If Tkaczyk keeps up this kind of constituent work, she may become more than a one-term wonder elected in a presidential year against an oft-inept opponent.
Comprehensive planning
Every half-century or so, Kingston officials take a look at the sad state of affairs they, their predecessors and circumstances have visited on their constituents and cry, “We need a plan!”
In the old days, they were called master plans. The most current dates to 1961, the year JFK took office. Now the word comprehensive is in vogue.
There have other plans since the original began gathering dust. Urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s was a plan, more or less a plus for Uptown but a disaster for once-thriving Rondout. The waterfront revitalization plan in the late 1990s and later, transformed the creekfront. Numerous zoning changes over decades did little to prevent Midtown from being transformed from stately homes to multi-family, oftentimes substandard, housing.
That’s not to say the city hasn’t done any planning over the last 50-odd years, only that it has been haphazard, reactionary, parochial and devoid of vision.
Whether the present attempt at comprehensive planning, launched last week at City Hall, does anything to change that will be, to say the least, a challenge. In my view, it would be easier to build an entirely new city in the Hurley Flats than to reconfigure bricks, mortar and neighborhoods in place for centuries.
To begin with, planners need to get a clearer definition of the word “comprehensive.” (One alderman’s idea, muttered to a nosy newsman, was to “put all the used-car dealers in one area.”) Will this be a complete makeover or just more tweaking? Does comprehensive mean something more than land-use regulations? Does it get to quality-of-life issues? Will they place a moratorium on stop signs? Should the plan go to the voters — the 1961 plan did not — or should elected officials have the final say?
It is in any event a good thing for a community to take a comprehensive assessment of itself, say every 25 years or so. What flows from that assessment — or doesn’t — could well govern city life as we know it for a long time coming.
