Water Works 58 - 4/30/05

Greetings from the Center of the Universe

America’s institutions of self-government never had a more ardent admirer than Alexis de Tocqueville. Our nation was still young when he knew us. It’s easy to forget there was once a time when the way we manage our affairs was a great new thing in this world, which made the rest of the world very nervous. We made Tocqueville nervous too
– we always seem to do that to the French – but his unflagging fascination with us is hard to miss even in the less sprightly chapters
of his Democracy in America.

He visited the United States in 1831. What he saw often startled him. We take it all for granted now: walking across the street to chat with your neighbor about some bit of public business needing attention, and attending to it yourselves; talking to the officials in charge of the matter as if they work for you, not the other way around; throwing the fools out if they refuse to do their jobs as you see fit. In Tocqueville’s time we were the only people on the planet who behaved that way.

France’s grand experiment with liberty and equality ended with Napoleon. Ours produced Washington, Adams and Jefferson. One of Tocqueville’s insights was that our success had less to do with our leaders than our character as a people. We had advantages the French never had. Even as colonials, by the time we sent the British packing we had effectively governed ourselves for more than 150 years – building roads, securing public safety and providing for the poor, putting common pastures and forests to best use, founding churches and schools, hanging witches and Quakers and a host of alleged heretics – shaping the habits of heart and mind that make us what we are today.

Tocqueville’s critics say he flatters us, but he was blunt when our failings were impossible to ignore: “Among the immense thrusting crowd of American political aspirants I saw very few men who showed that … independence of thought which often marked the Americans of an earlier generation.” And though he met a few exceptions, “strict slaves of slogans” were apparently as common in Andrew Jackson’s era as they are now: “I know of no country in which, speaking generally, there is less independence of mind and
true freedom of discussion than in America.” (i)

If the spectacle of public affairs in our great republic makes you wonder who passed a law against making sense, or you are absolutely required to spend time in the company of politicians, Tocqueville is a kindred spirit. He understood as well as anyone has how a people who profess to love freedom lose the habit of thinking for themselves.

“The township is the only association so well rooted in nature that whenever men assemble it forms itself. ... man creates kingdoms and republics, but townships seem to spring directly from the hand of God.”

Tocqueville reserved his highest praise for our humblest public institutions. He likened municipal governments to primary schools, where lessons in the exercise of political freedom were available to anyone willing to learn: “... they teach people to appreciate its peaceful enjoyment and accustom them to make use of it.” He foresaw that Americans would someday lapse into a prosperous, self-imposed tyranny of sorts, ignorantly and blissfully content to let others think for us and manage our affairs. What we call “home rule” was to him the best defense against his worst fears for our future: “Without local institutions a nation may give itself a free government, but it has not got the spirit of liberty.” (ii)

If only he could see us now. We have all heard sermons like his preached since we were children. Most of us forget every word before those of us who bother to vote are old enough to vote. As anyone who has served on a town planning board can tell you from painful experience, typical residents of a typical town in New Jersey know as much about the workings of their municipal government as you or I know about astrophysics.

We might know more about astrophysics. Take the simple question, “Why is the sky dark at night?” The rather complicated answer is probably easier for most people to follow than the rules a planning board follows when it hears an application to develop a tract of land. Astrophysics can certainly provide more compelling entertainment. The handicap local government faces, in competition with everything clamoring for our attention each day is – it’s about as entertaining as paying taxes.

How far are you right now from a copy of your town’s master plan or its land use ordinances? I won’t belabor the point. I always think about that when I hear of people who suddenly find themselves unprepared for a fight against some local mutation of suburban sprawl. I’ll bet many of them could not sketch a map from memory of the zoning scheme of the town they want to defend. They may have spent less time studying the place where they live than the Alaskan tundra or the rain forests of Brazil.

Give thanks for those with good memories. Research suggests that most of us can’t sketch any kind of reasonably accurate map of our home towns. (iii) Best-selling books warn us how little attention we devote to our local communities, which we sometimes read in breaks from more pressing personal concerns.

Regardless of the reasons for their opposition, when most towns try to fend off an unwanted intrusion – perhaps a shopping center or a few hundred condominiums – they lose. Surprises are rare. The fight is usually over before the first shots are fired, and the rest amounts to no more than a negotiation over the terms of surrender. The poorly armed, ill-informed defenders often end up angry and disillusioned, sometimes as angry with the band of their neighbors who had to do most of the fighting as with the victors.

They learn all the wrong lessons from defeat: that the process, the laws and the courts are all stacked against them, that he who writes the largest checks wins. To an extent they’re right, but they consistently miss the most important lesson of all. They should have been ready for battle long before one arrived. They lose because too few of them care to lend a hand with the hard work required to build effective defenses.

The biggest critics of municipal home rule I have met – and some of New Jersey’s biggest fans of regional land use regulation – belong to local political factions that favor stricter environmental protections for their towns. Though the positions they take are very popular, they are often electoral minorities. Their problem is prodding the majorities of residents who agree with them to take action and prepare defenses for inevitable fights ahead. Tired of losing elections they should be winning, in place of home rule they increasingly prefer to cede power to the state.

Tocqueville thought the greatest threat to democratic government would arise when a majority of citizens monopolized public opinion and stifled minority views. As much as he admired America’s relentless spirit of innovation, he would have found it hard to fathom New Jersey’s latest twist on its traditions of local self-rule – our willingness to hand over critical municipal powers to the state, because decisive majorities of citizens care too little about their towns to exercise their political will. Washington, Adams and Jefferson would have had trouble understanding that too.

A few last words from Tocqueville should help us understand why so much of the public discussion about “smart growth,” traffic, our water supply and home rule can seem so confusing:

“Men living in times of equality have much curiosity and little leisure. Life is so practical, complicated, agitated, and active that they have little time for thinking. So democratic man likes generalizations because they save him the trouble of studying particular cases. They contain, if I may put it so, a lot in a small space and give a great return quickly.” (iv)

He almost seems to be looking over our shoulders, doesn’t he?

Let’s look at a few generalizations you may have just formulated yourself. You are right about the most obvious one – I am a big fan of home rule. You are unlikely to meet more of an enthusiast. If you guessed that makes me skeptical of regional solutions to environmental protection, such as the Highlands Act, or making New Jersey’s State Plan more than a fairy tale for the terminally naive, you’re new here. As the rest of you know, I support the Highlands Act and look forward to reading my way through the State Plan someday without laughing out loud.

I also share Tocqueville’s opinion of the sorry state of political discourse in America, especially concerning environmental issues in New Jersey today. Our tendency to over-generalize a notion like home rule, to the point where the subject loses all meaning, deserves as much blame as any of our other bad habits. In what follows I will try to stick to particular cases and leave most of the generalizing to you.

If we seem to devote an undue amount of the rest of this episode and the next few to Franklin Township and Hunterdon County, don’t worry. Before we’re through we will examine cases far enough from here to keep anyone happy. Besides, there is nothing special happening locally that you won’t find happening a few miles from wherever you’re reading this. Staying close to home for a while will save us valuable time too. I assume I’m not the only one growing impatient to see where this is headed.

The Franklin Township Planning Board is not normally given to venting. Unless you’re an interested party to our proceedings we are pretty boring to watch. Despite our reputation as a reliably merciless group we are as unfailingly polite as any board or committee could be on the public stage. As far as I know, even the minutes of our liveliest meetings have never noted that we “vented.” The minutes of our most recent meeting undoubtedly will.

We are sticklers for detail, but asking the record to show that venting was precisely what the board intended, and then reminding ourselves a few times for good measure, was something new. By the time we finished I was counting how often we used the word. The cause of all the venting was traffic. We were deciding whether we should ask the county to install a stoplight on one of its roads here, at an access drive to what we call Wal-Mart Plaza.

Wal-Mart Plaza is a shopping center in Franklin, but we use the name more generally to include the hotel and restaurant next door. The whole complex sits at Exit 15 (Clinton, Pittstown) on Interstate 78, where three municipalities – Franklin and Union townships, and the town of Clinton – all share borders. It’s a first-rate example of a chronic traffic problem with no solution. We have been told so by the New Jersey Department of Transportation, which has been refreshingly candid about how little can be done to provide any relief.

Franklin’s contribution to the daily horror show at Exit 15 attracts impressive streams of traffic. Union and Clinton have their attractions too. Beyond that, access to an interstate highway is a natural draw by itself. If all development near the interchange stopped today and the towns that share it magically stopped growing, towns farther away and growing faster than any of us will continue to send more cars. When the near neighborhood is completely built out, the situation will still get worse.

If you drive in New Jersey you know what goes on there. One of the two access roads to the shopping center – at the intersection we are thinking to fit with a stoplight – can hold its own against anything you have seen. Forget yourself for a moment when you are up on the plaza, make a turn down that seemingly harmless little lane at the wrong time on the wrong day, and you will bet your life for a bag of groceries. Whether risk of serious bodily harm would be enough to discourage use of the intersection, whether we should risk making a couple of bad choke points worse with a traffic signal, or whether it made sense to try anything at all, were the questions facing us when the board decided it was time to vent.

Venting aside, Tocqueville would have been impressed with all three towns that share the problem up at Wal-Mart Plaza. We did our level best for the future of American democracy. Each town did its duty to protect the health, safety and welfare of the people who live there. According to the laws and standards that evolved through the years in Hunterdon and New Jersey, we all made good use of our right to home rule. By most people’s standards we are all well-planned communities, and as the traditions of home rule dictate, we still hardly talk to each other about the mess we created together.

The several virtues of home rule will be left for our next episode, when we will return to the subject that brought you here in the first place, which is water.

Let’s finish today’s session with a few simple maxims. When we talk about home rule, we should avoid easy rhetoric and stick to cases. In New Jersey you will never have to look far to find one. More generally, no matter how fine a pedigree an idea has, and no matter how many dead white males can be trotted out to vouch for it, stick to cases. Tocqueville would approve.

Ron Gutkowski