If you do get on, you should walk into the meetings to "Der Kommissar".
Oh god I would totally not do that, though I'm probably only a few years away from school board. It sounded like you had some beliefs about not having the kind of development that contributed to the terrible flood stuff, so that's maybe a positive in terms of a difference you could make.
P&Z would give you a better shot to address issues of equity and environment than practically anything else you could do, possibly even moreso than getting on Council. FWIW, I'm not sure that the time commitment is all that great. I mean, obviously I have no idea how it's structured there, but my sense of how it works here, in a much bigger city, is that it's not 10 hours a week or anything crazy.
In practice, would you be the only non-pro-development voice? That would get tiresome as shit.
Wait, committee or Board? Like, are you advising Council on how to enact/interpret P&Z, or are you a distinct entity that rules on variances and master plans? The latter is where the leverage is.
If the meetings don't have a DJ to play the members into session, don't bother.
Do they pay people for that kind of work? Or at least can you get tips?
Following on 4.1, if it's a situation where there's at least a reasonable Chair, then you'd have the opportunity to maybe have a big effect at the edges. IOW, even if you don't have the votes to stop bad developments, you could suggest all sorts of reasonable requirements that would blunt their worst effects.
One of the frustrating aspects of development is how often small improvements that would make a big difference don't happen, because nobody thought of it/asked/cared.
Depending on its discretion and powers, if you dominate this board you may be able to rule your environs like a king. The presevation nut/real estate agent who runs our local historical zoning board (despite not always being on it, but his creatures always have a majority) is the Don Corleone of a decent-size swath of Los Angeles, since you need his approval to do anything to your house. I literally go over to his large, perfectly-appointed home before doing any home project for a kiss the ring session, almost literally since he's an extremely flamboyant man who wears large rings.
Things are considerably more lax around here. I have been thinking of calling the city on a car that has been parked on a street near me for about a year. It had no plates and debris is now piled under it. I'd assume there was a corpse in the trunk except it's an SUV with no trunk.
Not that my neighborhood is historical.
Or that anybody has ever found a trunk-corpse since I've lived here.
To be fair, I think I'm the only one looking.
Heebie, it really depends on the board and what it covers. In the bay area, city staff handled all of the real development, but boards were involved in residential remodels. (Actually, I think there were multiple boards.)
I'd attend a meeting or two to see what they handle before you give it too much thought. You might wind up without the power to grant variances (city councils often keep this instead of delegating it), so it can be more of a fashion and noise prevention determination instead of answering "can the building go here at all?".
9-12 are a fantastically Eeyorish progression. Don't give up, Moby! There could be a corpse, or the trunk of a corpse, or a corpse in a trunk, round the next corner!
8: I have a hard time imagining you can just waltz into a position of such power by dint of showing up and getting into the details. This guy presumably is plugged in in some way.
I can't look in every car. I only break into the trunk if it look like the car is abandoned or if it has New Jersey plates.
13: whaaaat? That's almost perfectly backwards re staff level vs commission approval authority.
For development applications, staff will review projects for code compliance, if applicable draft proposed conditions of approval and make a recommendation. You'd get a whole packet to review x days before the monthly/biweekly meeting. And at the hearing you can put your oar in (within limits set by city counsel), asking for further, fewer or revised conditions of approval. You'd spend additional time meeting with applicants, opponents etc on site visits or in an office. I once met with a mayor in her bar. She had remarkably died hair, striking if not particularly flattering. Folks in the future could remember you as the commissioner who brought countless hordes of children to site visits! Particularly exciting at the petroleum refining facility! Go kids go!
Ordinances are obvs policy, future oriented (ideally), but while the commission will give staff direction, staff actually do the drafting.
Go to a few meetings, start to finish.
How much more time you spend is down to how much of a local fiefdom you want to create and/policy influence you want to have.
I meant sit through a few meetings start to finish and ask yourself if your mind, let alone ass, could take it.
Follow your ass and your mind will open.
At any rate if you'd like me to cruise around the town's website and glean anything more specific, email me. I think you'd be great.
The town's website probably won't have pictures of the assess of existing committee members, so I don't know what you could tell.
I don't have time to sit in on meetings, I don't think, unless there's one tonight. Nominations are due Monday.
Maybe somebody exceptionally civic minded and extremely dull created a YouTube channel with past meetings.
There may be archived audio, video or transcripts. At least cruise through 6 or so agendas to get a feel for the range of matters that come up. It's going to be mostly development projects with maybe a couple of ordinances per year and some compliance matters thrown in occasionally.
After the flooding there may be si.e exciting ordinance-policy stuff! Or not, sadly.
24: Looks like there are videos, actually.
24: Looks like there are videos, actually.
It looks like you can serve two 3-year terms. If that's a lifetime cap, then maybe I should wait.
If you shiv a guard, I bet you get a longer sentence.
Anyway, this thread makes me feel lazy, comparatively.
My dad used to be on a ridiculous number of committees, but that was his punishment for going to law school.
Good advice from DQ here.
15 is perhaps optimistic about how local governance tends to work. People frequently win minor offices with vote counts in the single digits. Board seats often sit vacant because nobody really wants the hassle, and the mayor (or whoever) can't be bothered to track somebody down. Chairs tend to hold the balance of power on a Board/Commission, and so that's the only one that the mayor really cares about, which is how people like HG, who seem qualified and civic-minded and unthreatening, can get on them, and then have a real impact (because it turns out to be kind of random which Chairs are forceful and effective).
29: Maybe. But in the aftermath of the flooding, this may be a tipping point period for these debates: "They're still cleaning out basements on Floodzone Street, and you're proposing to pave the wetlands!?" As opposed to "we haven't had a flood in five years, I'm sure everything's fine now."
It's one meeting every two weeks. But I'm already chronically tired and not sure what I'd give up in exchange (besides Jammies and E. Messily just picking up the slack).
Think of all the Olive Gardens you could prevent.
Careful. You could wake up with the head of a breakstick in your bed.
Head of cauliflower would have made a pithier (!) joke.
I'm pretty sure there's no whole cauliflower in an Olive Garden.
Under my ordinances, you'd have to have cauliflower at all Olive Gardens. And olives at your Cauliflower Gardens.
In many places there's a staff and maybe even a planner who do most of the day-to-day work, including evaluating proposals. You can help around the edges but they are not happy if the board itself overrules their conclusions. You are also going to be constrained by law (city and county and state zoning rules) so you can't declare Olive Gardens to be forbidden, either.
Still, it's a great way to learn more about where you live, such as who has the real power (it's often developers). So go to some meetings as a spectator, both because you'll see some of what you're in for and because if you are nominated to the board people won't be able to say "But she's never been to a meeting!" You will also be better informed if you seen it in action.
My dad was on the local planning commission for a while. He enjoyed it enough to do it for about 8 years. The most direct impact of his service (aside from one or two multi-use buildings he was proud of helping usher through) was when he was successfully able to intimate that the big construction project across the street had better continue the undergrounding of fiber-optic cable to his house or there might be someone reporting their extremely non-standard and annoying driveway variance. Neighborly!
I like the idea of these American mini-elected posts, probably because I imagine I could probably get elected as President of the Water Conservancy Selectmen or something and stack up posts like a pound-shop Robert Moses. Then I look at the kind of thing small US jurisdictions get up to....and realise that it's down to people who had the same idea I did.
In many places there's a staff and maybe even a planner who do most of the day-to-day work, including evaluating proposals. You can help around the edges but they are not happy if the board itself overrules their conclusions. You are also going to be constrained by law (city and county and state zoning rules) so you can't declare Olive Gardens to be forbidden, either.
So what exactly is the point of the board in a place like this? Theoretically or in practice.
Checks and balances/blame avoidance.
One of the top managers at the Water and Sewerage Authority here got assassinated the other day. Be careful who you piss off.
Is there some reason that your friend wants you to be nominated now, as opposed to some later time? Such as trying to put a slate together to push some particular agenda, or take advantage of a unique opportunity to get sympathetic people in charge? If not, I'd be inclined to wait and get more familiar with the existing board and what they do.
44. Why do we have representatives when there is already a federal bureaucracy?
Or that anybody has ever found a trunk-corpse since I've lived here.
Meanwhile, over here, I can think of at least three car-murders, i.e. people murdered and found dead in their car, that happened in the neighborhood in the past four years or so. I think only one of them involved a body in the trunk, and that was a car set on fire.
So what exactly is the point of the board in a place like this? Theoretically or in practice.
Well, all due respect to Mr. LMA, but the summary you quote isn't quite right. Staff don't have nearly that much power/influence*, and the whole point of appointed P&Z boards is to make decisions that aren't slam dunk.
IOW, if I want to build a garage 3' from the property line, but I'm in a zone where it has to be 5', but the code says a narrow lot can go 3', that may, indeed, go before P&Z, but it's essentially a formality. But if I want to build it 3' from the line despite not having a narrow lot, then it's not really staff's role to say what the answer should be, because now it's balancing my ability to use my property against my neighbor's direct interest as well as the community's broader interest in density and how flexible they want setback rules to be. Maybe the neighbor is fine with it and I have a good reason to build there, but that's not a technical decision to be made by civil servants.
That's obviously the simplest sort of things that come up; infinitely more fraught are developers who want to, I dunno, turn a city park into a mixed-use structure complete with turning a quiet, effectively dead end residential street into a commercial thoroughfare. Among other things, in that sort of case, while the staff in theory can go against the mayor and tell P&Z that this is bad practice, in reality staff's boss is a mayoral appointee, and there will be pressure to, at the least, present a balanced case, whether planning in the abstract suggests so or not**. By contrast, it's perfectly common for boards like this to buck the mayor, sometimes at the cost of getting kicked off the board.
*varies place to place, of course, but as a general rule, staff is civil servants, often unionized, while the Board is a political body; despite what Republicans think, unelected bureaucrats don't really hold all the power in our system
**this is essentially why AB left city government 9 years ago: the new appointee was a creature of the mayor who didn't give a shit about best practices, and so AB no longer had cover to present honest staff reports to her Commission.
That was unclear. The sequence of events was (a) body put in trunk (b) car set on fire.
49: Does the guy with the rings approve? Sounds like he'd put a stop to that sort of thing.
I could see why setting a car on fire would go to the historic preservation board, but I don't see why a murder would need approval.
49: SEE? Cars ARE coffins!
Generally speaking, I thought the point with putting a body in the trunk of a car was to delay discovery without having to put a bunch of work into it (e.g. digging a grave seems like a great deal of effort). Starting the car on fire would negate that benefit.
52 -- Unfortunately, his power only extends to haughtily and capriciously dismissing proposed renovations to historical homes. You can't stop gang murder armed with nothing more than a collection of Gustav Stickley chairs and a hatred for satellite dishes.
I hate satellite dishes and have a collection of Ikea furniture. There's no gang violence by my house.
I'm just saying, suggest he buy some crappier furniture.
50: Yeah, but staff can influence decisions in various ways. One that I've seen: Board needs to come up with $X million in budget cuts by deadline. Staff has helpfully costed out various proposals totalling at least $X million, from which board will choose. Staff will, of course, cost out additional proposals upon request by board, provided request is made sufficiently far in advance of the deadline. However, what assumptions they make about how proposal will be carried out, and what savings will be achieved, is likely to depend in part on what they think of the proposal, unless the board has been very careful to spell the assumptions out in excruciating detail in their request, or staff has a good relationship with the person doing the proposing. At the final meeting (typically just before the deadline), when the public turns up to ask "Please save program A which costs $Y million," whether or not the board can accommodate that request depends on whether other alternatives costing at least $Y million have already been identified - there is no time to consider alternatives that haven't been fully costed out by then.
59: as detailed in Yes, Planning and Zoning Committeeman
so you can't declare Olive Gardens to be forbidden
The law, in its infinite majesty, should prohibit the serving of faux Italian cuisine to Olive Garden and Buca di Beppo alike.
I say do it. You're not nobody: anyone who raises their hand is somebody. You can always resign if it's too much. Just say you want to spend more time with your family, and people will knock themselves out trying to figure out the real reason.
59 sounds like the machinations of the Deep State, at a municipal level.
I've watched enough TV to get the joke in 59, but I prefer to think of Planning and Zoning Committeman as the lifestyle magazine for the superior municipal board member.
64: I only read it for the articles.
("Drive Her Wild With Your Comprehensive Knowledge Of Post-Kelo Eminent Domain Jurisprudence.")