PSN candidates forum: Listening with a green ear

This post was written by John Bennett

October 16, 2007

The complete inventory of mayoral candidates was available in the fellowship hall of Cokesbury United Methodist Church last night: Otis Johnson, Floyd Adams, Jerry Sammons, John McMasters, James Dewberry and Yusuf Shabazz. All three alderman at large Post 1 hopefuls Edna Jackson, James DeLorme and Clara Mae Curry were present along with at large Post 2 candidates Jeff Felser and Ellis Cook. Van Johnson was there making his case for reelection to District 1 along with Mary Osborne, who’s running unopposed in District 2; Tony Thomas who’s unopposed in District 6; and Clifton Jones, unopposed in District 6. District 4 competitors Clint Murphy and Mary Ellen Sprague completed the panel.

While the Preserving Savannah Neighborhoods’ Oct. 15 candidates forum was aimed probing candidates’ positions on the issues of transportation and zoning, it was my intent to listen for sustainable keywords.

Candidates and audience members were presented with a list of seven questions that would be posed to each candidate, however, not all the questions were asked by the conclusion of the two hour program. According to event organizers, the forum was recorded and will eventually be available in transcript form through the PSN Web site (I presume). In the meantime, here are my impressions:

The first question asked if the candidates would support adding more neighborhood representatives to the Metropolitan Planning Commission and if they believed that the MPC was too heavily stacked with individuals representing the interests of real estate agents, developers and other related business concerns. Most all the candidates agreed this was the case, though some were more direct than others in casting developers as threats to established neighborhoods. The two large hospital campuses were also placed in the role of villains in responses to subsequent questions. Later in the evening, Mayor Johnson observed that beating up on developers was relatively safe at a forum sponsored by neighborhood advocates. He questioned whether some of the candidates would be so enthusiastic, had they been speaking to a meeting of business leaders or major employers.

McMasters drew one of the night’s largest rounds of applause when he used the new Target/Home Depot complex on Victory Drive as an example of a flawed approach to transportation planning. Dealing with the traffic problems after a development is completed is “ass-backwards,” he said. The audience responded approvingly.

Dewberry made a point of flashing his Chatham Area Transit card and labeled the Savannah River ferries and River Street trolley services as boondoggles that benefit tourists, while daily CAT riders suffer long waits for buses without the benefit of shelters. McMasters said he’d push downtown tour operators to convert to environmentally friendly fuels, after which he’d turn his attention to the bus fleets operated by CAT and SCAD.

Only two candidates seemed capable of considering modes of transportation beyond the realm of internal combustion engines. Adams said that Savannahians had developed a false expectation that they should be able to drive, door to door, to any destination they chose. We should all learn to walk, he suggested.

It was Murphy, however, who said the magic word I wanted to hear: bicycle. In fact, he was alone in listing improved bicycle and pedestrian facilities as priorities. Murphy also mentioned Context Sensitive Design as a tool to protect neighborhoods.

In the last half of the forum, zoning was center stage, with almost all the candidates speaking out against the evils of spot zoning. Adams, Felser and others identified the Tricentennial Plan as the garlic that would keep the spot zoning vampire away. Several candidates talked about using existing zoning ordinances to prevent commercial development (and incumbent automobile traffic) from oozing into residential neighborhoods.

It’s here that I would have asked a question of the candidates, had there been time in the forum’s format to do so. I’m curious about how the candidates view the relationship between traffic congestion and single use zoning. In other words, when zoning is employed to segregate residential areas from every other use, it virtually guarantees that cars will be necessary for every single trip made by residents who live in these areas. When the grocery store, the doctor’s office, the school and the restaurant are kept outside the neighborhood, residents don’t have the choice to walk or bicycle. Does preserving a neighborhood’s “residential character” also have the unfortunate side effect of making its residents automobile dependent?

I think the creation and maintenance of self-sufficient neighborhoods, in which residents aren’t forced to climb in a private or public motor vehicle for all of life’s chores, will be essential to sustaining communities in an age of decreasing energy resources. As long as we focus exclusively on keeping cars out of residential neighborhoods, I fear we risk being distracted from the more important goal of keeping residents out of their cars.

Posted in Advocacy, Government, Planning, Transportation