The fox is watching the henhouse

It raised our eyebrows when we heard recently that the Mat-Su Business Alliance had authored a rewrite of Mat-Su Borough Assembly’s Title 27.

Why should anyone be concerned that the business community, and not the assembly or the taskforce of volunteers who spent months working on Title 27, is taking the apparent lead here?

Well, in simple terms, it’s a case of the fox watching the henhouse.

Title 27 and its predecessor, Title 16, are a set of rules that govern everyone in the borough who wants to subdivide a parcel of land.

So why should anyone care if developers and other business people have taken the reins and drafted a compromise version of the borough’s subdivision rules? Does anyone really trust developers who stand to profit from subdivisions won’t craft regulations that benefit them at the expense of the rest of us?

If the past is any indication, the answer is of course developers will, for example, build roads to the minimum standard required, pocket the profits and then hand the substandard roads over to the borough. And it’s taxpayers’ problem if the roads aren’t wide enough for an ambulance and fire truck to meet and pass the other, or there is no place a fire truck can turn around because the developer only built one road into a subdivision to save himself some money.

“Open for business” is a popular catch phrase, like “where’s the beef?” or other advertising slogans. But it’s not a great rule of thumb for taxpayers. Borough code, such as this one, exists not just as a limiting factor for developers, but also to provide individual taxpayers and local government with a measure of protection from shady business doings on the part of people whose only motive is profit.

The assembly says it plans to use the business alliance’s rewrite of the code as a starting point when it takes up the issue Oct. 18.

We see evidence the borough has already taken steps down this road toward wresting the reins of power from the people and surrendering them to corporations. We cite as evidence the resolution in favor of the Usibelli Wishbone Hill coal project, which reads as if it were drafted by the corporation itself for approval by the assembly.

While we have no blind allegiance to either business of government, we continue to put our trust in government, which is at least tasked with representing taxpayers’ interests. Business serves only one master, the bottom line.