Nature Watch / By Gerry Rising
Costly and misleading campaigns defeat open-space proposals
Sadly, our sixth freedom is the freedom to bear false witness. The adage, “People may not believe you at first, but tell a lie again and again and they will soon come around,” is too accurate. Add “in the glossiest of forms” and you have the kind of political action that is strangling our modern society.
Consider in this regard the open space proposals that were voted down in Amherst in 2007 and in East Aurora in 2008, despite the facts supporting those proposals.
Taxes produced by new homes do not meet the cost of town services: an independent study for the Amherst Industrial Development Agency found the town’s expenses per housing unit are $1.12 for every dollar taken in by taxes.
And withholding land from development, even factoring in the costs associated with maintaining that land, would cost less than the costs associated with supporting that land if developed: the Amherst planning director analyzed that town’s proposal and came up with annual savings of more than $350,000.
The situation in East Aurora is similar, as it is nationally. John Crompton of the American Planning Association speaks to this issue: “Cost of community services analyses consistently report that over a wide range of residential densities, and especially in rapidly growing communities, the public costs associated with residential development exceed the public revenues that accrue from it. The emerging prevailing view is that few developments generate sufficient tax payments to pay their way.”
Crompton calls this “The New Municipal Math,” and offers dozens of examples of savings through setting aside land for open and park use.
Those are, of course, just the fiscal issues. Overcrowding, increased traffic and the loss of wild places, natural resources and farmland are equally important.
Why then did the bond issues fail? Slick and very expensive ad campaigns —$100,000 in Amherst, $33,000 in East Aurora—were mounted by two groups, the Realtors Political Action Committee and the Realtors Action Committee.
To me, two of the basic ad claims were patently false—that violators would be prosecuted for accessing any of the land protected by the programs, and that land would be removed from the tax rolls. And two other claims were seriously misleading—that there would be little benefit to taxpayers, and that the proposal was poorly planned.
What is especially interesting about this local situation is that it contradicts the stated posture of the National Association of Realtors. The Winter 2009 issue of its national journal, “On Common Ground,” is devoted to land conservation. An editorial in that issue states, “At all scales—from establishing city parks to preserving farmland, from addressing sprawl in rural communities to protecting wilderness on public lands—providing and preserving open lands are vital to the health of communities and the environment.”
Tuesday, a group of East Aurora homeowners will appear before State Supreme Court Judge Gerald Whalen to raise issues associated with this. There are questions about the information the realtors’ committees were required to report under state election laws. Among the campaign finance law questions are troubling ones of transparency about the source of their funding.
We should understand what is going on here. The dollar amounts invested in the defeat of these initiatives are way out of proportion to the amounts usually committed to campaigns. These groups brought major outside resources to bear on local initiatives that cannot be matched by the initiatives’ grassroot-level supporters. Thus such proposals are defeated piecemeal.
None of this excuses us, however: We are a community of sheep, willingly led off a cliff.
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