Last night the City kicked off its “visioning” process on the Fairview Development Center specific plan. And once again, I was left scratching my head over the value of these kinds of meetings.

I won’t bore you with the background for Fairview Development Center and why suddenly the City is trying to plan for 2,300+ units of housing on this piece of State-owned land. The Orange County Register wrote up a brief synopsis if you aren’t familiar with what’s happening there. And thankfully, some confused comments from the public notwithstanding, this meeting was not about the proposed State Emergency Operations Center.

Rather, it was about determining the City’s “vision” for the site. This goal, the FDC Plan website states, is to facilitate a “community-led process”. Which sounds great, except for one problem.

I have no idea what that means. And I don’t think the City or anyone in it does, either, especially for a project like this one.

Who is the “community” who will “lead” this process? No one lives in Fairview Development Center, and all of its former patients have been moved over to other facilities in a cost-savings maneuver by the State. And while there are a handful of residents living in apartment complexes that adjoin the site, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to let these residents take the lead. They undoubtedly would, very rationally, prefer that the site remain undeveloped or developed only as a large amenity.

If you take a look at the Housing Element or the State enabling legislation that authorized over $3.5 million of State funds to be spent planning this site, it is clear that the substantial majority of the land must be used for high density affordable housing, with many units set aside for those with developmental disabilities. Those future residents would certainly be “stakeholders” in this process. Unfortunately we have no idea who those future residents might be, and neither do they.

And so we come to one of the central flaws in “community-led planning”: even if the City did a good job of finding and engaging the existing community (which it does not), it can only ever reach the residents that live here now. They will never reach to or fully consider future residents, because they are definitionally not “part of the community” even though they will be the ones that ultimately have to live with the results.

Now, arguably, our elected officials should be the ones considering the needs of future residents, rather than the “community” itself. But where were our elected officials? Other than the President of the NMUSD Board of Trustees, Ashley Anderson, and a handful of Planning Commissioners (who are appointed rather than elected), I didn’t spot any elected officials at the meeting last night. And none of those who represent the City spoke on its behalf. Instead, all of the speaking was done either by the consultant, PlaceWorks, or by Jennifer Le, the Director of Economic and Development Services.

One thing that would go a long way to improving these meetings would be to have our elected officials take the lead, both by laying out the stakes of the meetings as well as the constraints that have been placed on the City. By allowing Staff and consultants to stand out in front, residents intuitively understand that there is no direct accountability regarding what is said or expressed at these meetings. If the consultant politely gathers up all of the comment cards and lights them on fire behind the building, the Mayor and the City Council can plausibly argue that they still “ran a process” and that any errors in outreach were problems with the consultant. That gets a lot harder to do when those elected officials stand up and answer direct questions from the public.