Members of the Plan Commission and Common Council have complained about meddling by the metro area's regional planning body before.
Monday night they got to say it to their faces.
Despite a respectful tone and compliments going both ways, commissioners showed plenty of apprehension over the Capital Area Regional Planning Commission's project to put local planning into a regional perspective. Senior CARPC planner David Greene and deputy director Kamran Mesbah came to Verona to explain their goal - the identification of future urban development areas (FUDAs), or locations where sewer service, and therefore most development, will be considered likely and appropriate.
"(We) spent a lot of time over the last year-and-a-half plus working on a comprehensive plan," commissioner Jeremy Charles pointed out. "We actually did a fair amount of looking at our neighboring municipalities. ... We do think about the implications of our actions on the surrounding area and vice-versa."
Greene and Mesbah went through great pains to explain that they saw the project as an extension of Verona's work, further definition and clarification rather than a repeat of the almost two-year process. But commissioners were also uneasy about the possibility of CARPC planners and commissioners butting in to where they felt CARPC didn't belong: telling the city how best to grow economically and not just physically.
"I'm concerned ... about 'mission creep,'" Ald. Steve Ritt said. "You're looking to provide us with your additional input; what I'm concerned about is that drift between water quality protection and economic development."
Mesbah said the two necessarily overlap. For example, if Verona and Fitchburg had huge industrial parks just a mile or two from each other in an attempt to compete for the same tenants, CARPC would have the responsibility to consider whether more would be necessary in that area. He used the glut in the condominium market as a further example.
Ritt didn't try to shoot down that concept, but he clearly bristled at the idea of planners and a voting body with limited knowledge of Verona's particular economic issues attempting to redirect the marketplace.
"A lot of times it's business development in the right areas that ultimately winds up helping us do the kinds of redevelopment we anticipate seeing," Ritt said. "If you're thinking it's going to be all publicly driven ... we can't look to the taxpayers to fund redevelopment."
Verona has volunteered to be the pilot for multiple reasons, not the least of which is to get as much input on the process as possible, given that it's still a test case.
But with two urban service expansion requests in the pipeline and a third possibly in the works, some are also holding their breaths to see whether CARPC will wait for Verona to get its FUDAs set before approving further expansions.
Mesbah said that should not be the case, but he couldn't promise it would not happen. He also reminded the commission that good long-term planning isn't just about not having adverse impacts on the environment but in many cases making it better.
"Making natural resources as centerpieces of your development ... is going to be the wave of the future," he said.
