Rex Puts on White Coat, Goes Double Blind, and Accuses Commissioners of Not Being "Empirical"

Richard Lawson surfaced again this week in all the chicken-hearted pseudonymity of "Rex and the City" accusing the Planning Commission with making its Bells Bend decision based on economic development rather than land use reasoning. The Chatterbox failed to mention that the entire case made against the Scottsboro/Bells Bend neighborhood plan and for the Planning Department's alternative (which would all but assured wins for May Town Center) used economic development as the lure for Planning to vote their way.

So, it's perfectly fine in Lawson's mind for Tony Giarrantana to use economic development in arguments to the Commission for killing the neighborhood plan and allowing sprawl on the Bend, but it is illegitimate for the Commission to defer the alternative on the same grounds? Sounds to me like the pro-development reporter arbitrarily cherry picks the reasoning to serve his situation. The logic is also tortured by the reporter's failure to stipulate precisely where land use ends and economic development begins; perhaps, that's a shifting goal line, too. The whole idea that a biased journalist makes appeals to the paid-for "empiricism" used to justify growth without recourse to community character or to truly independent study is itself hilarious.