You can’t live without it. They can’t live with it.

Feeling appropriately civic minded, I participated in the recent “Vision Dixie” planning process sponsored by Washington County during this past year. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the process involved listening to a high priced consultant hired by Washington County describe the thousands of new homes, businesses and roads that will be built in the next few decades and then pouring over maps to describe where it will all go.

It was mass NIMBY. (Not In My Back Yard.) Everybody pretty much put everything on the other side of the county from where they live.

I slipped away from my table and let the others paste multistory apartment houses somewhere else so I could spend my time just talking to people. The conversations went like this:

Me: Just theoretically, do you think it would be possible to use statistics to predict about how many wars there will be in the next few decades?

The Other Guy: Ummmm … Yeah, I guess so. Maybe. Why?

Me: Wouldn’t deciding whose country to have those wars in be about the same process that we’re going through to decide where to put all these new suburbs?

There was usually not much agreement on that second point. Civic minded people are usually exceptionally positive and optomistic. I’m not sure why I was there.

But I did learn something completely new at Vision Dixie and I thought you might be interested in learning it too.

As we were looking at PowerPoint slide after PowerPoint slide of highly educated guesses about population, transportation, industry, and general urban sprawl, there, in bright red across the middle of the Red Cliffs Desert Reserve, was a brand new road that isn’t there now. I learned later that this is the proposed Northern Beltway road. The red line was in all the slides and the highly paid consultant didn’t say a thing about it. It was just assumed to be part of our future.

When people talk about politics happening to you rather than because of you, this is as good an example of that process as I have ever seen. A little history is in order to demonstrate the point.

The Red Cliffs Desert Reserve was established as a result of some very hard, and sometimes emotionally bitter bargaining when it became pretty clear that if we didn’t do something quick, the Sonoran Desert tortoise would join the Black rhinoceros, Giant anteater, and Humpback whale on the road to extinction. Actually, they’re already on that road and it’s just a question of how close to the destination they are.

The question was, “Are we going to live in a world without the tortoise or are we going to put a higher priority on a property owner’s right to make a profit?” The result was neither … and maybe both … but in the end, both sides - a bit bruised and broken from the fight - guardedly agreed on a tightly worded deal that preserved some of the land and “let ‘er rip” on the rest.

The Northern Beltway road is NOT part of that deal.

But there are people in St. George and Washington City who figure that the Northern Beltway is absolutely essential for orderly growth of the county, even though its route would bisect the reserve, dividing the desert tortoise population and destroying precious habitat that is simply irreplacable and absolutely essential for the tortoise. The unmentioned, but highly effective, placement of that red line on the “Vision Dixie” map is the kind of manipulation of the public mind that only money can buy.

Although the Northern Beltway is not part of the Red Cliffs Desert Reserve deal, something called “the current take permit” (basically, how many tortoises are we planning to wipe out as we “let ‘er rip” with roads and housing projects outside the Reserve) will expire in 2016. Some renegotiation will inevitably take place in Congress then. The people who want the road are gearing up now to win that fight.

Just thought you might like to know.