APB Archives

JULIANA MAXIM'S LETTER (Nov 03 03)

PRINTED AS RECEIVED

San Diego, October 29, 2003
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Honorable Commissioner Chase,
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In your comments at the October 16, 2003 Planning Commission meeting (see
transcript attached) you complained that City Heights community members'
attitude towards regulations is inconsistent, and that we try to manipulate the commission by presenting it with contradictory behaviors and beliefs. But an eye more generously disposed than yours could have easily seen that the contradictions are only superficial and stem not from opportunism, but from a steady concern with the development of our neighborhood.
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Urban sociologists often write than the real right to the city is the right to
change it according to our desires. Sometimes we think the regulations
represent well our desires; sometimes we think they lock down possibilities of
improvement. In each case, we have presented the commission with what we, as a collective, deliberative body, came to think was right for our neighborhood. Different positions on the regulations are not contradictory; on the contrary, they speak of the consistency of our involvement with urban processes. Our positions are indeed shaped case by case, which only testifies to the fact that we constantly exercise our right to freely - and rationally and collectively - conceive what is best for our community.
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Your appeal was for rigidity, rather than consistency, and rigidity is in no
way a guarantee for objectivity. In fact, your comments raise questions about their own objectivity.
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The transcript of your comments falls short of conveying perhaps their most
disturbing aspect: the time and manner in which you delivered them. Not only
the arguments you raised, but also the way in which you raised them, by
monopolizing public hearing time after severely restricting ours, shook our
community's long-standing trust in the democratic nature of institutions like
yours. Speech is power, and you broke the rules of both by accusing us
without offering a chance to defend ourselves.
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Unlike our opponent in this case, we did not come in front of the commission
to request sympathy. We always tried to couch our arguments in rational terms
and to support it with evidence; we stayed away from supplications as much as from accusations. When our opponents did not follow the rules of rational debate, we were displeased. But when you yourself renounced, for the time of your comments, the Commission's usual standards of pertinence and legitimacy, you threatened nothing less than the possibility itself of impartial debate
and decision-making.
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Juliana Maxim
[author's address deleted]
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See transcript attached.
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From October 16, 2003 Planning Commission meeting minutes:

"While she's coming up - on the community members, you know, we've heard a number of projects from these areas and I have to put a point of personal order here that a lot of you people ask for changes when you decide you want changes, ok? I sat on a project here with many of these people coming up and saying we don't want to respect the designation of these plans, we don't - we want changes to these plans. So please don't speak to this commission about how you want us to protect you in one case, and not in another and I don't know where this thing about guns and ammunition is coming from, but in this very community you didn't seem to be very interested in dealing with the safety issues in regard to the pistol range and having an open firing range in your community and the neighbors and what they wanted there, you were perfectly willing to come forward and say we're going to amend that plan, because we've decided we want to amend that plan, so I don't know what we're going to do today but I'm not very receptive to these comments that says, you know, that we're supposed to enforce everything, but when you come and ask for changes and accept it, we're then supposed to do those changes in some cases and not others, so I just want to say I've lived - been around a while now in
this community and you have conflict and I would have preferred if you
actually deal with the conflicts rather than come and lecture us with positions that are inconsistent with past testimony you've given. I'm sorry,
but we go through a lot up here."
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