Freedom Disappears in the General Plan DEIR

Freedom Disappears in the General Plan DEIR

In the Open Forest zone (3-11) no residential use is permitted. So if you wanted to live in the forest, for whatever personal meaning or desire it holds for your individual self, that right is gone. Despite the extensive length of this document and the copious appendices, I could not find the Environmental Impact Report Daniel Boone filed when he crossed the Cumberland Gap. But if you want to kill freedom, it’s better to forget our traditions.

The text continues with “new mixed use development” in the Martell Regional Service Center and the town centers (3-11) which will include up to 160 new housing units in Buckhorn added to the 90 housing units that currently exist there. Martell should have “creative future development” and River Pines should have “commercial uses focused on providing tourist services” (3-12). Who defines creative is left unanswered and I shudder to think it could be decided by the same types who wrote this document. Also I wonder if a River Pines resident that decides to open a business unrelated to tourism will have to somehow mitigate his former marketplace freedom.

Referring to the Town Centers as medieval villages is not a metaphor. People in Europe lived in crowded villages and left in the morning to farm plots surrounding the village. But when these people came to America they moved onto their land, generally building their homes in the middle of their property, and ditched the more restricted land use and communal living style of Europe. This is a fundamental historic difference between Europe and America that the planners want to relegate to the dustbin of history to whatever extent possible.

Our freedom to travel where we want will be governed by Transportation Demand Management which the Federal Highway Administration defines as “Road Pricing, Parking Management and Parking Pricing, Car Sharing, Pay-as-You-Drive Insurance, Ridesharing and HOV Lanes, Transit Incentives, Transit Improvements and Telework” along with Transportation System Management (3-13). The FHA defines this as including “Traffic Signal Optimization, Ramp Metering, Incident Management, Speed Limit Reduction and Enforcement, Roundabouts, Capacity Expansion, Resurfacing Roads and Alternative Construction Materials.” Out of these two laundry lists some are givens such as speed limit enforcement and the only others of traffic signal optimization, capacity expansion, resurfacing roads and alternative construction materials make sense for us. The rest should be discarded from this plan’s DEIR. Ironically for the no growth and CO2 fearing folks, resurfacing roads and alternative construction materials partly depend upon having the Newman Ridge project operational.   

The Economic Development Element’s first goal (3-17) is to “Develop and maintain a favorable business environment in the County.”  Exactly how a 2,000 or so page DEIR of restrictions and mitigations help accomplish this appears somewhat contradictory doesn’t it? But someone that convinces you they are helping you while they are hurting you would make Machiavelli proud.

One of the goals of the Conservation Element is “Reduce energy use and promote renewable and locally available sources of energy” (3-18).  Solar energy requires sunlight. A good example is the creamery in Pine Grove. Maximum sunlight reaches their roof from the open sky area created by their parking lot in front, Hwy 88 and then the parking lot across the street. But the Town Center plan wants parking behind the businesses with store fronts facing a sidewalk along the highway. The shadows this may cast across solar cells seem ignored. It appears more important to advocate and plan for both politically correct solar and town centers than understand the consequences of their specific and sometimes contradictory schemes.

Proceeding to Aesthetics in Section 4, Environmental Impact Analysis it states in relation to the National Scenic Byways Program “…increase public understanding of national forests…sustaining …ecosystems…      ensure that people remain socially connected to public lands…contribute to the Nation’s overall scenic byways efforts.” So now our General Plan to guide land use has become a publically sanctioned and funded propaganda device to promote a certain limited point of view.

Whole sections such as Governance that don’t belong here as a replacement ballot box, have been skipped as I’ve only hit some highlights. This document is rather long for a suicide note even for a whole county, but it effectiveness may lie in trying to tire us out and giving up or perhaps even scaring us into believing that freedom shouldn’t stand in the way of their abstract, static and deified environment.

Copyright 2015, Mark L. Bennett