A city's office of planning should be responsible for planning "everything," not only for land use

Harry Jaffe's recent column, "School builders get an A for effort, D for planning," in the Examiner touches on an important issue, one that he appears to not fully grasp.

After discussing the appreciated successful efforts of Allen Lew in rehabilitating school buildings (Lew directs the Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization), he writes about the lack of coordination. From the article:

What’s missing, according to the advisory committee, is adequate planning among the executive branch’s planning and development arms, School Chancellor Michelle Rhee and Lew. How would Lew’s new buildings better fit into neighborhoods? Which ones need bigger gyms, better health clinics, modernized performance spaces?

It’s as if Lew, the builder, has been told to build and rebuild schools without much direction from Mayor Adrian Fenty or Rhee.

To a systems thinker (of which there don't appear to be that many in DC), the column states the obvious.

The problems exist because there isn't one unified process for (1) municipal agency planning, (2) land use planning, (3) facilities and property management, and (4) capital budgeting.

For example, the Deputy Mayor of Planning and Economic Development's office does its own thing with regard to initiating economic development through the utilization of DC-owned assets, with a soupcon of involvement, very constrained, by the Office of Planning. The Schools do their own thing for the most part, unless it has to do with property disposition. The charter school "planning" such as it exists is the very definition of "chaos" from the standpoint of a "rational planner." The libraries do their own thing. So does Parks and Recreation. Etc.

Regarding the Deputy Mayor's Office involvement in economic development, see this past blog entry:

- A request for proposals isn't a plan.

And since DC has just received a couple dozen proposals to buy DC properties and redevelop them, see "Developers bid on vacant D.C. schools" from the Washington Business Journal, that's a problem.

I have been making a point for a number of years, in response to the desire in some quarters to have an overarching planning commission for DC as most cities have a Planning Commission and a Zoning Commission. DC only has a Zoning Commission. Currently, DC City Council acts as a kind of planning commission in its role as approver of the Comprehensive Plan.

During the Comp Plan revision process (2005/2006) I commented to Ellen McCarthy, then director of the Office of Planning, that DC doesn't really have an office of planning, we have an office of land use. (She didn't find the comment that funny.)

The proof of this statement is the fact that the Office of Planning has a limited if not almost non-existent role in the planning activities of the various DC Govt. agencies. And as others have pointed out, DC doesn't have a master capital improvements and budgeting plan either.

Another example of this besides the schools is the planning for libraries. I am disappointed with the Master Plan for the DC Public Library System (developed a few years ago), which was really only about 35% decent in my opinion, and has never been properly vetted through a public process, despite all those "listening" sessions.

Some of the conclusions, such as a focus on one story facilities, and recognize that DC is urban, a center city, where buildings taller than one floor are not uncommon, are counter to best practice library planning practices in other communities, even Montgomery County's construction of a library in Rockville, and their planning for a multi-story library and community facility (with for profit components as well) in Silver Spring.

But this document shapes how DCPL deals with library planning.

And the planning for the DC Department of Parks and Recreation. Rather than build new expanded recreation centers, with community center and cultural components (e.g., see these past blog entries "Prototyping and municipal capital improvement programs" and "No area municipality does it better: Arlington County extracting mixed primary use benefits from publicly supported facilities"), they spent tens of millions of dollars building cookie cutter facilities across the city, and there are still many many gaps in the programs and capabilities that are offered to DC residents, by comparison to what is offered to residents in other jurisdictions, either across the region or across the country--despite the fact that DC spends plenty of money on such services.

And why is it that we have to build a Senior Wellness Center in every Ward (I know, because there is federal money to pay for it, + neighborhood parochialism), without thinking about time shifting of use--every senior wellness center is closed at 5 pm) and building these facilities into community/recreation centers, and maximizing the use of such facilities throughout the day into the evening hours?

Money isn't the problem. The problem is lack of vision, inadequate planning and discoordination.

Etc.

So my take on a planning commission is that if it only has oversight of activities of the DC Office of Planning, then it's a wasted effort.

One way is to re-orient planning around a master planning agency, and the planning for these agencies and/or issue areas: land use planning; transportation planning; schools, education and libraries; parks and recreation; + cultural planning* (for which we don't have an agency at present, substantively, responsible for this area) and housing; should be tightly coupled and at one level at least, focused on planning at the level of the "neighborhood unit" in order to simultaneously achieve pro-child, pro-family, pro-neighborhood, and pro-city objectives.

Furthermore, planning efforts have to be truly based on enabling civic engagement in substantive ways, not just focused on some arbitrary time limits, and allowing for creativity, innovation, best practices and deliberativeness.

* Other agencies/areas which need to be included within a master planning system include police and public safety; fire and emergency services; public health, wellness and hospital planning; affordable housing (Dept. of Housing and Community Development); and economic development and public finance.

But there are two major units of analysis, the neighborhood and the city. These units connect, intersect and intertwine, but each also possesses a "factor set" that may conflict as needs and expressed desires at the neighborhood level may conflict with city-wide goals and objectives.

These conflicts need to be reconciled but aren't always congruent. But in any case, without defining these factor sets and communicating the resulting framework more widely, it is guaranteed that conflicts will continue to exist and become even harder to reconcile.