GATEWAY FODDER

The city annexes a huge amount of county open space and develops it all the way to the county line. During this development process, a huge suburban style development was put in just on the county side of the border line from where the city was intently scraping away and paving over.

Nobody raises an alarm. Even those who claim to be preserving rural heritage in the county say nothing. Is it that they don't see a difference between suburban and rural? Nobody thinks about developers. Who developed the city down to the county line? What, if any, was the relationship between them and the the suburban developer(s) on the other side of the county line? Was the suburban development meant to patronize the city sprawl, single-use development in a kind of murky metropolitan-style smudging of boundaries? Which banks made development loans? Nobody (that I know of) asks these questions. The developers and their funders operate in secret, hiding in plain sight.

Beyond this, there must be a whole array of enablers and enabling systems to smooth the development process while affixing the needed blinders on the public's eye.

Just as veiled and cloudy was the matter of the new freeway interchange. We drive into town one day, and huge construction has begun. A new diverging diamond interchange is being built. Everyone is alienated from the process. It's something that the people in charge have decided to do. Never mind that we should have learned not to relinquish land use oversight to "people in charge". Not at the county level anyway. This is the level at which the people should retain oversight.

The divergent diamond takes two years to build while they detour us this way and that. Finally it's done, and there are two fatal accidents there in the first week. There are two stop lights to maneuver where formerly there were none. We county residents can't see the advantage of this thing. The scale of the operation was staggering. But for what? Maybe it was meant to accommodate the totally insane proposal for a truck stop right by the interchange on the county side where hundreds of trucks will park with motors running all night? The suburban development people are up in arms. The pollution! The noise! The lights! A mighty opposition movement is formed against the truck stop (as if the truck stop and not the developer community was the main problem).

So here is a case of the system painting itself into a corner, which could have been avoided with commonsense planning.