By Adam Stewart
From the Newsroom
I’ve been in a lot of public meetings over the years. It’s a hazard of working in local journalism.
Across those many meetings—in Reno County and elsewhere—I have witnessed quite a few complaints about planning and zoning matters and tax appraisals. I get it. People don’t like to be told that they can’t do something they planned on their property (or that they have to go through a public hearing process to seek approval), or that their tax bill is going up.
Occasionally, but thankfully not recently, there have been elements to the complaints that the city or county staff should have “fixed” things before the complaint went to the council or commission, and that because staff didn’t, they are “bureaucrats” who are difficult to work with.
And sure, some people in government can be difficult, just the same as any other area of life. But a lot of dedicated people get an unfair reputation as difficult because they don’t grease the wheels for people.
In planning and zoning, as well as other regulatory fields, staff’s job is to apply the letter of the rules. If something isn’t clearly OK, they shouldn’t OK it. Gray areas, exceptions, and negotiations are the purview of public boards, whether elected or appointed, where decisions can be made transparently.
In appraisals, staff’s job is to determine the value of the property as best they can, using the information they have, while following procedures dictated by the state. If you aren’t satisfied with their decision, you have multiple rounds of appeals available to you.
Yeah, it can be frustrating. It takes time and effort to go to public hearings or appeal your appraisal, with no guarantee that you’ll get the result you want. But the alternative, where government staff make case-by-case exceptions, or where appraisers can set values based on what owners’ want their values to be, runs the extremely high risk of turning into Calvinball, with the rules being made up on the fly. It also tilts systems further in favor of those who are well-connected with the right friends.
Most of the people I’ve seen in those positions are at least as reasonable as the average person. For example, in Hutchinson Board of Zoning Appeals meetings, it isn’t out of the ordinary for city staff to lay out a case that could support a variance, even if they don’t recommend the variance.
Again, bureaucrats’ job is to apply the rules. If a rule keeps getting in the way of what the community wants, the response shouldn’t be for staff to disregard the rule, but rather for the people who make the rules to change it.
Adam Stewart is the assistant news editor of The Hutchinson Tribune. He can be reached at adam@hutchtribune.com.