We Deserve Better

Watching the videos of the Zoning Commission’s July hearings, a few things became clear:

1.  The ZC is being asked to make the kind of decisions it was never intended or structured to make.

2.  In the absence of both electoral accountability and the data necessary to make intelligent and well-informed choices, a majority of the Commissioners seems comfortable making these decisions based solely on their own personal preferences or beliefs.  Chairman Hood has repeatedly resisted such an approach -- see, e.g., his recent admonition: “Why don’t we take self out of it . . . and try to think of the city as opposed to what we personally would do.” -- but the other two Mayoral appointees seem to pay him no heed.

3.  Unless there’s a major shift in the political landscape, the likely result will be that three individuals, none of whom has been elected, will be determining whether DC upzones citywide, incentivizes the subdivision of larger homes, makes it more difficult and expensive to own a car while living in the city, replaces public input with a developer-controlled market in density credits in neighborhoods like NoMA, West End, and Capitol Riverfront, and decides that single-family residential neighborhoods do not belong in an urban environment like ours.  

These are not policy choices that were mandated by the democratically-adopted Comprehensive Plan.   And I’m fairly certain that none would survive the Comp Plan process.  There’s an easy way to find out.  A new Comp Plan amendment cycle is imminent.  Rather than make these decisions themselves, the Zoning Commission should tell the Office of Planning to get Council approval of these policies through that process before asking the ZC to implement them through the ZRR. 

4.  Finally, it appears that the ZRR hearings scheduled for early September may be crucial.  There are clear divisions of opinion among the Commissioners and the compromise appears to be "let's hear from the public."  Experience tells me that that's literal -- i.e. the Commissioners pay more attention if you show up and speak than if you submit written testimony.

If you don't like what's happening, it's important to push back -- not only at Zoning Commission hearings, but as you talk with and evaluate Mayoral and Council candidates. As residents, citizens, voters, and property-owners we need to demand that city planning represents our interests and not just developers', that it is based on civic priorities that have emerged from robust public discussion, and that it is informed by careful study and understanding of the District's (including various neighborhooods') resources and challenges.  Right now we have none of the above.  We deserve better.

Public Advocacy

[[Earlier today I testified at two of the Committee of the Whole's annual Budget Oversight Hearings.  Below is my testimony regarding the budget for the Office of Zoning, which is the administrative office that supports the work of the Zoning Commission and the Board of Zoning Adjustment.  

As you'll see, I urged the Council to shift some ZRR-related tasks (and the budgets associated with them) from the Office of Planning to the Office of Zoning. One part of this argument will be familiar to regular readers of this blog.  The other -- creating a public advocate position within the Office of Zoning -- is something I haven't previously discussed here.  I'm not the first person to make such a suggestion (I think former ANC Commissioner Robert Gordon proposed something similar when he ran for Council in 2006), but I think that recent experience with the ZRR has made the creation of such a post even more imperative.]]

Two things were apparent from public testimony at last month’s Performance Oversight Hearing on this Agency.

First, people trust the Office of Zoning.*

Secondly, over the past few years, this Agency has made great strides in terms of online communication and it seems highly motivated to keep improving the public’s access to information relevant to its mission and decision-making process. 

With these two observations in mind, I’d like to make two budget suggestions (both which may involve reprogramming of funds from the Office of Planning):

• Allocate sufficient funds to the Office of Zoning to enable it to hire consultants (and, if necessary, a new in-house IT person) to streamline the zoning code and render it more user-friendly as well as to create supplementary materials like guides, summaries, and finding aids.  This might be an appropriation that, in part, waits for next year.  Meanwhile, it would be very helpful if the existing code could be turned into a single, searchable pdf available online as soon as possible. 

• Give OZ funding for a new permanent staff position:  a public advocate.  This staffer (who should be a professional, ideally an AICP certified planner) would serve three functions – review proposals where OP is the author/applicant, provide substantive public outreach services that would clearly and accurately inform citizens what specific changes the ZC will be considering, and summarize public comments.

It’s time to acknowledge that the Office of Planning’s own attempts to make zoning code easier to use have failed miserably.  The ZRR draft is longer and more unwieldy than current code -- and it’s in the process of getting worse not better, as various patches are made and exceptions are carved out.   The bottom line is that significant substantive changes have been buried in a mountain of convoluted code, which has created a situation rife with unintended consequences.  To mention only one, we’re on a path that would throw into doubt the status of the entire body of existing case law and administrative precedent accumulated over more than 50 years.

The way out of this mess is to separate the substantive amendment of the existing code from a wholesale revision designed to make the code easier to use.  The Zoning Commission should make substantive changes explicitly and deliberately, debating each policy proposal separately.  Then, after the code says what we want it to say, consultants should be hired to do the streamlining – people who have done this before and done it well.  These consultants should report to Office of Zoning and be tasked with rendering the code user-friendly without changing its substance.  When they confront editorial choices that have substantive implications, they should refer such questions to the Zoning Commission for guidance, spelling out alternative approaches and what they see at stake in the choice between them.  This team should include IT people, at least one of whom is (or will be) a permanent employee of the Office of Zoning.  Increasingly, users of the code access it electronically and the code needs to be structured in a way that makes it easy to navigate both in printed form and online.

As for the public advocate position, the Zoning Regulations Review process has exposed and magnified problematic aspects of public policymaking process in this domain.  It’s bad enough that, constitutionally, decisions about local zoning are made by five unelected Commissioners.  At very least, we need to do what we can to create a structure in which those decisions are as fully and as accurately informed as possible.  To put it bluntly, we can’t just let OP vet OP’s policy prescriptions.  From the standpoint not only of public input but of quality control, the Zoning Commission needs access to an independent voice with expertise on these issues and it should come from someone who has been specifically charged with the task of representing the public interest.  This is a resource that the Council, as our elected representatives, can and should provide to the Zoning Commission.  

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* The Office of Zoning (OZ) is an administrative agency that supports the work of the Zoning Commission and the Board of Zoning Adjustment.  OZ does not have any decision-making role in development cases. It handles things like scheduling, publicity, education, and record-keeping.  In recent years, its major achievement has been IZIS an online case management system that provides online access to the complete administrative record of cases in progress (as well as at least some of the documents for cases that have already been decided).