Share the wealth!

Last week’s 14-2 vote of the Livingston County Planning Board to give a thumbs down to the proposed new Village of Geneseo Master Plan may have come as a surprise to some, but only if they were not paying attention. The village’s plan was only the latest casualty in the ever-widening Big Box War that has raged through the northern part of the county for going on two years now in the wake of the Geneseo Lowes and the Lima Super Wal-Mart proposals.

A village Master Plan is not usually something that draws a lot of public interest. I daresay that there are very few people, aside from the professional planners who actually draft them, who have ever read one all the way through. In the heightened environment of political struggle that has engulfed Geneseo recently, however, there is precious little neutral ground left on any issue at all related to development.

Tensions are increasingly frayed between local advocates of Smart Growth and those around the county who are quite happy with Geneseo’s role as the sales tax Cash Cow for the county. This was a view expressed by many of the County Planning Board member’s who voted against the plan.

The clear message is that residents of other towns want to have more, not less, large-scale retail development in Geneseo. They like the convenience of not having to travel to the city, the selection and low prices that are brought by Big Box competition, and most of all, they like the increased sales tax revenue that they believe will be captured by Livingston County. (Whether there will, in fact, be much of an increase, rather than just a shift of collection from small retailers to large and from outlying towns to Geneseo, is also the subject of fierce debate.)

The dirty little secret of this debate is that, if there is any increase in county sales tax collections, 95 per cent of it goes directly to the county government. While the municipality that hosts the store does get some increased property tax revenue, the remaining 5 per cent of the sales tax is distributed around the county according to a formula based on population and assessed value, regardless of where the store collecting the tax is located.

This is a great boon for the county, which after all, has lots of Medicaid and other state-mandated bills to pay, and good for residents of outlying towns, who hope to see at least a stabilization of their county property tax bills, but what exactly is in it for Geneseo? Residents of Geneseo are the ones left to deal with all the nasty side effects of having their Historic Landmark Village turned into a traffic-clogged retail center.

While residents of surrounding towns will make the occasional trip to Geneseo to shop, they can always escape back to their quiet little country homes or villages the rest of the week. In contrast, residents of Geneseo, particularly those of us who live in the village, are forced to suffer with the traffic and other harmful effects of sprawl every day of the week. Is it any wonder that the proposed new Master Plan seeks to put some restraints on the type of development that can come into our village?

In the fullness of time, of course, the only reasonable outcome to all this is compromise. I believe Geneseo citizens are willing to bear their fair share of retail development for the good of the county, but it has to be a two way street.

If more Big Boxes are to come, then other communities need to be willing to consider hosting some of them. There also needs to be a recognition that not every dollar of retail sales in the county needs to or should take place in Geneseo.

Finally, to the extent that some of the new development does take place in Geneseo, county leaders need to be willing to share some of the new wealth generated, by helping build the infrastructure needed to handle the increased traffic that surely will come. If a serious cooperative proposal were to be offered on funding the needed improvements on Geneseo’s already over-burdened road system, the Big Box War could probably begin to be settled.

As of yet, however, no such discussions have taken place, and leaders on both sides seem content to just dig in and lob grenades across the lines. Keep your head down!

Closing the Gray Gap

As I travel about I frequently run into people who mention how much they miss the newspaper. This is gratifying to hear and I usually try to steer them in the direction of this web site and blog. If the person is significantly older then my 56 years (as most newspaper readers are), however, I find that they are not in the habit of visiting the Internet.

This surprised me at first, until I did a little research on the subject, and discovered that this phenomena is quite well known and even has a name. It’s the Gray Gap. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it turns out that net-savvyness is inversely proportional to age.

Recent surveys (Pew Internet Project, 2006) indicate that while 72 per cent of Americans overall use the Internet, that number falls to 28 per cent for people age 70 or over. This is in contrast to 89 per cent of those age 18-28. If you are reading this, the chances are you are under 60, as the penetration drops to 54 per cent for those 60-69.

This is further compounded by the fact that, even though Geneseo is a lively college town, we also have a strong legacy as a rural area. Overall 42% of rural residents do not use computers, compared to 31% of urban residents and 34% of suburban residents.

Most alarming, however, is that of those who currently don’t go on the Internet, more than half (57%) say they don’t ever expect to. While it is understandable that many older Americans never had the opportunity to learn the new technologies, the reasons given for avoiding the Internet are revealing.

The most frequent reason cited by non-users for avoiding the Web (given by 54%) is that it is perceived as “too dangerous.” This point was driven home to me recently at a meeting of the Livingston County Highway Safety Board, on which I serve as Recording Secretary.

The board has set up a Technology Committee to bring modern technology, such as satellite mapping, into our meetings. At the May meeting, Livingston County Highway Superintendent Don Higgins hooked a computer with an Internet connection up to a projector. As we were searching for a particular web site, we clicked on a likely link only to have the image of an attractive young lady in a bikini pop up on the screen.

It was nothing more risque than you would see on the average Victoria’s Secret TV commercial, and yet it confirmed one older member’s beliefs about the Internet. “You make one wrong click and they come and take you away,” he said.

This would be funny, if it wasn’t a little sad. The Internet is the most wonderful knowledge and communication machine ever invented and yet a significant part of our population is not enjoying the benefits. I  hope each of you who are computer savvy enough to read this blog will adopt a gray person and help them discover the wonders of the net. Let’s have no senior left behind!

If you are gray and computer literate I hope you will let me know you’ve read this the next time you see me. Or better yet, post a comment!