Does zoning protect our land rights or squanch them?

On one hand, by Joel Davidson

Perhaps I should ask why the issue of city planning and zoning concerns my fellow citizens and me. We are concerned about our habitat, our trails, roads and paths, our places of eating and meeting. In short, we are concerned about our relationship to, with and in the land.

Some want us to believe that the primary concern for the land is that it generates capital as we "develop" it. "What's good for a dollar is good for this land," many will say. The problem being, that dollars only pay the rent on the land, but do not make the land worth paying rent on.

I drove by Wasilla Lake Park the other day with its trees and trimmed bushes. It is an attempt at stewardship. People eat lunch there along the shore. Children splash in the water, ducks paddle around the edges.

Wasilla Lake Park is a place to sit, breathe and simply "be." One can read, picnic and stroll thoughtfully through the park. Across the busy highway, however, there is a parallel and equally sizable strip of land. It lies well within eye and earshot of the lake, but it is not a place you would ever willingly lay out and read, picnic or barbecue. It is an enormous gravel pit, smack in the heart of Wasilla, and hence is not a place "to be," but rather, it is a place to use and "develop," and thereby generate capital.

I am not opposed to gravel pits or the money and jobs they generate for this valley. Most of us use their services daily when we drive to school, work or the grocery store. Our cities and roads are built on gravel pads. They have their place and their use in our valley. I am only questioning the indiscriminate locations where some of them are cropping up. But I do not own the land. I cannot decide its future or ask that the heavy equipment be just a little quieter while I read and picnic in the park.

I, like many residents here in Wasilla, can only feel that our community park is somehow depreciated by the loud, grinding gravel pit which encroaches ever more into the landscape, as it shapes the outer borders of our park. I wonder sometimes if the bulldozers and backhoes would not dig right up to the very edge of the grass if not for the highway that separates it. So I return to the question of zoning. It does limit and control what a man can and cannot do with his own land, but it also protects him and his neighbor from developers who might be ambivalent to their concerns. Some kind of limited zoning is necessary if we are to keep neighborhoods and community parks from being surrounded, and divided up by the ever-increasing number of racetracks, gravel pits and junkyards.

Joel Davidson lives in Wasilla.