The Township & River

So the Township…

I guess Lancaster Township has at the very least some say in what happens along the river. They also own a lot of land along the Conestoga’s banks as it goes through the city and as far as I can tell the people in charge there are committed to doing right by the river and figuring out ways they can improve access. Has to be about the river. 

After meeting with the Township Manager yesterday with our class, my impression is that Bill wants to make the world’s best township ordinance. I imagine that he doesn’t have it as a priority (time spent rewriting the thing) since he, no doubt, has other things to deal with like potholes and managing employees and liasoning with the Board of Supervisors and a whole mess of things the normal person doesn’t even know, but is he a policy/ordinance nerd? I think so. 

He wants, even encourages, residents to rewrite the ordinance in order to loosen or tighten the thing so it works for the folks who live in the Township. He seems to have an awesome philosophy about municipal governance that, if summarized, would be like this: let common sense dictate the codes by which individuals, residences and businesses can come together to shape a community. In that, people can have the freedom to do what they want with the understanding that they live around others. 

This approach seems like a good one to approach the management of the river and the spaces along it that are controlled by the Township. I’m not saying that there is anything pending that needs to be dealt with, but if something arose, I’m confident that as far as the Township is concerned, it has the people and systems in place to do good. 

On the way home