In local government

At 5 today (Jan. 29), is the almost monthly meeting of the City of Rice Lake Planning Commission. I am what is called a “citizen member” of the committee (as opposed to a city council member or the mayor, who presides).

I remember when I joined it. I was going to bring light and logical change. (How is it that a historian can know so much of the past and forget so much of it in his daily life?) That was over four years ago.

I have discovered since that my concept of paradise is not always shared by others. To bend a Joni Mitchell lyric, many people believe that paradise is a parking lot. However, I have done some good (by my lights), and I have learned much about business, politics, and conflicting dreams.

Today is a fairly big day. We have been working on a master plan and are supposed to recommend a new draft of zoning and subdivisions ordinances to the City Council.

Much of the work is done by staff. Yep, in small cities (just over 8,000) as well as imperial capitals like D.C., one has to weigh carefully the expertise of staff members against their biases. It’s probably easier here, where the entire administrative staff can sit on one side of a not-too-long table.

I’m going to try to slip in something related to communications towers and bird kills. The odds are against me slipping something really substantive in; however, I have some hope of including language that requires applicants to build such towers to address the issue. That sort of thing actually can lead to change. Eventually. Occasionally.

I get tired of those words in this context: being “eventually” successful; “occasionally” on top. That’s part ego, part desire to help a community I’ve come to love continue to be a good place.

But Rice Lake started as a lumber town. The lake, as the name suggests, was originally more of a bog connected to the Red Cedar River. The lumber industry dammed the river and expanded the lake to its current size. And though nearly all that industry is long gone there’s still a veneer plant on the lakeshore, and there is still much of that old entrepreneurial attitude toward the woods and water and wetlands around us. They love nature, and they love to change it, to make it new, and human, and a good investment. And am I, really, all that different?