Local effort may point to a new way

Some of our nation’s thinkers are coming around to the conclusion that maybe our inclination to keep things fair for all individuals all the time has been accidentally making things worse in a number of ways for all of us, with some serious consequences. But one idea could suggest a way to solutions.

Take our housing shortage, for instance. Any diehard capitalist will cite the principal that if you discourage supply, demand will rise, along with prices, as supply goes down. That pretty much describes the current housing market, the paucity of which likely has a lot of causes, not least of which is NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard). As the decades have passed, we keep passing more laws and filing more lawsuits to stop construction projects. Now, it’s so hard to get anything done in this country that costs have risen sharply, many say.

And that inclination has led to a dangerous long-term problem, too. In order to tackle climate change, the world needs to drastically lessen our reliance on fossil fuels, switching to electrification with more renewable energy sources. But the “grid,” the network of wires and transformers and switches that transport the energy we make, has to grow a lot to do that.

The NIMBY problem has made that unlikely as well, creating opposition to siting more powerlines, but also leading to an idea recently expressed by Lawrence Lessig, who invented the type of code that made possible the modern internet with clickable links that now tie together the combined knowledge of humanity.

Lessig recently condensed a lot of thinking from various experts into an idea that suggests the problem might be addressed by reshaping how government operates to streamline big, special, difficult projects by assigning them to temporary but powerful commissions formed just to tackle them, then hand off the solution to the government, by law.

That just happened in Electric City, although for a much smaller project than Lessig had in mind.

In a short amount of time, folks there got a park built that the city has been trying for years to construct. They did it with zero grant dollars, we’re told. But the process unfolded quickly after a committee finally formed to outline the project according to the wishes of residents. Once they knew what they wanted, the temporary hand-off occurred, to Run the Dam, a local non-profit that guided the project to fruition. It opened up last week.

Although the ideas Lessig wrote about can conjure up red flags, he should take note, and maybe so should others. Whether they do or not, Electric City residents are now better off for handling the problem differently.

Scott Hunter

editor and publisher