Outlook for Turf Valley: Growing...

If this story is to be believed, things don't look very good for the REGION folks.

For five months, people waited with anticipation to hear the opponents' case against a planned expansion of Turf Valley, but what they heard was a thud.

The opponents have been forced to abandon -- at least temporarily -- the heart of their presentation because the strategy of trying to broaden radically the county's examination of the developer's plans has been dashed at every turn.

While they will get another chance in two weeks, many believe that it will be hard to reverse their fortunes.

Frank Martin, co-chairman of the opposing coalition, all but acknowledged defeat, calling it "premature adjudication."

I think they were right to raise the wider issues of growth and its impact on our neighborhoods, but they were wrong to raise these issues as a means of discrediting the developer's proposal and winning the argument.

Of course, there's another reason for their apparent defeat:

...they have unmistakably weakened their position by occasionally challenging the integrity of the Planning Board in general and its chairwoman, Tammy J. CitaraManis, specifically.

That's not going to win you any friends.

But more fundamentally, I think REGION's problems in winning this case are pretty well summed up by this paragraph:

[REGION Co-chair Frank Martin] planned a 150-slide Power Point presentation. But he was forced to abandon the effort 27 slides and almost two hours into the demonstration, as he continually veered into areas that were ruled irrelevant to the case or beyond the purview of the Planning Board.

150 slides!? In politics, life and everything else, if you can't make your case or state your beliefs in a few relevant sentences, you're doomed to an ignored existence.