This is part of a series on the parallels of misinformation locally and nationally that led me to write Systems out of Balance.
The federal agencies that needed to review the Yale Farm Golf Course application were the Army Corp of Engineers, Environmental Protection Agency and Fish and Wildlilfe. I first encountered these agencies in 2004, not long after Doug Hoskins from the Connecticut DEP insisted I share my data on slope gradients with them. I was nervous about this meeting for several reasons. I felt compelled to meet with Doug, just to get it off my chest that Norfolk had been misinformed. Taking the next step meant I was resolved to battle the Yale Farm developers until the end. Neither the outcome of the battle nor the length required was the least bit certain.
I took the initiative to meet with Doug, and then with the federal agencies, on my own. HVA did not know I was doing this until after the fact. There was a slight chance they might have instructed me not to take these actions; they had expressed concern about me being controversial. Despite my nervousness, I was determined to go. The applicants were not far off when they later portrayed me as a loose cannon.
Finally, I was apprehensive because of the stigma being attached to the federal agencies. Roland Betts was good friends with Bush II; Bush II was the chief executive of the federal agencies; ergo, the federal agencies would be behind Betts. That apprehension disappeared as soon as I entered the ACOE building in Concord, MA. Steven Dilorenzo, team leader from the ACOE, came down to greet me as required by security. With an impish smile on his faced he announced: “The applicants were very unhappy about you coming up to speak with us.” The way he said it indicated that if I was there to be a thorn in their side this would probably be worth his time. My steps lightened as he escorted me to the meeting room.
A most receptive group of people met with me. In particular, Mike Marsh from the EPA seemed almost as upset about them misinforming people as I was. Up until then I had much self-doubt. I mean, Milone and McBroom is a multimillion dollar engineering firm that is sort of a favorite son of the state. Could they really be butchering the slope gradient claims to the extent that one lone schlep from a nonprofit organization was claiming? Nothing tangible came out of that meeting for the year 2004, except that I grew in confidence that I could stand up to the “experts” simply by focusing on the data. In 2005, however, that meeting would reap some benefits.
January 2005 was an important month in my life. After enduring comments from in-laws such as “Your son will finish school before you will,” and from colleagues that declared “The Red Sox will win the World Series before you are done,” I finished my fourth and final degree, a PhD in Natural Resources. I had by this time already embarked on a career making maps and modeling data for the Housatonic Valley Association, but timing is everything. Cindy’s Dad had started his decline by the time I started a career. Every time she saw him Cindy would repeat where I was working and he would respond each time: “Kirk has a real job now? That’s nice!”
Over the course of umpteen years as a student I had taken a course in almost every field. Educational Finance indoctrinated me into the world of economics and, in particular, how free markets worked. Yet I knew there was much more to learn if I was going to figure out how and why we were being misinformed. Within three weeks of being granted the PhD I had ordered by my first course on CD, about Economics. As soon as I discovered that the field of economics revolves around the principle that “wealth is created by trade” I had an epiphany about what has been going wrong with our economic system. The Yale Farm battle was further increasing my confidence that I could fight misinformation with meaningful results. I decreased my hours to 25 a week as I spent the next four years researching and writing about “how misinformation hurts the middle class.” I suppose this meant that once again I lacked a “real job.”
Early in 2005 the DEP held a meeting with intervenors and other interested parties that they were once again about to grant tentative approval to the Yale Farm Golf Course application. After the meeting I spoke with Bob Gilmore, a former Norfolk resident who was involved in the review process. He conceded that the application was not “environmentally sensitive” as the applicants claimed, but it should have been defeated by the towns.
In reality, no one seemed to be fooled that the applicants were “environmentally sensitive” folks. Norfolk Inland/Wetland commissioners were suspicious enough to attach over 100 conditions. Norfolk P&Z commissioners were suspicious enough to require that their plan be consolidated into one parcel, so that there could be no grandfathering of future housing units in without a special permitting process. The federal agencies were pretty blatant about their doubts, at least to me, while the state agency wished that the towns had denied the application to prevent them from having to review it.
Yet despite all this cynicism, the application was about to be approved and the opponents were once again wearing their doomsday faces. Both at the national and local scales misinformation works because of systemic problems. The applicants were required to present a prudent and feasible alternative to their plans, but who knew how to design golf courses better than world famous golf course architects or state-favored engineering firms? If they say there is no prudent and feasible alternative to their design the regulatory agencies do not really have the resources to challenge that.
But GIS specialists on a crusade do.
Ironically, the one regulatory agency that everyone thought was most certain to support the Yale Farm Golf Course, the first one to grant approval, whose commissioner later had to recuse himself because of his public support for the project, would also become the first one most publicly dubious. The intervenors naturally appealled all four town commission approvals. They succeeded with one appeal, and the application was coming back to the North Canaan Inland/Wetlands commission for round two. It was time for GIS to work its magic on a prudent and feasible alternative.
