CaryWatch

Cary's Open Space Plan

Plans

A Plan to Make Some More Plans, Sometime, by Somebody

Planning consultants thrive because everyone involved in the process has an incentive to keep planning. Towns hire consultants to study problems. Consultants produce plans. The plans recommend more studies, more public input, more measurements, and more planning. The process can continue for years without anyone having to make a firm decision.

This is especially convenient because a completed plan looks like an accomplishment. It can be presented at a meeting, posted on a website, praised in a press release, and cited in the next planning document. But a plan with no firm deadlines, no named person responsible, and no measurable result is not much of a plan. It is a statement of intentions.

Planning has value when it leads to action. When the main result of a plan is another plan, taxpayers are not buying progress. They are paying professionals to postpone decisions in an orderly and attractive format.

For example:

Cary has been working on a draft Open Space Plan for more than four years. The process has included consultants, surveys, public meetings, presentations, revisions, additional public input, redirection, more revisions, and still more review. The result is a lengthy and polished document filled with goals, strategies, maps, graphics, action tables, implementation language, and all-too familiar Cary vocabulary about collaboration, resilience, stewardship, connectivity, sustainability, and community values.

What it contains far less often is what most people would ordinarily expect from a plan: a statement that a particular person or department will do a particular thing, at a particular place, by a particular date, for a stated amount of money.

The Town itself gives fair warning that nothing will come of this Plan. The draft states:

"In Cary, plans are aspirational roadmaps intended to help accomplish long-term visions in an ever-changing world; they are not fixed promises based on a known, fully predictable, and static future."

That sentence may be the most important one in the document. The Town is telling the reader at the outset that what follows is not a set of promises. It is an assortment of aspirations that may be altered as circumstances, budgets, priorities, technology, demographics, regulations, economics, or politics change.

The Long Road to a Draft

The current draft did not arrive by a straight route. It has gone through a lengthy sequence of study, outreach, review, revision, and reconsideration.

[TO FILL: verified chronology of the Plan's development, earliest event first.]

At some point during that process, public or stakeholder feedback caused the project to change direction substantially enough that the draft was reworked. That history matters, because the present document is not simply the execution of an original concept; it is the product of a process that itself evolved over time.

[TO FILL: the specific feedback, date, meeting, consultant presentation, or staff explanation showing why the Plan changed direction.]

What Does the Plan Actually Plan?

The Plan contains many items labeled as actions, but none of them are physical actions or measurable commitments. They are instructions to create processes, prepare maps, devise criteria, develop guidelines, coordinate with partners, identify opportunities, evaluate needs, create educational materials, or prepare still more plans.

Among the recurring verbs are words such as identify, evaluate, explore, encourage, coordinate, collaborate, develop, create, support, prioritize, integrate, continue, and improve. Those are not meaningless words. Many describe legitimate preliminary work. But preliminary work is not the same thing as committing to an outcome.

For example, an actual open-space commitment might say:

"Acquire 100 acres of environmentally significant land by June 30, 2029, with $15 million appropriated for acquisition."

That sentence tells the public what is to be accomplished, how much is to be acquired, when it is to be done, and what resources are to be devoted to the task.

By contrast, the draft Plan repeatedly relies on language of this general kind:

Create a process for evaluating and prioritizing open space.
Develop criteria for identifying priority locations.
Explore incentives for private landowners.
Continue partnerships with outside organizations.
Coordinate a plan for community education.
Develop joint agreements with other jurisdictions.
Identify areas requiring ecological improvement.
Create best practices and design guidelines.
Evaluate staffing needs.
Develop additional management plans and standards.

These may be useful steps, but they are at best preparatory, and command no action towards increasing our open space. None state what land Cary intends to preserve, which parcels it intends to acquire, what ecological work will be performed on it, how much money will be committed, who will be accountable for delivering the result, or the date by which the public can determine whether the promise was kept.

A Plan to Create a Plan

One of the clearest examples of this bureaucratic lunacy is the proposal to create a plan to collaborate with HOAs to enhance their open-space management practices.

The action is not to improve HOA open space. It is not even to collaborate with HOAs. The action is to create a plan under which collaboration might occur, after which somebody might determine what that collaboration should involve, and after which some enhancement might eventually follow.

That is planning at several removes from the thing supposedly being accomplished.

Page 80: A Timeline Without Deadlines

Page 80 is revealing precisely because it does not contain a list of substantive actions. Instead, it introduces what the Plan calls "A 10-year Timeline for Action" and explains that the implementation matrix on the pages that follow is intended as a guide.

The timing categories are:

Ongoing
Short-term: 1–3 years
Mid-term: 4–6 years
Long-term: 7–10 years

The page also warns that timeframes and partners may need to shift over time and says implementation will require many actors working together. In other words, even the Plan's timetable is flexible. A task placed in a one-to-three-year category is not given a completion date; the reader is instead given a range, followed by a warning that the range may change.

The substantive implementation matrix begins several pages later, around page 84. There one finds actual entries such as Action 1.1.1: "Create a formal process for evaluating, prioritizing, and acquiring open space" and Action 1.1.2: "Create an acquisition checklist for potential parcels..." — good examples of why so much of the Plan consists of creating processes for later decisions rather than committing to present results.

How Much Is Concrete?

A review of the draft's action items shows a striking imbalance between process-oriented tasks and measurable commitments. Only a small number describe direct physical management activities. Most are concerned with creating frameworks, maps, criteria, standards, partnerships, educational tools, future programs, or additional plans.

Examples of comparatively concrete language include actions such as actively thinning forested areas along greenways and implementing actions already contained in Creek Management Plans. Even these, however, lack a stated scale, a targeted area, a budget, a completion date, or a measurable performance target.

The distinction matters. A municipal government may reasonably need studies, inventories, maps, policies, criteria, and partnerships. But those things are means. They should not be confused with the ends they are supposed to accomplish.

When Is It Supposed to Happen?

The Plan assigns various actions to broad categories such as short-term, mid-term, long-term, or ongoing. Those labels create the appearance of a schedule, but they do not necessarily create a deadline.

A genuine deadline is something like June 30, 2028. "Long-term," by contrast, describes a span of years. "Ongoing" may describe work that never reaches a point at which anyone can say that it was completed. And because the Plan expressly reserves the ability to evolve and adapt, even those broad timeframes do not necessarily bind future action.

The draft defines Short-term as 1–3 years, Mid-term as 4–6 years, Long-term as 7–10 years, and separately identifies some work as Ongoing.

Who Is Responsible?

Responsibility is similarly diffuse. Actions may involve Town departments, partner organizations, regional bodies, nonprofits, HOAs, private landowners, contractors, volunteers, or the community generally. Participation by many groups may be desirable, but accountability becomes difficult when no single office or official owns a measurable result.

A useful test is simple: for each action, can a citizen identify the person or department that will be answerable if it is not done? If not, responsibility has been distributed so broadly that it effectively disappears.

What Will It Cost?

A plan that does not identify the cost of its principal commitments leaves another essential question unanswered. Open-space acquisition costs money. Restoration costs money. Staffing costs money. Maintenance costs money. Consultants, outreach, mapping, studies, design work, public meetings, staff time, and administration cost money as well.

Cary identifies Agency Landscape + Planning as the master-plan consulting team for the Open Space Plan. Agency's own project page describes its work for Cary as an update to the Parks & Open Space Plan undertaken with the Eppley Institute for Parks and Public Lands and Heritage Strategies.

What I have not been able to verify from publicly indexed Town records is the total amount Cary has paid for this planning effort, including the original consulting contract, amendments, staff time, outreach, printing, surveys, and related work. The absence of an easily identifiable total is itself worth noting. A citizen can readily find a 90-plus-page draft describing future open-space policy, but not a simple figure stating what production of that draft has cost.

Until the contract and any amendments are located in Cary's procurement or payment records, any dollar estimate would be speculation. CaryWatch should use the verified figure when it is available rather than repeat an unsupported estimate.

Why Call It a Plan?

There is nothing inherently wrong with aspiration. Governments need long-range goals, and no responsible municipality can predict ten years of budgets, land prices, development pressure, environmental conditions, or political decisions with certainty. Nor should every long-range policy document be treated as a contract.

But words matter. A vision is not a plan. A goal is not a plan. A catalogue of possibilities is not a plan. A process for identifying future priorities is not a schedule for carrying them out. When these categories are blurred, the public may quite reasonably believe that decisions have been made when, in fact, the document has postponed every important decision to another day.

In the classical sense, a plan is an ordered scheme directed toward an intended result: it identifies means, agents, sequence, resources, and some temporal relation between intention and accomplishment. A document consisting principally of aspirations, processes, future studies, contemplated partnerships, and promises to devise subsequent strategies belongs to a different category.

However polished its terminology or elaborate its procedural history, Cary's Draft Open Space Plan will be, if it is ever completed, no more than a plan to make some more plans, to be completed at some unspecified time, by some unspecified body.

Sources

Cary Draft Open Space Plan (March 2025)
Town of Cary Open Space Plan project page
Town of Cary Parks, Recreation and Cultural Resources System Plan
Agency Landscape + Planning: Cary Parks and Open Space Plan