The Plan

My friend Art Consoli sent me a note in response to a General Plan reference I made in a Scottsdale Republic “Sound Off” column last week.

Art gave me permission to reproduce his note here, and to me it represents sound advice from a guy with a real business approach and experience. I’ve added emphasis to a few key points.

Been thinking about your comment in the paper the other day – a Master Plan could be a major point on which to build a campaign. It should hold the same position as a good business plan holds for a business.

Did you know that Toyota has a Business Plan that looks out 25 years?

Think about all of the problems any city faces – they all come from the arrival of something that no one paid any attention to, or the time required to be spent on a request for a departure from what was “correct.”

People buy into a community expecting the community to make changes slowly, carefully, after all sides and issues have been considered. If the same amount of time and deliberation were put into the master plan – as well as a binding process to make changes – the citizenry might have a lot more confidence that their little world (the backyard) would not be suddenly viewed by hundreds of people looking out the windows of a high rise.

And in the process of developing a plan with teeth all parties might become more appreciative of the other stakeholders’ objectives. Now everyone knows it’s just window dressing.

And as with a good business plan there would have to be financial projections. Maybe with those in place we would look harder at what’s in the agreements so we wouldn’t have to deal with surprise expenditures; pensions and maintenance costs.

Good points, all. Thank you Art. I hope whoever wins seats on the City Council tomorrow will listen. Most of our current council members have forsaken the analytical approach. Only Chris Schaffner, Guy Phillips, and Copper Phillips have committed themselves to it.