The Best-Laid Plans - Randal O'Toole

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      In 2000, a prescribed fire lit on the Bandolier National Monument escaped control and swept across the Santa Fe National Forest into Los Alamos, where it burned hundreds of homes. Congress responded by increasing the Forest Service’s budget by a whopping 38 percent and asking the Forest Service and other federal land agencies to write a national fire plan.

      The Forest Service long ago agreed with private landowners that some forests benefit from frequent light fires. But not all do: while 85 percent of the mostly private forests in the South need frequent fires, only about a third of forests in the West, where most federal lands are located, fall into this category. Without making any effort to determine where the money would be most effectively spent, the National Fire Plan simply asked for huge appropriations for treating forests to reduce fire hazards.

      Congress accommodated the agency by passing the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003, which allowed the Forest Service to spend timber sale revenues on activities aimed at reducing fire hazards. This effectively laid the perverse incentives created by the Knutson-Vandenberg Act on top of the perverse incentives created by the blank check. Predictably, in 2006 the U.S. Department of Agriculture inspector general’s office charged that the Forest Service had failed to “ensure that the highest priority fuels reduction projects [were] being implemented.”7

      In the meantime, the Forest Service is rewriting the plans for each national forest. Because no one in the Forest Service dared tell Congress that its billion-dollar planning process was a failure, Congress did not change the law requiring forests to revise their plans every 10 to 15 years. So the agency continues to spend money on a process in which no one, from the chief of the Forest Service on down, seriously believes.8 The status quo suits Congress, which finds it easier to let government agencies waste taxpayers’ money than to agree on a sensible public lands policy. It suits the Forest Service, which gets bigger budgets and a larger bureaucracy. And it suits some forest users, who vaguely hope they can use the planning process to get what they want out of the national forests. Taxpayers who must pay the cost and members of the public who are frustrated by bad forest management have no influence.

      Part Two

      Why Planning Fails

      It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and planning are required to waste this much money.

      —P. J. O’Rourke1

      Because they can grow a tree, planners think they can plan a million-acre forest. Because they can build a house, planners think they can design an entire urban area. But there is a qualitative difference between these activities that is more than just a matter of scale. Ecosystems and cities are complex systems that are inherently unpredictable, even chaotic. This term is used in the sense of chaos theory, best known for the aphorism, “A butterfly stirring the air today in Beijing can transform storm systems in New York next month.”2 Since even the near-term future of chaotic systems cannot be accurately foreseen, any attempt to plan the distant future will fail.

      Any who say they can write a comprehensive, long-range plan for a city or region necessarily presumes that

      • they can collect all the data they need about the values and costs of the land, improvements, and proposed and alternative projects in the planning area;

      • they can accurately predict how those values and costs will change in the future;

      • they can properly understand all the relationships between various parts of their region and activities in those areas;

      • they can do all this quickly enough that the plan is still meaningful when they are done; and

      • they will be immune to political pressures and can objectively overcome their own personal preferences.

      Consider an urban area with a million people and a million parcels of property, each of which could be used for dozens of different purposes. Each of those people places a different value on each potential use of each parcel of land, resulting in trillions of different pieces of data to collect. Add transportation and other infrastructure (each item of which will be separately valued by each of the million people), changes in tastes and trends over time, and the way different uses on different properties influence the values of other nearby properties, and the data requirements reach into the quadrillions. No one can ever collect or understand this much data.

      What do scientific, rational planners do when confronted with problems of this magnitude? They simplify.

      • Instead of comprehensively planning for all resources, they focus on one or two resources.

      • Instead of measuring the actual relationships between resources, they rely on preconceived notions and the latest planning fads.

      • Instead of predicting the future, they envision what they want and try to impose that vision on the future.

      • Instead of finding out what the people in the region really want, they succumb to pressures from powerful interest groups.

      In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs called planning a “pseudoscience.”3 That remains true today not because of any flaws in the planners but because the promises planners make are simply impossible to keep. As a result, plans end up doing far more harm than good to the cities and regions for which they are written.

      6. Radical Doctrine or Rational Decisionmaking?

      Imagine a world free of politics. Imagine everyone has the best of intentions. Imagine the sharpest experts are at your disposal. Is it possible to plan? That is, is it possible for a government agency employing those experts to write a long-term, comprehensive land-use plan for your city, region, watershed, or other large area of land?

      Many believe the answer is yes. “Planning is not radical doctrine,” say planners. It is rational decision making. It is time the country gives up its fear of planning and embraces its benefits.”1 Yet there is little evidence in history that government-controlled, centralized planning can work. The Soviet Union failed spectacularly not because it was communist, in the sense of common ownership of the means of production, but because the government had turned over all production questions to planners. Yet the above defense of planning was written less than five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

      There are several technical barriers to the success of planning. These barriers prevented planning from working in the Soviet Union, and they are just as much of a problem for American planners.

      • The Data Problem: Planning requires more data than can be collected in time for it to be useful to planners;

      • The Forecasting Problem: Planners cannot predict the future;

      • The Modeling Problem: Models complicated enough to be useful for planning are too complicated for anyone to understand; and

      • The Pace of Change Problem: Reality changes faster than planners can plan.

      The Data Problem

      In 1952, the California legislature invented tax-increment financing, or TIF, to help cities finance urban-renewal projects. It allows a city to declare a particular neighborhood or district blighted and to promote redevelopment of the area. From that point on, all property taxes on any new development would go not to the schools, fire, police, and other services for which they were intended but to the city to subsidize the redevelopment.

      In effect, developers would get to use the taxes they pay to subsidize their own developments. Meanwhile, the cost of police, fire, educational, and other urban services consumed by the redevelopment district would have to be covered by other taxpayers. Typically, cities would project future tax revenues and sell bonds to be repaid with those revenues. The bond proceeds would then be used to subsidize the redevelopment, sometimes by buying land with the help of eminent domain and turning it over to developers; sometimes by building infrastructure that developers would normally

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