Eagerly waiting Fayette County’s comprehensive plan, why bother?
If you’re like me, you’re awaiting the unveiling of the 10-year comprehensive plan for Fayette County due in late February or early March of next year.
I’m kidding, of course. The last comprehensive plan came out in June 2000, and only this week did I skim through it. (Actually reading the plan was impossible, for me at least. Word-processed rather than written, the document contains more stilted sentences than my dog Riley has fleas.)
Three-hundred plus pages long, the 2000 plan was completed by the Cranberry Township engineering firm Herbert, Rowland & Grubic, or HRG, for short. This time around another engineering firm is in charge of things.
Maybe things will be different — maybe this time the William Faulkner of comprehensive plans will be doing the word-processing.
I shouldn’t rag like this way. What’s dull and tedious to one set of ears may be symphonic to another.
Besides, plans such as the one the county has ordered up is not meant to land on the best-seller list. These are working documents meant for planners and local government officials. They are designed to help these officials steer the county’s economic development efforts.
In short, they are the nuts and bolts, wrenches and hammers of local job-creation.
If this is the case, why bother at all? The county is hardly any better off now than it was in 2000.
True, the county’s portion of the Mon-Fayette Expressway was completed in the 18-year gap between plans, and new hotels and restaurants have been built. But the county continues to shed population and to lag behind neighboring countries in the struggle for jobs.
Fayette County is hardly vibrant in the sense that Washington and Westmoreland counties are vibrant. You can go to parts of those counties and experience roads and highways clogged with traffic and see vibrant new retail and residential construction.
Maybe something different in the way planning is required — something beyond the scope of engineers, who are good with blueprints and road and sewer designs, but maybe not so hot when it comes to matters more vexing than the placement of walking trails or the construction and rehabilitation of bridges and off ramps.
You wouldn’t consult a plumber to repair a broken marriage. Maybe you shouldn’t hire an engineering firm to figure out a way to address the problems incidental to a frayed social fabric, which is sort of what we have in Fayette County.
For as long as anyone can remember Fayette County has been in the doldrums. People look back to the days of coal and coke, yet those were some of the most turbulent and troublesome times on record.
Beginning in the 1920s the average miner worked far less than full-time; the average mine family lived paycheck to paycheck, and then some; strikes were commonplace, labor-management disputes daily occurrences. Violence was not unusual.
If not for World War II, coal mining in Fayette County would have effectively come to end sometime in the 1930s. Since World War II, the county’s economic landscape had been marked by one disappointment after another.
Conditions may have just gotten worse.
In the age of a global market economy, when “creative (technological) destruction” has mowed down entire categories of jobs and even professions, the situation for blue collar workers, not only here but in large portions of rural and small town America, has grown dire. The past twenty or more years has spawned, in the words of David Brooks, a “social catastrophe” characterized by the opioid epidemic and an alarming rise in the number of suicides among middle age men and women.
It’s not for nothing that life expectancy in the United States is falling, a development that is largely without historical precedent.
Under the circumstances, a county plan containing the same old bromides and formulas will not suffice — not at a moment when “economic anxiety,” again the words of David Brooks, “has merged with sociological, psychological, and spiritual decay.”
Now, county commissioners, mayors, and township supervisors are in no position to tackle problems of this scale. This crisis requires national mobilization. Still, there may be community workarounds, including innovative ways of addressing local economic planning and development issues. More about this later.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.