At the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, in the suburbs of Tucson, there are at least two hundred volunteers who devote a day or more per week helping visitors understand, better, what they are seeing as they go from one end to another of these magical paths. There must be another seventy five volunteers who work with staff, helping them unravel the mysterious tangles of the many life forms extant. And all of these volunteers work free of any charge for their time.

But it isn’t the museum volunteer who attracts our attention. Nor are we concerned with the definition of duties. Our focus is on the individual member of the planning commission, who gives of his personal time at no charge.

He is one of four persons of Sonoita, Arizona who sits on the Planning and Zoning Commission of this community, forty miles southeast of Tucson. It’s a small place. It doesn’t even have a traffic light, not one. But it will have, and in a funny way, the problems of the planning and zoning commission of Sonoita are the same as the problems confronting the members of a similar board in Newark, New Jersey, or San Diego, California.

In the Summer Edition 2001 of the Planning Commissioners Journal, Elaine Cogan offers a triad of traits that will be the basis for effective membership on the planning commission: Patience, Persistence, and Passion. She doesn’t say this is true for large commissions, or small ones or downright tiny ones, like Sonoita, Arizona. She refers, correctly, to all commissions. But you can, in effect, take her triad of traits, or three of another kind, or three three’s of nine kinds, and arrange them all in some kind of schedule or diagram by which you can illustrate that the affairs of the commission all fit. The point is that an effective commissioner is described by words or phrases that define a “good” person.

The words may take different tones as one traverses the phantasmagoria of the lid, something more approaching concinnity rather than cacophony. And if one takes issue with what a commissioner says every time he says it, all bets are off. But in general we are dealing with “good” persons, each striving to meet the sometimes contradictory laws and functions that he must deal with all the time.

A few years ago I had occasion to visit China as a member of a planning team. We met with teams of Chinese planners and discussed techniques for coping with problems of housing, transportation, and the environment. Their problems were our problems, except for one thing. We had a Planning Commissioner in our group – a petite, vocal woman about sixty years old from the small town of Amherst, Massachusetts . The Chinese planners couldn’t understand her role. They had nothing in their structure that would tell them what to do with somebody who drew no pay, and ranked higher than staff planners.

“What, no pay”, they asked, in terms both polite and incredulous. This was something so foreign to their experience. They could not imagine someone figuring out a solution to one of their problems and having their solutions figure to be the equal or superior to one of their staff answers, at no pay.

And this brings us to the major thrust – do we still allow the planning commissioners answers to be heard, understood, and weighed in – leaving the staff to wonder what happened ?