Community Benefits Agreements and Comprehensive Planning: Balancing Community Empowerment and the Police Power

Click title for link to abstract of article.  Once there, you can download the full article from the link provided.  This is a bit on the "scholarly" side and may be too much so for some, but maybe not.

A little background on this issue:  Back in 2005, a group of about nine of us traveled to Philadelphia for a conference on "Advancing Regional Equity."  The trip was paid for by the Lake Worth CRA and included people like me, Annabeth Karson, javier del sol, Martha Wright, among others.  I happened to be chair of the Planning and Zoning Board at the time.  If you click here, you will find my notes from the conference.  Those that attended uniformly returned with a greater knowledge of disparities within regions based upon race and economic class.  To me, it reinforced that a lot of what Lake Worth was doing was right on track with many of the approaches taken to address these issues around the country - at least at that time.  Now, I'm not so sure.

One of the topics there included the concept of Community Benefits Agreements - the subject of this scholarly article.  In fact, Annabeth Karson and I made a presentation before the City Commission after the conference on this topic.  These agreements are typically used when a large employer comes to a community and are ways of how to integrate non-traditional stakeholder groups into the development review process.  Many conditions are then incorporated into these agreements based on that process.

One of the assumptions you would have to make, as it applies to Lake Worth, is that we are actually an attractive location for a large employer given our other branding issues.  You also have to ask if those that are elected would be honest brokers during the process, or would they be more about skewering potential future candidates - or current political foes.  If not acting as honest brokers, then we would either be dragged to court - yet again - or have nothing to show for our efforts other than a protratcted process with no tangible results.

I haven't read the entire article yet, but it focuses on the balance between the zoning "police power" and the power given to stakeholders in crafting conditions upon the project.  I hope you find it informative.