Richard Grossman on Community Impact Studies

By Richard Grossman

Editor’s Note: Mr. Grossman cofounded POCLAD (Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy) and is currently legal historian at CELDF (Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund). He and Ben Price of CELDF presented a Democracy School in Plainfield in Summer 2007, attended by North Plainfielders Antoinette Rinehart, Thalia Saloukas, Gary Lewis, Laly and Alex Kuga, Councilwoman Mary Forbes and several other people from other communities.

Following that meeting, members of NPCCR finished drafting the Self-Governance Ordinance which was circulated for petition signatures last fall and then rejected by the Courts – not by the People of North Plainfield, who never got an opportunity to decide for themselves.

Mr. Grossman has been following local democracy developments in North Plainfield ever since.

My two cents on a “community impact study:”

The essence of such an undertaking is its definitions, its assumptions, its framing, its purpose.

This is because there’s nothing built-in to “impact study” laws or traditions that is about DEMOCRATIC ACTION, about people building upon data to declare YES to what they want, NO to what they don’t want.

Absent intentional organizing and pressures, such studies are about “data.” And such studies are about “due process” only insofar as community residents are given opportunities to inject their feelings and emotions, to testify, to be heard.

Many communities have learned the hard way – after the fact – that unless they control the framing, the definings, the assumptions, – and the writing of the text – the final products rise up to bite them in the
rear, to make their tasks more difficult.

And those in charge are able to truthfully declare: We heard you. You testified for hours. We listened
to your technical experts. Thank you so much for participating in this exercise in democracy. Now, let us move on.

I don’t recall that your Planning Board is friendly to your Villa Maria aspirations. Maybe they would be more open than the Borough Council. But no matter what government body is in charge, it’s never too early to think about how you will want to USE this product, and not allow yourselves to be used.

It’s also never to early to acknowledge to yourselves that for the process and product to be useful to YOUR GOALS, YOUR PEOPLE need to structure it – to be on top of things at every step and stage – so that it is not simply about “data” and “process.”

If your people are not exerting pressures daily, exploiting teachable moments, etc., public officials, the corporate developer and the experts will snatch it from your group’s hands, beyond the community’s reach.

The essence of “environmental impact laws” – and accompanying hearing processes – is technical experts identifying and assessing potential “problems.”

And then the process becomes: WHAT MUST BE DONE TO MAKE THESE PROBLEMS LESS BAD?

In other words, it’s all about “ameliorating” “side effects” of a project that everyone assumes will be constructed, and that everyone assumes the corporate developer has a RIGHT to construct.

What it’s NOT about is the whole community coming together to assess the “wisdom” of some corporate developer’s idea, and make a decision about what should or should not be done at a particular site.

A generation ago, the THEORY (or perhaps more accurately, some people’s hopes) of environmental impact processes, was that they were about a community choosing among alternative concepts/plans/approaches. It was thought that if a community had the “data” about various ways of doing things for a range of proposals on the table, people could then democratically choose what they wanted.

This process quickly became bastardized to: Well, let’s congratulate ourselves (including the developers
who had to pay for much of the data-gathering). We identified the negative side effects. And then, as a community, we agreed to make those side effects less bad.

In the end, an impact study is not about WHO DECIDES (in Ben’s famous phrase) what project should be under consideration, or whether identified “side effects” are “fixable” and hence “acceptable.”

A community impact study is usually centered around helping the developer ram his proposal into a community.

Without community uprising, the impact process comes down to a duel over conflicting data, not struggle for self-governance.

So beware.

One thing your group could do is to force the framing of this “impact study” to be about the Villa Maria SITE – about the various options of what COULD be done there (as you all have been shouting about from the
beginning), as opposed to helping the corporate developer identify potential problems with HIS plan and empower the developer to bring in his experts promising that these problems can mostly be rendered “acceptable.”

Such an approach would be less of an “impact” study, more of a “So what do We the People want” process.

Rest assured that this is not what politicians, technical experts for hire, and judges have in mind with regard to “impact study.”