Greenwood planning

Comprehensive plans are supposed to be a road map for a better community. Unfortunately, in Greenwood Township, a comprehensive planning effort has become yet another major source of controversy.

In most communities, comprehensive planning is a model of openness. Every meeting is public, the public is welcome to participate at planning meetings, and public events are held at various points in the planning process to keep the public up-to-speed. Done right, comprehensive planning is a great way to get a community talking constructively about important needs, concerns, and hopes for the future. Planning committees routinely operate by consensus.

But that’s not how things have worked in Greenwood, where the process quickly became mired in controversy over seemingly minor issues, such as what questions to include on a community survey and how to phrase them. Many of the questions included in the survey were approved by divided votes of the planning committee over the objections of others on the committee. In the end, some of the questions are written so ambiguously, it’s hard to know what anyone’s response actually means.

When an initial draft of the plan produced by consultant John Klaers suggested the township had originally been formed to provide local planning and zoning, some longtime residents objected to the revisionist history, since the primary impetus for forming the township was to create a fire department.

Perhaps the biggest source of friction has been over how to handle the results of the survey. According to members of the committee, the township not only received responses to the questions on the survey, they received almost 300 separate comments from residents on a wide range of topics. So what did all those residents of Greenwood have to say? It’s not clear, since only a smattering of excerpts from the comments have been released publicly. Even members of the planning committee have been barred from viewing the vast majority of the comments.

Who is behind that decision isn’t clear. Town board officials, this week, said it was the consultant’s call. The board has consulted with the township attorney, who assures them the comments can legally remain secret. Yet the township used grant funds from the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board, and the grant application states that the state’s public information law applies to work undertaken with grant funds. Some in the township are looking at pursuing that issue further.

Whether the township can legally withhold the comments is less important than the fact that they even want to keep them under wraps. The city of Tower and Breitung Township recently completed their own comprehensive plan and all of the comments from their survey are available to the public.

Those advocating for secrecy in Greenwood say some of those commenting may not have wanted their names associated with potentially controversial views. That’s not unreasonable, except the simple solution is to redact the names, as was done with the comment excerpts that were included in the draft comprehensive plan. What’s more, according to committee members, the 25 full comments that Klaers did allow committee members to see included names and addresses of those commenting, which suggests personal privacy isn’t much of a concern, after all.

What seems more likely in this instance is that certain township officials would rather not know how residents really feel. For a long time, the town board majority and other township officials have dismissed critics as a mere handful of disgruntled people. But if the high number of comments point to a broader dissatisfaction within the township, that argument becomes tougher to justify, especially if the comments are released publicly. The fact that almost 300 people took the time to express views beyond the survey format suggests residents feel strongly, about something, perhaps a number of things.

The controversy over the township’s planning effort is indicative of the increasing distrust by Greenwood residents about the way in which their township government functions. It should have been an opportunity to heal those divisions, but, for many, it’s just more evidence of a township government that resists the kind of openness that residents expect.