Nerditorial: Open Letter to Bellingham Planning Commission

On February 14, 2013 at 7 p.m. the Bellingham Planning Commission will have a hearing on a draft of a new Economic Development chapter of the City Comprehensive Plan.

I, naturally, don't like the draft and said so in an open letter.

To Whom It May Concern,

I take exception to the use of, and definition of, "Employment Lands" in the current draft of an Economic Development chapter of the Bellingham Comp Plan. The definition of Employment Lands as "land in the city limits and the UGA with commercial, industrial, or mixed-use zoning" is inappropriate and incompatible with the past, present, and future economic development of Bellingham.

The use of "employment lands" to describe these zoning designations may seem, at first glance, to be a reasonable and benign common sense short hand. But, upon closer inspection, it actually proves to be a misleading and sinister Jedi Mind Trick.

In the same paragraph that defines "employment lands", there is mention of the fact that "Critical Areas and their net buffers impact nearly 50% of the 7,300 acres [of Employment Lands]."

This is an explicit assertion that the protection of Critical Areas within the city, and the buffer zones that protect those areas, poses an obstacle the city's ability to foster economic development and create a "friendly" business environment in Bellingham.

This Economic Development chapter also describes a goal of exploring "mitigating measures to compensate for any lost employment land capacity".

Remember, this is a document that, if adopted, would be a part of the City's Comprehensive Plan which is governed by the Growth Management Act, so it is difficult to overstate how putting into writing that actions to protect Critical Areas within city limits will be assumed by the City to be job killers, unless proven otherwise.

What is the Employment Capacity of an Acre of Land?

The question of how to calculate the employment capacity of an acre of urban land must be answered before the concept of "employment lands" can be taken seriously.

What is the BAS (Best Available Science) to calculate the job yield of an acre of "employment land"?

The word acre is an old word. 

According to the Encycopedia Brittanica Online "the acre had one origin in the typical area that could be plowed in one day with a yoke of oxen pulling a wooden plow."
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/4100/acre

So, once upon a time, one acre of land could keep one guy (and his oxen) employed for one day.

Then John Deere invented the first modern mass-produced steel plow.

After that, a farmer could plow five acres in one day. And that was with oxen.

When a tractor with an internal combustion engine and a steel plow became widely available, a farmer could easily plow an acre of land in under an hour.

Due to technological advances, the employment capacity of an acre of rural land plummeted in the last 100 years.

But that's rural employment. As illustrative and dramatic as that may be... what about urban employment capacity?

Well, the effect of technology has actually caused the employment capacity of an acre of urban land to skyrocket...  a swift skim over technological advancements that have exponentially increased the Employment Capacity of an acre of urban land is all that is necessary to establish this (such as the skyscraper, the telephone, the automobile, the Xerox machine, the personal computer, the internet, and the post-it note.)

The employment capacity of land has proven to be wildly fluid (particularly in recent history), and in the absence of any science to back up an assertion that employment capacity of a parcel of land can be reliably quantified, assertions to the effect that employment capacity should be (or could be) mitigated has no place in the Bellingham Comprehensive Plan.

To a Person With a Hammer...(All Employment Land Looks Like Developed Land.)

The definition of Employment Lands is founded on an argument with a fatal rhetorical flaw. The definition limits Employment Lands to only those parcels of land which are developed, based on the assumption that the only way for land to create jobs is by developing that land.

This is observably and provably false.

Mount Baker generates jobs out of all proportion to the fraction of a percent of the land developed there. And several of the jobs generated by Mount Baker are generated in Bellingham.

While it is possible to get to Mount Baker without ever getting near Bellingham, it is not exactly convenient. There are gas stations, restaurants, hotels, ski shops, and an airport in Bellingham that all have a larger customer base by virtue of the existence of one of the most enormous parcels of undeveloped land in Whatcom County. No credible definition of Employment Land that excludes overwhelmingly undeveloped Mount Baker can be taken seriously. People can't ski on asphalt and concrete.

In the middle of Bellingham itself is Whatcom Creek. The run of salmon that occurs year in and year out at that creek brings anglers by the hundreds year in and year out. The notion that the existence of this largely undeveloped urban Critical Area... and the buffer that protects that area... does not create any jobs in Bellingham is absurd on its face. If the City of Bellingham adopts this draft, with this definition of Employment Lands, then the City will be taking an official position that salmon, and salmon friendly habitat, are assumed to have no job creating value on the grounds that the only employment land in Bellingham is developed land.

More to the point, the proposed definition of Employment Lands strongly implies that Whatcom Creek and its amazing salmon runs go beyond contributing nothing to the local economy... and imply that the existence of the Creek and its buffers are a textbook example of the percieved threat to the economic future of Bellingham posed by protected Critical Areas.

Such an assertion, however implicit, has no place in a serious discussion of the future economic development of Bellingham.

(NOTE: I have no reason to believe that Whatcom Creek is zoned for development or will be zoned for development in the foreseeable future. I am using Whatcom Creek for the purpose of illustrating that features such as Whatcom Creek are at risk of becoming artifacts of a "bygone era" if the City of Bellingham officially adopts a plan that excludes Critical Areas as having any potential job producing capability.)

A keen observer will notice the relative abundance of retail outlets that sell bicycles in Bellingham. The definition of Employment Lands in this draft asserts that the relatively undeveloped areas in and around Bellingham that draw bicycle enthusiasts like well-toned moths to an endorphin-generating flame contribute nothing to the local economy. This assertion ignores the fact that the relatively undeveloped park and trail system in Bellingham pays for itself every year in terms of the amount of revenue generated by the annual sale of bicycle shorts in Bellingham alone.

And I will end this section with a brief but pointed reminder that no one buys a kayak for the purpose of paddling it to Wal-mart. Undeveloped land generates jobs in Bellingham.

Point Source Employment vs Non-Point Source Employment.

An analogy may prove useful here. Any public discussion of pollution and the impacts of human development on the environment will eventually mention the difference between Point Source Pollution (easily identifiable sources of pollution like a pipeline of waste transmitting pollution directly into a body of water) and Non-Point Source Pollution (more difficult to identify sources of pollution such as the nutrients that are transmitted to a body of water from stormwater runoff from literally hundreds of properties)

The jobs generated by developed land are examples of Point Source Employment. But the jobs generated by undeveloped land, through tourism and recreation, are examples of Non-Point Source Employment. And those Non-Point Source jobs are just as real as the Point Source jobs. These aren't theoretical jobs that exist only in an economic textbook. They exist in Bellingham right now.

For an Economic Development chapter of the Bellingham Comprehensive Plan to be truly comprehensive, it has to accurately reflect the entire economic milieu of Bellingham... including economic impacts that may not fit neatly into the vision of one specific faction of the local business community. A faction that seems to be mired in a 20th Century mindset.

If any mention of Bellingham were stricken from this draft, it could be mistaken for a description of the planned future Economic Development of Detroit. The draft essentially waves a white flag to austerity, and aspires to little more than survival in a bleak economic future with no end in sight. This Economic Development plan puts the "meh" in employment.

If we aim for prosperity, we might miss it. But if we don't aim for prosperity, we will never hit it. 

No one who aimed for austerity ever missed.

This plan is supposed to include an aspirational component. So, I insist that this plan be re-written to actually aspire to something more than applying an economic tourniquet to the City and amputating those Critical Areas that the development community thinks we can afford to live without.

This does not reflect the City's best work.

Please try again, this time with feeling.

Shane Roth
Bellingham, Washington