It’s tough trying to boil multiple-hour meetings into a news story. Local media outlets have recapped the public hearing where the Obey Creek development agreement was approved after a nearly six year process (read more here and here). I tried futilely to capture what Council said in 140 characters (see Storifys from the May 11, May 18, June 8, and June 15 meetings that discussed Obey Creek).
But what summed it all up for me and was both a profile in both public service and in leadership was Councilman George Cianciolo’s comments on why he was supporting the plan.
“…This is our chance to get it right. Will it be perfect? I don’t know. But I think we’ve learned from some of our past experiences. There is risk to this, there’s risks to anything we do in town. We can’t adequately predict all the future events. What I do know is that folks tend to fear the unknown, so there’s a lot of fear of what will happen…
[…]
I hope citizens understand it would be really easy for us just to say, ‘Oh, let’s go with the smaller project. I mean, that’s what the citizens want, let’s just do it.’ That’s the easy way out. I mean, if we go with this larger project, I sense that we, there’s a good chance we will, a lot of people in this room are going to be unhappy. There’s a lot of people outside of this room that will be unhappy.
But our job when we were elected was to make the best choices we think of for this town, in our opinion, to make the best choices possible. And that doesn’t mean we’re always going to make people happy. And I’m sorry about that. It would be an ideal world if we could make everyone happy all the time, but it just doesn’t work that way.
And so the easy choice would be to go with the smaller project, to go with a lot less parking, to do a lot less of everything, but that’s not why we’re elected, to go with the easy choices. So I think this will be a good project. I think it will be a successful project. And I’m looking forward to it. And I will vote to support this project going forward.”
How would you try to summarize your position on the 1.6 million square foot mixed-use project or really any proposal or issue our Town tries to tackle? What do you think about Councilman’s comments? I welcome your attempt to sum it all up.
Issues:
