It is a few years since Tesco, the British supermarket group, had a tricky encounter with a population of burrowing owls in
California.
The small
endangered birds were cited in a legal challenge to the construction of a huge
distribution center east of
Los Angeles that now supplies Tesco's U.S. chain of Fresh & Easy
grocery stores.
The suit, eventually defeated, was seen as the work not of concerned owl lovers but of an informal alliance between the
United Food and Commercial Workers International Union and local supermarket businesses -- both threatened by Tesco's U.S. debut.
It
is a good example of the local political shenanigans and Machiavellian
manipulation that keep the authors of "Nimby Wars" in business.
The book is co-written by Michael Saint, founder of Saint Consulting, which describes itself as a "
management consulting firm
that specializes in winning zoning and land-use battles for global and
national companies" -- an activity that the authors, who all work for
Saint, regularly compare in the book to street fighting.
These
are the kind of people you call in when it turns out that the local
community does not want your new hospital or cellphone tower.
Or if you want to stop
Wal-Mart opening near your profitable
grocery store.
The authors have produced what amounts to an introductory promotional handbook to the dark arts of land-use politics, which
argues that this is a job which requires an expert professional approach.
Do not rely on a lawyer, they say; avoid the local political fixer; forget about public relations.
There is plenty of business to keep Saint busy.
Its research suggests that in
North America and in
Britain, the NIMBY (not in my backyard) complex has turned into BANANA (build absolutely nowhere anywhere near anything).
Because
Lulus (locally unwanted land usages) are decided by local politicians,
planning is a question of whether they think giving a project the green
light will lose votes.
"The local land-use permitting process is totally political and is thus controlled by those who control the
ballot box," the authors write, in what is the central tenet of the book and their consulting firm.
So conduct the battle like a
political campaign, they say. If necessary, covertly organize a group of supporters to attend planning meetings.
You
must be ready for anything, the authors say. Keeping your own
supporters in line may prove to be one of the hardest challenges.
The
authors also suggest using aliases to check out planning applications,
driving around in a car with local license plates to prevent arousing
suspicion, and avoiding the use of local photocopying services.
Such
tactics are intriguing. Sadly, the book fails to describe the
shenanigans in which the authors have been involved, which makes this
book less John Grishamesque and frank than it should have been.
Jonathan Birchall is New York-based correspondent for the
Financial Times of London, in which this review first appeared.
Nimby Wars:
The Politics of Land Use
P. Michael Saint, Patrick F. Fox and Robert J. Flavell
Saint University Press: 240 pp, $29.99
