The citizens of New Smyrna Beach are being forced to pay twice to get progress in our city. First, we are forced to submit to a system of useless public planning that stretches all the way to Tallahassee. Second, we pay a small fortune to hire a team of planning experts to guide our building projects through a maze of planning hurdles and then finally we find that our team of highly paid experts has let us down. The fact that they are no longer employed is a good start at fixing the problem.
Simply by not doing the required paper work over the course of five years that brought tens of millions of dollars in projects to a grinding halt in the past five weeks and for several months to come, as our investigative reporting has showed, demonstrates why NSB has such a bad reputation as a place to do business.The already slow, costly and burdensome job of getting permission to build has been made even slower, costlier and more burdensome by the inaction of two highly-paid planners and a lack of oversight through several administrations.
The first thing everyone should realize is that planning on a city, county and state basis is mostly an exercise in futility. The amount of information needed to really make these plans doesn’t exist in any one place at any one time. The amount of information really needed to make a proper plan is absolutely staggering. The mathematical model that would be needed would be impossible to understand. Furthermore good planning would require the ability to predict the future. Needless to say there is a severe lack of people with that capability.
Faced with such difficulties planning is usually done by using oversimplified models of reality and the biases of the planning community. Most of these models and biases have little connection with reality. Despite these difficulties the planners put out plans.
Quite often the plans are vague and flexible enough that they can be modified to reflect reality. This is fortunate because plans usually have to be modified every time someone wants to build anything substantial.
It is the job of the planning department to get all of these plan changes variances, etc., worked out and put through the maze of approvals in order to get permission for building permits. In some parts of the country, this process has become so slow and costly that building has virtually stopped for some categories such as housing. Some areas of California, such as Palo Alto, have reached a state where almost no housing is being built.
It is still possible, at least theoretically, to build in New Smyrna if everyone in city government connected with building does his job. However, if the vast paper river of changes that is necessary to make master planning fit reality stops building is going to come to a halt.
New Smyrna Beach has had to initiate a crash program to get all of the paper work in order so that building permits can again be issued legally.
As a short term solution to our building permit problem, we must get our permitting paper mill in order.
As a long term solution to the problem the cities, counties and state should give up trying to plan the unplanable. The savings in time, money and frustration would be tremendous.