Puget Sound Partnership reaches a crossroads

Sucher wonders:

I wonder if we are making the problem -- as complex as it indeed is -- yet more complicated, and with claims of need for radical change etc etc, than it needs to be.

So far as I can understand from the PSP web-site, the core issue is fairly straightforward -- Low Impact Development (LID), both for future development and to retrofit what we have already built.

Will that be expensive? I imagine so. But what troubled me -- and maybe I missed it in the PSP site - is that there is no back of the envelope discussion of what in fact it will cost. And such $$$ numbers exist.

Consider, for example, the parking lot on the west side of Northgate Mall. So far as I can tell, that is supposed to be a method for cleaning up the numero uno problem -- storm water run off from parking lots and roads. So how much did it cost? Has it been effective (scientifically)? How many parking lots (throughout the region) could be retrofitted and at what cost? and what scientific benefit? Those numbers can be found. But wher are they? They start to offer practical solutions to one very significant part of the problem. But I can't get a handle on them from PSP.

My hunch is that the language of "it's basically a land use issue" is so huge and obviously contentious that it stymies practical discussion.

Read the very interestin article here:

via crosscut.com