Land preservation in Michigan

Recently, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy released a summary of a report that assessed some $800 million
that the State of Michigan has spent since 1974 to preserve open land and protect it from development. Out of
the splendid assortment of the facts they reported on, clearly indicating that they missed the point entirely, the
one that pissed me off the most was their criticism of where the money was spent. And that was this: only 28.5
percent of these public funds was directed to preserve farms in high-growth counties. An extension of that
factoid is this: "Five of the 17 highest-growth counties — Livingston, Macomb, Midland, Oakland and St. Clair —
had zero enrollments in the farmland preservation program in 1997, 1998 and 1999." But what the hell do they
expect as a conservative think tank? The late nineties was a stoned orgy of reckless sprawl and natural resource
exploitation. What's ironic, and literary, is that the very people that were in the position to regulate where funds
for farm preservation were directed were the same property rights maniacs insisting on more and more sprawl.
It shouldn't be a surprise to anybody--particularly conservatives--that so few funds (28.5%)
were used for preservation in high-growth counties. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy has no right to criticize
the program for this statistic, as it was the conservative platform that they absurdly defend that made the whole
thing so ineffective in the first place! No typical conservative in government would allow such a foolish and
misguided thing to occur; they didn't want to piss off their constituents and developer buddies in the staunchly
conservative suburbs who were racking the dough in just as fast and to the same horrible intensity that they
were chewing up the land to put up frickin' Wal-Marts and Jiffy Lubes and strip housing subdivisions for fertile
young accountant families. Preserving open space in such fast-growing areas would be crazy and self-defeating
for them! It's an arrogant trick for conservatives to scheme for this program's ineffectiveness and then point to it
as a programmatic flaw. But then again, who should be surprised? It's the same old crap that it always has been.


Chanson du jour: something angsty.