doesn’t the very Long Range Regional Transportation Plan for Ada & Canyon County accept that farmland preservation is the lynchpin for growth (not roadway capacity)?

It seems that the leadership we expect of our elected officials to care for the public’s health, welfare, and safety is sorely lacking. And no one is blameless. It is incredibly easy for one agency to fire off a letter pointing out the problems facing another agency — but how damning can their criticism be when these same agencies have officially accepted the ag-based limiting factor on growth in the Valley AND they withhold the necessary resources to develop a joint comprehensive plan to deal with this issue?

The City of Boise is worried about Dry Creek? Where’s its support for Agriculture and Agricultural Processing preservation? COMPASS is worried about SH55 carrying capacity? Why hasn’t it cited it’s own LRTP’s AG Preservation policies regarding the loss of the Dry Creek farmland? Why have all the land use agencies in Ada County renegged on their obligations to fully implement the Ag Preservation policies spelled out in their own Blueprint for Good Growth Phase One Report?

At one level it really is okay to take the position that a “generic” parcel of property can be developed — as long as the development mitigates its impacts. You establish what constitutes an Adequate Public Facility — and you set up the rules to ensure that no one crosses that line.

But, when a development encroaches upon our communities’ abilities to feed the populace the time to define un-mitigatable impacts is upon us. Is farmland a “public facility”, is sufficient drinking water, is breathable air?

The Peak Oil crowd has been saying that for a lot of years. There is a reason why the Nordic countrys started preparing for Peak Oil 15 years ago. It takes a long time to retreat from a position of high energy useage in a graceful manner.

We in America are now faced with an economic collapse that will be ugly, and the corporate monsters have destroyed our ability to quickly reorganize into a localized lifestyle.

I am personally hoping that a LOT of people commit suicide, which is actually already happening. The middle aged American suicide rate is the highest its been in over 30 years.

The only local group that is talking about what you are saying is the Boise Sustainable Living Community. You can join at…
http://www.relocalize.net/groups/bslc

A group of councellors have put together a website to help folks deal with Peak Oil at…
http://www.peakoilblues.com/

Here’s what I think. The Treasure Valleys carrying capacity will eventually be about 2 to 3 thousand. The area may be one of the better locations to be in the coming years due to its remote location, placement at the top of a large watershed, and fairly homogeneous population.

Long term, this area might not fair so well because of its remoteness and the predicted effects of global warming.

I have been thinking for some time as I pass land being torn up for unneeded buildings that will not have tenants that Idaho really needs to put any useable land under cultivation for food — human and animal — now. Zoning laws should encourage people to keep a given number rabbits, chickens, ducks and other small farm-type animals on urban and semi-urban properties. Support intensive programs to teach people how to grow edible garden plants or do urban farming. And, as in the 1960s and 1970s, share skills and knowledge about what you can produce yourself to supply household needs.

Idahoans were a pretty self-sufficient people when we moved here 42 years ago. I was constantly amazed at the life-skills ordinary people used (and shared) regularly. And every summer, a surprising number of them strapped on backpacks and headed out of Boise on foot for the mountains. There was a steady stream of them walking up the two-lane stretch of Highway 15 (now Highway 55) past Floating Feather where we lived that first summer.

Today, the first step toward taking back our lives in the Treasure Valley and beyond should be to call a halt to development that does not have the infrastructure to support it, that may not have adequate water available and that will serious degrade life and even use of property in the neighboring areas. Public officials need to look long and hard at whether there will even be a way to finance the needed infrastructure in the foreseeable future — and be required to state what the financial means are, if they believe it is possible.

Be careful with your facts, you might scare the clueless multitudes enough that their heads might never come back out of the sand again.

My personal favorite economic reality check sources are…

http://www.321gold.com/
The Wall Street Journal
Newsweek
http://www.energybulletin.net/
http://www.kunstler.com/
The Guardian, UK

Please don’t think me greedy for space, but I would like to post this weeks rant by James H. Kunstler, America’s number one interviewed Peak Oil guru.

http://www.kunstler.com/

June 30, 2008
Worse Than Grandma’s Depression

This isn’t so funny anymore. Intimations of a July banking collapse rumbled though the Internet this weekend while mainstream news orgs like The New York Times and CNN pulled their puds over swift boats and Amy Winehouse’s performance technique. Something is happening, and you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones…? to quote the master.
What’s happening is that American society is sliding into a greater depression than the one Grandma lived through. On the technical side, there has been unending controversy as to whether we’re gripped by inflation or deflation. It’s certainly deceptive. Food and gasoline prices are rising faster than the rivers of Iowa. But the prices of assets, like houses, stocks, jet-skis, GMC Yukons and pre-owned Hummel figurines are cratering as America turns into Yard Sale Nation.
We’re a very different country than we were in 1932. In that earlier crisis of capital, few people had any money but our society still possessed fantastic resources. We had plenty of everything that our land could provide: a treasure trove of mineral ores and the equipment to refine it all, a wealth of oil and gas still in the ground, and all the rigs needed to get at it, manpower galore (and of a highly disciplined, regimented kind), with fine-tuned factories waiting for orders. We had a railroad system that was the envy of the world and millions of family farms (even despite the dust bowl) owned by people who retained age-old skills not yet degraded by agribusiness. We had fully-functional cities with operating waterfronts and ten thousand small towns with local economies, local newspapers, and local culture.
We had a crisis of capital in the 1930s for reasons that are still debated today. My own guess is a combination of a bad debt workout that sucked “money” into a black hole (since money is loaned into existence, but vanishes if the loans are not systematically paid back) plus a gross saturation of markets, meaning that every American who had wanted to buy a car or an electric toaster had done so and there was no one left to sell to. (The first round of globalism — 1870 – 1914 — had shut down after the fiasco of World War One.)
Our debt problems today are of a magnitude so extreme that astronomers would be hard pressed to calculate them. By any rational measure our society is comprehensively bankrupt. From the federal treasury down to the suburban cul-de-sacs so much loaned money is either not being paid back, or is at risk of never being paid back, that the suckage of presumed wealth has passed through an event horizon out of the known universe into some other realm of space-time, never to be seen again in this realm. This would seem to be the very essence of monetary deflation — money defaulted out-of-existence.
This condition is partly disguised by both the loss of credibility of US currency and real-world scarcities of oil and food, but the upshot will be something at least twice as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s: people with no money in a land with no resources (with manpower that has no discipline), hardly any family farms left, cities that are basket-cases of bottomless need, comatose small towns stripped of their assets and social capital, an aviation industry on the verge of death, and a railroad system that is the laughingstock of the world. Not to mention the mind-boggling liabilities of suburbia and the motoring infrastructure that services it.
The banks have been doing their death dance for an entire year now, pretending that their problems are those of mere “liquidity” (i.e. cash-on-hand) rather than insolvency (no cash either on hand or in the vault and nothing else to sell to raise cash except worthless “creative” securities that nobody would ever buy). But the destruction of money (resulting from loans not paid back) is now so intense that the game of pretend has reached its terminal point. The question for the moment is exactly who and what will be crushed as these institutions roll over and die.
Complicating matters is a global oil predicament that is really not hard to understand, but which the organs of news and opinion have obdurately failed to explicate for an anxious public. Call it Peak Oil. There are only a few elements of it you need to know. 1.) that demand has now permanently outstripped supply; 2.) that new discoveries are too meager to offset consumption; 3.) That under under the circumstances, the systems we rely on for daily life are crumbling. I’ve called this situation The Long Emergency.
Our chances of mitigating this, and of continuing our current way-of-life is about zero. I’ve tried to promote the idea that rather than waste remaining resources in the futile attempt to sustain the unsustainable (i.e. come up with “solutions” to keep suburbia running), that we should begin immediately making other arrangements for daily life — mainly by downscaling and re-scaling everything from farming to commerce to the way we inhabit the landscape — but my suggestions have proven unpopular even among the “environmental” elites, who are too busy being entranced by new-and-groovy ways to keep all the cars running.
So where we are at now is the equivalent of standing in the slop by the ocean shore under a gathering hundred-foot-high wave that is about to come crashing down on our heads. Since I sure don’t know everything, I can’t say how this will all play out in the months ahead, especially with the presidential election coming at the exact moment that voters will be turning on their furnaces for the cold and dark winter beyond. I would venture to say that so far our society as a whole has done a piss-poor job of comprehending the situation. But there is still the possibility, with four months of politicking left, that the nature of our predicament can be articulated in a way that few can fail to understand, the way Mr, Lincoln articulated the terms of the Civil War on the eve of its fateful outbreak.

There will be no real estate ‘uptick’ in 2010 . . . that’s when the Option ARMs start to reset and all the nice middle-class people with good jobs lose the homes they are already upside down on. But that’s just housing. The noose is already tightening on commercial resort developments, and it will hit commercial office and retail soon after. Anyone noticed what’s happening with Starbucks, GM, Ford, Home Depot, Linens n’ Things, and dozens of other companies that were expanding right along with the housing boom? Those businesses are shedding property and jobs as fast as they can, hoping to trim down to survival weight before the lending tsunami really hits.

To extend the analogy: all we have seen so far is the tide starting to recede, unexpectedly, as the sub-prime meltdown finally ended the go-go real-estate madness. The credit tide is still going out and out and out. The further it goes, the bigger the tidal wave that will follow. It’s going to wash away a lot of the world we took for granted, and we will be spending a long time rebuilding sometime after 2015 . . . perhaps long after.

The whole world finance structure has come unstuck, and is causing chaos in Europe and Asia, not just the US. No one knows how to stop it. It looks a lot like 1929 on steroids. Read the European papers online and see what’s happening in Ireland, Spain, Italy, China, Japan, the UK. Then do what you can to survive what is coming.

Well, ACHD jerked everyone around for so long that the deal fell apart. What would have cost $6million or so back then has what tripled now. And it does come out of yours and my pockets. Such a deal.