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Six years ago communities competed for these projects. Now they organize against them. Scale explains part of it — and not the most important part.
When you label your neighbors’ concerns as a disinformation problem, you’ve told them what you think of them — and they heard you.
The most expensive mistake in community benefits isn’t the amount. It’s the timing.
Duelling experts don’t produce information. They destroy it — and then everyone stops believing in studies at all.
The same $150 million investment produces $10.8 million or $0.4 million for a locality. The variable isn’t the project.
Communities spend months fighting over the things a developer can simply pay for — and give away the things that can’t be bought.
Compliance and complaint are decoupled. That points at your ordinance, not the building.
Both sides of the water fight are quoting numbers that don’t mean what they think. Here’s the sentence that ends the argument.
Public comment measures intensity, not opinion. Officials who confuse the two make bad decisions and then get blamed for them.
In a lot of towns, the biggest land-use decision of the decade has already been made — by a staffer picking the closest available category.