Phil in the Blank columns through the past few years have well documents my efforts to be healthier, lose weight, run faster and farther, etc.
One thing I’ve learned throughout the whole experience is the futility of looking backwards. Worrying about overindulging for the holidays doesn’t help anything, and since eating is a coping mechanism, can actually hurt the effort.
Only what happens now and in the future matters. So it’s always the first day of a healthy lifestyle, since changing the past is impossible anyway.
That’s the sort of thinking I heard at Monday’s City Council meeting. Not about losing weight, since everyone up there seems in decent enough shape.
But in the rezoning request discussion about 42 W. Washington, when Mayor Steven Percival responded to property owner Ed Adler pointing out perceived differences in city treatment of his versus requests from business owner Curt Catallo.
The mayor said the current council was seated in November and they can’t argue what happened in the past.
The mayor noted there are other recourses, referring to the courts, and he’s right.
The court can and will consider what happened in the past when making its decisions. It already has.
In the 59 S. Main Street lawsuit, filed by CBC Joint Venture against the city, the judge found the city’s denial of a rezoning request for a restaurant to be arbitrary. It ruled the city singled out the plaintiff’s property “to apply different standards as applied elsewhere in the area. Defendant’s decision to do so is arbitrary and capricious and not based on any legitimate rational reason.”
The city’s case against rezoning 59 S. Main, the Sutherland Building, was partly based on the slippery slope argument, which was also applied to the Washington property request, next to the Mills.
No one on City Council can change the past, of course. But what happened then makes a huge difference when making decisions now. A judge might think so, anyway.