Decoding Planner Speak

Planners are easy to understand

by Robb Caldwell

In hopes of promoting understanding I’m providing a translation to standardized English for use with Agenda 21 vocabulary. Certain words just go together and any article involving any issues ecological written since the beginning of this decade just has to have the word “stakeholder” in it. I challenge anyone to pen a story on Plan Bay Area without using it . Kind of like describing Buddhist monks without saying “saffron”. It should also be noted it’s not paranoia if they really are out to “get ya”.

Vision: My ideas and people who think as I do.

Sustainable: If this type of thing went on for a long time I wouldn’t agitate against it.

Inter-disciplinary: If I don’t agree with the science I’ll get someone on board who will, preferably a sociologist from Berkeley who is good at public relations.

Common Good: I know what’s best for you.

Best Management Practices: Don’t blame me because things went wrong, I covered my butt with a long paper trail.

Restoration: I want things to look just like they do on modern Hollywood westerns.

Public/Private partnerships: My friends are going to get a piece of this thing and if you go along you can too.

Watershed: Catch and release fly fishermen.

Preserve: Preserved for bird watchers only.

Endangered species: Not a vegetable or mineral, amended to include any plant except those sold in Whole Foods.

Historic Preservation: I want cute looking houses to drive past and I’m going to make you keep your house cute by law.

Benefit of all: I know what’s best for you in the long run even if you don’t.

Consensus: We might pretend to listen to you, but at the end of the day we’ll simply outlast you at the meeting and vote later after you’ve gone home.

Traffic Calming: We’re going to put in traffic circles so you and your doggone horse trailers don’t drive in my neighborhood. Can also mean raised beds with annuals.

Landscape: Used with words like “wide” or “level” meaning someone wants to impose something over hundreds of square miles. Something pretty enough to be photographed. A tell that the user has origins in the burbs of one coast or another where landscaping is what you pay people much poorer than yourself to do to your yard.

Facilitator: Someone to calm the crazies without committing to anything.

Affordable Housing: We don’t want trailers so we’ll build some condos school teachers can afford but please, no poor people.

Smart Growth: Sprawl with bike paths.

Livable Communities: Cul de sacs with bike paths all the way to Starbucks.

Stakeholder: blood sucking vampire that can only be put to rest with a wooden stake through the heart. If someone calls you a stakeholder consider yourself officially “undead”.

Smart Growth: My ideas are smart, yours are dumb.

Editor's Note: This comment was sourced from an article in High Country News, that attacked people opposed to smart growth plans as anti government conspiracy extremists.