It isn't the notes you play, it's the notes you don't play.
This quote is usually credited to Miles Davis, but I have been unable to verify it. It is one of the deeper of the jazz musician quotes.
It's Zen, with a backbeat.
What does this have to to with the Growth Management Act? Read on.
Sometime after I moved here, I discovered the Growth Management Act. And I read its 14 stated goals.
And this line caught my eye...
The following goals are not listed in order of priority... - (from RCW 36.70A.030)
I've been to this dance before.
At my last job, I worked in a department that had a long list of goals that needed to be achieved.
All of the goals that my department needed to accomplish were equally important to each other. These goals were imposed on us, by legitimate necessity, from other departments. No one from any other department wanted to admit that any of these competing goals might be less important that another goal, so the company took no position about which goal might be more important. So there was no way to set those goals in any sort of order of priority, in the event that those of us who worked in my department had to make a decision.
I called it The Fifty Way Tie For First Place.
There were about fifty or so goals that my department was responsible for achieving as a matter of routine. And even though my company didn't take a stand on which of my department's goals was more important, I didn't have the luxury of not taking a stand, and neither did any of my co-workers.
So we improvised. Like jazz musicians.
And when another department in our company didn't like our improvised prioritization, we were criticized for it. Sometimes severely. Usually for the notes we didn't play.
I never did get that issue resolved while I was working for that company. The moral of the story is that if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.
Because it isn't really a fifty way tie for first place...
...it's a fifty way tie for last place.
The State of Washington passed the GMA, and established without clarifying which of these dynamic goals might have priority over the others, in the event of confusion or conflict or controversy.
Nice.
But the municipal governments, the cities and the counties, don't have that luxury. They need to set priorities, and they need to decide how they are going to prioritize these goals, even if the State refuses to commit.
Non-committal as the State has been on these goals, I believe that the language used to describe the goals gives clues as to what order of priority the legislators who drafted and adopted it might have had in mind.
I am going to be listing in 14 posts over 14 days, about the goals of the Growth Management Act. They will be ranked in order of priority based on a series of criteria that I will reveal in the last post in this series.
As I see it, it's the notes that the legislature didn't play when they drafted it that make the biggest difference.
My qualifications for writing this series are as follows:
- I have read the GMA. And by read, I mean I scanned it. Once.
- I have a pulse.
That's it.
I'm not a land use attorney. I'm not a city planner. I'm not even close to an expert on planning issues.
In fact, I will be learning about these goals and the GMA itself as I write this series of blog posts. So if you are reading these posts and you think you know more about the GMA than I do, you are probably right.
But a citizen has to start somewhere. I'm starting here.
The order of priority that I discovered was a surprise to me, and not necessarily a pleasant one. The order of priority was not what I hoped it would be. But the readership can judge for itself, and I'll be disappointed if they don't.
[Disclaimer: This series is written for edu-tainment value, and should not be mistaken for an authoritative or official evaluation of the 14 goals of the Growth Management Act.]
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