Justice Quote by John Murray

“Development” is doing double duty here: it’s the polite word for growth and the euphemism for a power struggle. Murray’s intent is less to complain about construction than to name the structural reason local fights keep ending the same way. When he says development “is always going to be an issue,” he’s not predicting endless debate; he’s diagnosing a rigged playing field where municipalities negotiate one-by-one against actors who can afford specialists, lawyers, and time.

The key subtext sits in “left to its own devices.” That phrase frames local control not as democratic empowerment but as administrative isolation. Towns get sovereignty on paper, then face regional forces in practice: housing demand, traffic, watershed impacts, school enrollment, tax-base competition. Fragmentation becomes a feature developers can exploit. If one zoning board says no, the next town over might say yes, especially when budgets are tight and a shiny project promises immediate revenue.

Murray’s argument for regional zoning is really an argument about leverage. Scale is the only thing that competes with scale: a countywide or regional framework can set baseline rules, align incentives, and reduce the “race to the bottom” where each municipality is tempted to undercut the next. His mention of “suits” and “in front of zoning boards” pins the imbalance in two arenas at once: the courtroom, where money buys endurance, and the local hearing room, where procedure can quietly outweigh public sentiment.

Contextually, this reads like a veteran of planning skirmishes speaking to a community tired of losing by inches. It’s a call to stop treating development as a series of isolated battles and start treating it as governance.