Archive: Opinions

Should Lansing have a full time planner or a part time planning consultant?  The question is more complicated than it looks.  If you have an overarching vision that includes a town center with a denser population that discourages suburban sprawl you probably want a full timer.  if you think government should be smaller and keep out of people's lives as much as is feasible you're probably on the part timer team.  These are, in many ways, intangibles.  How do you measure the quality of life when the various stakeholders define that quality differently?

What is absolutely measurable, however, is the costs to the taxpayers.  Not the consequences of doing things one way or another.  you can argue about those until the cows come home.  But the actual dollars and cents that each alternative would cost taxpayers is easily quantifiable.  You look at what the Town spends in each scenario and compare the bottom line.

Councilwoman Ruth Hopkins is the only Lansing government official that I know of that has attempted that in the three years that this has been a hot issue in Lansing.  Even she says that the comparison won't be 100% accurate until spending is closed out for 2015.  But she says that her projection of a full years of spending from the first nine months is probably pretty accurate.

I don't know what took so long for board members on either side of this argument.  The cost of a planner was one of the major factors in the disagreement from day one, if not the major factor.  Over the years I have been met with blank stares, prevarications and downright hostility from various government officials on both sides of the argument when I asked whether anyone had analyzed actual planning dollar spending.

Maybe I am simple minded, but it seems to me that the solution to this argument actually is simple: Do the math.  It's really just simple arithmetic.

This argument can be put to rest, and the way to do that is easy.  Hopkins has started the ball rolling.  She will be off the board before the 2015 books are closed, so either she should be conscripted to update her numbers with the actual planning money spent over all 12 months, or someone else on the Board who favors hiring a full time planner should do it.  At the same time another board member who favors a part time consultant should do the same thing.  Alternatively, get an unbiased independent auditor to analyze the numbers.

I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that their bottom line figures will not be identical.  But they will have some hard numbers they can use to sit down and smooth out their areas of disagreement and come up with a number that everyone can accept.  After that, all other things being equal, follow the numbers.  Either hire a full timer or keep a part timer, whichever is most economical.

So what's the big deal?  Why let some people say that the other people are just guessing when we all can know?  That makes so much more sense than just claiming that one approach or the other is less costly.  It is something that can be done without much effort.  It is easy to do.  It would settle one argument, once and for all, that has pitted part of the town against the other for three years. 

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