In consideration of Frank’s post below about regional planning, we might liken the creation of regional governance to the development by the military of the General Staff.
Before Clausewitz, and the creation of the Prussian General Staff, military line officers and staff officers were interchangeable. In fact, it might justly be said that, before the Prussian development of the staff, a strong-willed general could perform better than his staff at predicting and managing events.
What changed all this, of course, was the industrialization of war. With huge numbers of troops and supplies to be moved, the work of the General Staff became wide-ranging and critically important to mobilizing the power of the nation to war- and in knowing when not to do that. A trained General Staff became a powerful and complicated organization that could not be created in less than a decade, or quite possibly two.
And this is the evolution we’ve seen in Puget Sound. Fifty years ago we looked to leaders to get things done, but the complexity of the problems has far outgrown the ability of an individual to meaningfully manage. Huge amounts of staff work are needed to gather information and, more importantly, determine where and how the information is to be used. Just as the military staff coordinates many divisions and regiments, the regional planning organization must coordinate many jurisdictions.
The regional planning organization does not supersede local jurisdictions because those local jurisdictions never had the power to act at the higher level of the regional planning organization. To the extent that local jurisdictions implement regional planning, the role of the regional planning organization is to present the planning in forms the local jurisdictions can implement, just as the military General Staff issues orders to divisions and regiments that those organizations can do.
A lot of the controversy about regional planning is not about the form of regional planning, it is about what needs to be done. When Kemper Freeman or the contractors association pay the Discovery Institute to raise complicated questions about the nature of regional planning, it simply means they want more roads and more suburban sprawl.
Regional planning efforts can go sadly awry, as witnessed by the Port of Seattle, a major regional player and boondoggle, heavily financed by taxpayers who effectively have no say whatsoever in how the Port is managed. This fiasco should serve as a constant cruel reminder of the dangers of allowing amorphous governing bodies to grow without democratic supervision.
Regional governance is not an “option”- it is a major fact on the ground that we must deal with as best we can.
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