Planning and Zoning

I was appointed to the Planning and Zoning (P&Z) Board in 2006.  I was on that Board for about 3-4 years, and because of P&Z, I was also on the Code Review Committee for about two years.  These were tremendously valuable experiences, and I really have Gage Hartung, Andrew Olis, Elizabeth Piotrowski, and Mario Rumiano to thank for many lessons learned.  I think I wasn't always easy to deal with on that Board.

Being on P&Z was hard.  It wasn't so much that I didn't know the first thing about design, or the Village Codes.  I could learn that, and over time, I think I did.  I had excellent teachers in the people mentioned.  The hard part of being on that Board was learning to balance the needs and wishes of homeowners against the needs and wishes of the greater community.  It would have been easier to have advocated for homeowners, and declared the Codes intrusive and faulty, or to have advocated for the Codes, and declared independent-minded homeowners self-centered and irresponsible.  What was hard was finding a fair and reasonable middle ground.  It was helping homeowners find alternatives to the one idea they had in mind, which was either prohibited by a Code or would have caused too much unease among their neighbors, or finding ways to massage interpretation of one or another Code, to allow the rest of us to be a bit more permissive of things we might reflexly have refused.

When you represent the Village, at any level, you can't simply take sides.  You can't just advocate for the "little guy," and rail at the Village, the "government," "the man," or "the powers that be."  And you can't advocate for the Village at the expense of the people who comprise and support it.  There is never complete agreement, about anything, and you have to find some sort of satisfying compromise.  You have to come as close as you can to a win-win.  You have to work hard not to let people feel as if they've lost, or been overpowered.  And you have to preserve critical relationships with your colleagues, with whom you have to work, but also who are, "at the end of the day," your neighbors.

I'm not still on P&Z, or Code Review.  But I can count all the people with whom I worked as friends at some level.  We didn't always agree, not at all sometimes, but we maintained respect for each other.  I hope it's not just wishful thinking, but I would like to think I represented at least a small part of the value to them that they did to me.