Last week, a member resigned from of the Salt Lake City Planning Commission, which wound up causing a bit of a sensation, enough so that it was picked up by a building industry newsletter and then by the Salt Lake Trib.
Given my past fondness and associations with Salt Lake City (I grew up near Liberty Park, graduated from the now-defunct South High School, and served as city planning director for six years), I thought I’d pick up on this as well as a way to comment on some important issues.
The resigning commissioner, Andra Ghent, is the director of the undergraduate real estate program at the University of Utah (also my undergrad alma matter – in the days before there were even a planning degree or a real estate program). In her letter to Mayor Mendenhall, Prof. Ghent cited a couple of issues which she felt kept her from being able to be an effective commissioner – too much time spent on administrative matters rather than planning, and lack of expertise among commission members. I agree with Andra on the first issue, but disagree on the second. Here’s my thinking.
Prof. Ghent in her letter says:
Far too much meeting time is spent hearing verbal public comment on administrative matters. Not only does this waste commissioner time, it doesn’t serve the public. Most public comments on administrative matters are outside the purview of what the commission can consider and so the public usually ends up frustrated that they took the time to show up and then didn’t get what they wanted.
If you’ve been reading this blog a while, or if you’ve been to any land use conferences the last couple of years, you’ll know that I am very much in agreement with this point. Take a look at the posts in this blog for May 9, 10, and 12, 2022 for my thoughts and proposed actions on this. Prof. Ghent’s point is well taken, I too think it keeps commissioners from spending more time on what they’re real job is, which is making recommendations on planning policy for the community. I won’t take the time to rehash all I’ve said on this before, you can see that by going back to those blog posts. The solution is to either move all those administrative actions to another body (or person!), or to create a different type of hearing, one I’ve seen called an administrative hearing, in which the rules are different from the typical public hearing on policy matters.
The second issue in Prof. Ghent’s letter is this:
I’m disappointed at the lack of knowledge of urban economics and/or real estate among some of my fellow commissioners. In addition to wasting meeting time explaining basic concepts, the lack of expertise frequently leads to poor decisions. Were it a lack of suitable candidates, I would understand appointing unqualified commissioners.
As noted earlier, I disagree on this point. For a number of years now, I have had occasion to give presentations to planning commissions, councils, and at conferences titled Group Decisions: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. It is based on research on the dynamics of how groups make decisions, and the principles for groups to make the best possible decisions. I used a variety of sources on these processes and principles, and came up with some pretty good stuff. The first principle that is substantiated in a lot of the research is that diverse groups make better decisions than uniform ones. The more diverse, the better. This kind of goes against what might be thought of as common sense, but there’s plenty of evidence in the source materials to back up this claim. A correlating principle that came out in some of the studies was that groups made up entirely of “experts” were no better in the decisions they reached than other groups, overall.
While there were a number of different and varied studies, the general conclusion I drew was this: a group made up entirely of “nonexperts” did okay in decision-making – not great, but not too bad either, as long as the backgrounds of the participants were varied. Groups that were made up entirely of experts in the given area did not do much better that the nonexpert groups. This is often attributed to the fact that many experts share common thinking and therefore can miss or ignore factors outside their experience or background. The groups that did the best were those comprised of a few “experts” along with others of varied “nonexpert” backgrounds. The idea here is that such a diversity of backgrounds and thinking allows for different ways of approaching problems, often in new and diverse ways that may actually be better.
Here’s the main sources of the research I drew from for this presentation:
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, by James Surowiecki
The Perfect Swarm: The Science of Complexity in Everyday Life, by Dr. Len Fisher
Why Societies Need Dissent, by Cass R. Sunstein
There’s another reason I have found throughout my career in the public realm for having planning commissions made up of regular citizens from the community – their decisions and recommendations are more often accepted by the citizen elected officials, and by the community as a whole, if they feel like these are people like them, and do not have a personal vested interest in the outcome (whether they do or not – it’s all about the perception). To that end, when I get asked by local officials if they should just be looking for planners or land use attorneys or developers or real estate professionals to serve as their planning commissioners, I always refer them to the source materials cited above, and say that it’s good to have a couple of people like that, but by and large it should be citizens of varied backgrounds.
And by the way, if you’re interested in my Group Decisions presentation, let me know and I’ll email you a copy. I’m also happy to come present it as well – just did so again a few weeks ago for Pleasant View City’s Planning Commission.