FUDA: Outsiders looking in, exerting power.

Yes, I was quoted correctly. I do not want to see a half-baked plan come out of the Future Urban Development Areas (FUDA) planning process that gets adopted and tries to take the place of our comprehensive plan.

I'd like to elaborate on my use of the term "half-baked."

The City of Verona spent almost two years working on the Comprehensive Plan. It involved a committee of nine people who formed as much of a representative sample of City residents as one could possibly hope for. Each committee member read every sentence of the plan, asked questions about it and took an active role in revising it. Consultants were hired to handle specialty technical areas such as traffic. Several public events were held to gradually put the entire plan in front of anybody who was interested, and to provide City staff, elected officials and volunteer committee members to accept feedback and answer questions. Several surveys were mailed out across the City, and hours upon hours were spent analyzing the results to find the messages that the community was conveying. Input was also incorporated in to the plan from the surrounding Town of Verona.

I personally was involved in each and every aspect of this and I can tell you personally that everybody involved had one goal in mind. That goal was to come up with the most responsible, forward-thinking and prudent plan for our City's next 20 years that could possibly be put together. I believe that we succeeded admirably at it.

Contrast this with CARPC's FUDA planning process. They are planning Verona's future by putting a few staff members in charge of looking at Verona from the outside for six months or so. In a year of living in Verona for the first time, those staff members might begin to form an understanding of how this community works. During that year, they would need to spend hours every week visiting City Hall, our police department, the fire station, our EMS, the schools, our public works department, the senior center and seeing the activities at our parks. They would need to conduct their lives in Verona on a daily basis, using our local businesses, traveling our streets and interacting with our residents and visitors. They would need to review packets of material and tapes of meetings that surrounded every development and redevelopment project in Verona's recent history.

I don't see any of that happening.

David Greene of CARPC says that FUDA's goal is to put Verona in a regional context, and that if Verona doesn't like the strategy then it's Verona's obligation to get involved more. Really? How about this: If an outside entity wants to dictate a community's behavior, it ought to be the outsider's obligation to dig deeply in to how the community really works so that it has a clue as to what context to put it in.