By Carolyn Szczepanski

carolyn@dmcityview.com

Rebecca Holdridge hasn't taken a vacation in five years, and, lately, she says even a good night's sleep has been hard to come by. Living just east of Ankeny with area development running rampant, she worries that, the moment she takes even a moment's rest or leaves town for so much as a week, some nightmare scenario will deal the final blow to her rural way of life.

So, a year ago, when Polk County began the process of revising its Comprehensive Plan - a document that guides, not only land use and housing development, but outlines economic development priorities - Holdridge was first in line to make good on the county's claim that "broad-based public input is essential to the success of the plan." Over the course of 2005, as more than a dozen participants from her North Central region met month after month, Holdridge says, "I made sure I made every meeting; it was that important to me." But, as the draft plan debuts next week at a handful of open houses, Holdridge and others say the county's claim of "broad-based public input" is little more than public relations. According to critical citizens, they were fed a bunch of rhetoric about their vital participation while the fix was already in for a feast of development that feeds the expansion-hungry cities and starves rural integrity.

As Jim Elza, county's director for planning and development and project coordinator for the comprehensive plan says, the revision was needed, not just because the previous one dates to 1990, but because the past decade of growth has necessitated a new vision. In that effort, the county signed a $384,000 contract with URS Corporation to provide background studies and facilitate six committees - economic development, housing, and four geographic quadrants - over a 15-month process culminating in a tangible strategy that Elza says will "steer public and private decisions" as the county moves toward 2030.

Those committees, Elza explains, offered the public "tremendous" opportunity to engage in open debate and have their ideas and concerns directly considered by the plan's overall steering committee. But, make no mistake, Elza emphasizes: the steering committee - staffed by "people in public and business occupations" appointed by the Board of Supervisors - was the "ultimate arbitrator." And participants who are crying foul about their level of input are simply trying to "misconstrue" the process, Elza says.

"These are advisory committees," Elza says forcefully. "They are not deciding, they're advising. They were given instruction on their roles in the beginning and if they thought they were a deciding body, I'd take umbrage with that."

But some participants, particularly those in the North Central region - uniquely energized by the growth of Ankeny in their area - say they, too, took umbrage with the process. Holdridge says the public participants were regaled with claims that they'd "get a lot of input, a chance to talk and discuss issues on what we'd like to see for Polk County." But, from the beginning, the process felt "too controlled," she says. Sure, citizens listened to presentations and did planning exercises - like placing colored beads on maps to depict where the population growth should be located - but, soon, Holdridge realized, "I'd say the same thing over and over," to little effect.

Like saying officials could reign in Ankeny's population growth if they put an emphasis on more fully developing infill areas instead of pushing out at the margins. Or suggesting that planners make a more concerted effort to protect the agricultural land to the north and east of the city - after all, it's only some of the most fertile ground in the state. Or pointing out that a proposed housing development just east of the city was a traffic nightmare waiting to happen.

"I'd go up after the meeting every time, and they'd put up sticky notes saying, 'Take out such-and-such,'" she says. "But, for whatever reason, it wasn't being done."

And Holdridge wasn't the only one who began to question the consistency of the committee's progress and the efficacy of the public input. As Mike Baldus, also a North Central committee participant, explains, there was the perennial dividing line between the supposed "zero-growth fanatics" and the development-hungry "grow-or-die" types. But as the meetings progressed, he adds, it seemed that "there were also some mysterious things going on behind the scenes that, to this day, I've not really figured out what was happening, who was pulling what strings."

"Towards the very end," he explains, "they came back with maps [outlining proposed patterns of growth] for us to pick from again, and some of what we had already established had changed. Which left some of the members saying, 'Wait a minute, I thought we agreed to this map and, if so, why has that part of the map changed?'"

Elza, who fielded calls from concerned residents like Holdridge, counters that such supposed mysteries were simply a matter of "point of view" and, in an attempt to foster consensus and dialogue instead of divisive voting, the process included inherent compromises. But some worry that the process stacked the deck in favor of cities, rather than citizens.

Perhaps the most telling examples of that influence, North Central participants highlight, was the case of the ever-increasing population estimates for the city of Ankeny. First, Baldus says, the group was asked to rely on projections generated by the State Data Center, which forecasted a need for an additional 18,174 housing units for the entire North Central region. But then, according to a letter sent to committee members by facilitator Jean Coleman to assuage mounting concerns before the final meeting, the group was advised to overshoot the state's number by as much as 50 percent to avoid "overly constraining the land market." Or better yet, she added, the group could extrapolate from Ankeny's tremendous development boom between 2000 and 2005, raise it another 50 percent and end up with 31,500 projected housing units.

But some members couldn't help but think that taking the county-sanctioned estimate of 18,000 and increasing it to more than 31,000 to account for the fact that, as Coleman put it, "planning is not a precise mathematical science," was little more than a calculated attempt to give Ankeny a wide berth for expansion at the expense of adjacent rural residents. And after the final session was wracked with contention about the selection of the final growth maps, the steering committee ultimately settled on the "city-driven" map. According to the draft plan, such city-driven models concede "much larger urban expansion areas." Which is particularly troubling to Holdridge, because she says the model with the least sprawling expansion and most agricultural preservation had the support of a clear majority of committee members.

"The votes were a clear 8-5, but that didn't matter," she says with notable frustration.

And, in what Holdridge and Baldus view as another example of minimizing the will of the majority, they say the draft also downplayed opposition to the Northeast Beltway - a transit corridor that critics contend will plow through critical environmental habitat and expand commercial and industrial development. A uniquely hot-button topic for many, the North Central participants say with 80 percent of the members citing concerns about the project, it warranted more than conciliatory language that members were "split" on controversial transit project.

Elza counters that, "We clearly said the Beltway was in the plan; there was no vote on whether or not to have the Beltway," and instead emphasizes that, on the issues up for debate, the public's voice was heard. "I think people don't realize how much we've gone out to ask people what we should be doing," he says. "But we have to absorb 150,000 people in this 25-year period, and part of the question we struggled with was, 'Where do you put them?' You might be in favor of saving all the agricultural land; we want to save as much as possible, too. But you still have to put 150,000 people here. No matter how you cut it, we have to provide for that, and that's what the plan does." Not to mention, he adds, the plan deals with population realities while addressing
environmental issues like water quality and runoff. "It's more concentrated growth; less sprawl, if you will," he summarizes. "Of course, that's not the view of everybody."

It's certainly not the view of Baldus.

"Overall, the powers that be had already made up their minds about what, by and large, was going to occur in terms of development," he says. "And while they included some of our lofty language about green spaces and a happy future, when it comes to the hard decision of development itself, they were pretty much going with the governmental entities that all have a grow-or-die concept, that are universally out to grow as much as possible."

So while the draft does include language about green space, Holdridge worries that could mean nothing more than the current pattern of sticking a token park in the back of each subdivision and paying engineering firms to come up with small-scale water retention tricks, while ever more pavement condemns residents along overburdened creeks to constant flooding problems. She wonders how the plan can profess to preserve the rural character of the county when the economic development plans call for plenty of industrial and commercial development but barely even mention the word agriculture. And she openly scoffs at the plan's vision of a "pedestrian-friendly" environment, when all she's heard from city officials is that "every little community wants to stick a convenience store you can walk to, so your brother can go to the corner store, get a popsicle and, by the time he walks home, it won't be melted."

"That's not the issue," she says indignantly of dressing up the serious implications of continued outward expansion with negligible concessions to "make it look good."The real issue, Holdridge says, is the faade of public input; the fact that she invested her time, read a notebook full of materials and, in the end, felt she had no impact on the supposedly public process.

"Let's be upfront," she says. "Are we going to have input that matters or are we wasting our time? I heard from people in the Southeast group who quit going. I was shocked; you think to yourself that you're the only one thinking this. But, no, I was talking to these people, and they said felt like figureheads. I was very discouraged." CV

(SIDEBAR)

Public input
A year in the making, a draft version of the new Polk County Comprehensive Plan will be available for viewing and comment at open houses held next week:

Monday, Jan. 30
- Des Moines Botanical Center, 909 Robert Ray Dr., from 1 p.m. to 4p.m.
- Jester Park Lodge, 11407 N.W. Jester Park Dr. (Granger), from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Tuesday, Jan. 31
- Polk County Public Works, 5885 N.E. 14th St., from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.
- Pleasant Hill Public Library, 515 Maple Dr., from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.

The draft is also online at http://compplan.co.polk.ia.us.

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