Land Use Regs: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?

Tonight at 6 pm the County is holding a meeting on proposed land use regulations at commission chambers. More meetings will take place at other venues. Land use regulations focus on the heart of the human condition, the principles of the social contract and the elements of cultural democracy. The regulations not only inspire democratic participation and bring out the best in folks but also reveal human beings behaving badly as uncivil remnants from the Paleolithic past.

Yet, Taosenos have learned, whether fighting the legendary condo battles of yore in Valdez during the 80s or fighting the Big Box in the 2000s, the El Prado Dollar Store more recently that for all the victories by the citizens at large, there are also losses: the developers of Central Station and Valverde Commons in town, rural sprawl on Tune Drive, in Turley Mills, and up around Gallina Canyon and the old Stakeout. Hardly anybody is immune to hypocrisy when it comes to land use regs especially proto enviros, who buy salvation by donating large sums of guilt money to Amigos Bravos.

Meanwhile, Ag land is upended and ploughed over in the valleys and steep slope monuments to wealth persist high up in the forest. Residents in the forest face the potential of conflagration and slow to respond volunteer fire departments. Small and historic family plots in El Salto confront the prospect of unfriendly neighbors or worse, hostile family members if not crass newcomers— though some natives will tell you that some newcomers adapt and become community members in the best sense. Don’t be making bigoted remarks even if you are a bigot.

You will hear from the usual developers and property owners, who cast regulation as onerous and untoward interference with property rights. Democratic stalwarts and neighborhood denizens will say one person’s civil rights end where another person’s begin. Your chicken, rooster, barking dog, second story, trailer park, and strip mall doth offend me. You citizens, who pay taxes for roads and infrastructure, should not interfere with my right to build and offend, despite my use of paid public infrastructure. After all I am providing jobs and believe in the gods of the free market.

Traditionally, of course, God gave man and woman dominion i.e. stewardship over the land and animals but not the right to screw it up and detach water rights from land, truly an abomination when you consider that we have a responsibility to nourish the Mother of us all—Mother Nature—not exploit her and scar her and mug her for valuables. Stewardship, by the way might last for generations but you will meet your mortal end much sooner and what’s the point? You can’t take it with you.

But the United States of America has set a precedent for making the planet uninhabitable and local free marketers emulate the high achievers on Wall St. According to the latest news reports, Taos is about to be gentrified by a new custom housing development even as TSV receives an infusion of cash from a sympathetic and eco-friendly billionaire to root out the funk and bring in the carriage trade. Given the dismal decay and decline of the Middle Class, we might as well appeal to the high enders, those who have the dollars to develop and bring in the tourists who still have sources of income.

Some would say those who played the parochial and provincial card too close to the vest back in the 70s erred and lost 39,000 acre feet of illusionary San Juan-Chama water years ago, which water could have turned the valley green. But then you read the book or saw the movie, Milagro Beanfield War. The Spring Ditchers are still fighting the war.

Let’s call tonight a debate between a projected quality of life and the actual quality of life. What kind of community do we want? Where do we want to restrict development, so as to avoid the greed heads while mitigating the aesthetic claims of proto puritans, who can’t see the forest for the trees?

The term “NIMBY” applied to those who do not want development in my backyard, can be equally applied to developers. Developers don’t want the regulators in their back yard and neither do cultural preservationists want to be told whether a trailer or a vegetable patch or chicken coop offends nor does anyone want a neighbor to build a high fence that wrecks the “view shed.” Frankly, I love the smell of exhaust in the morning from Joey’s Gravel Plant on Highway 64 as much as I love seeing Bighorn Sheep step onto the West Rim Trail near the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge. I get high on Mother Nature and human ingenuity.

My passion for politics in Taos, where the perils of living in paradise are surely a living paradox, is sparked by unpredictable headlines. Politicians provide the drama and the comedy: either they are interfering with the basketball program, getting caught in flagrante delicto by their wives, or just behaving like worms in their cocoons. It’s a great town.

For more drama see:

Dec. 12 @ 6:00 PM – County Commissioners Chambers
Dec. 16 @ 6:00 PM – Village of Questa Town Hall
Dec. 18 @ 6:00 PM – Penasco Community Center
Jan. 14, 2014 @ 6:00 PM – County Commissioners Chambers

From Robert Frost, the Poet of Planning and Zoning:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
“That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”