Starting Out the New Year on the Right Foot
by Elaine Cogan
Elaine Cogan explains why patience, persistence, and passion are three important -- though hard to quantify -- measures of your effectiveness as a planning commissioner.
summaries of other Elaine Cogan articles
Read excerpts from article:
... There are many ways to evaluate your planning board's
effectiveness. On the quantitative level, you can count how many
applications you have considered or zoning and planning actions
you have taken in a given amount of time; you can measure the
number of people served over the counter or by phone to get an
idea of whether you are staffed properly. You can give
yourselves kudos for adhering to the tenets of your
comprehensive plan or demerits for the "compromises" that still
make you uneasy. If you have an adopted strategic plan with
goals and guidelines, it can serve as a good baseline.
Other measurements you might consider are qualitative in nature
and therefore more subjective. They can give you a different,
but valid, picture of your effectiveness. These qualities are
patience, persistence, and passion.
Patience. It will not take long after you have joined the
planning board to become an "insider." You will begin to
understand professional planning jargon and may even be able to
decipher plat maps and legal documents.
That knowledge, which is essential to doing a good job on the
commission, can also cause you to be impatient with lesser
informed citizens who slow down commission meetings with simple
or elementary questions.
...
