Tremendously Idiotic Development Districts

I posted about TIDDs on the Fix. 

TIDDs are not a planning tool.  This is not a way to manage growth.  It is a way to pay for it. 

A recurring thesis of this blog is that public utility decisions are political decisions. They are made through development agreements, not through a public planning process.  This is by design.  Water, sewer, roads and storm drainage - the big four up front costs for sprawl developers - are dealt with on a development by development basis.   TIDDs may bring a little order to funding new infrastructure, but don't mistake that for planning.

Planning might look like phasing of capital improvements - a capital improvements plan that prioritizes available funding as a component of a comprehensive plan that gets updated through a highly visible community-wide process. 

We don't do that.  We've smothered our comprehensive plan with a pillow and shoved it in the closet.  We've truncated administration of the largest utility in the state from the land use authority of its largest city.

And now we're further fragmenting responsibility for the economic health of our public tax base by creating multiple districts to bond and build public improvements.