Zoning and/or Safety Regulation
Last edited Thu Apr 18, 2013, 12:19 PM - Edit history (2)
I have seen a lot of comment that nothing should exist in proximity to a fertilizer plant, or visa-versa. This sounds right, but is actually full of subtleties and complicated costs.
For instance, most tiny rural towns exist relative to the railroad, and later the highway. Distance from the railroad is a cost. Land near the railroad is desirable. Businesses want to be near transport. People want to be near businesses. The acres in the downtown area become the most valuable acreage.
A farmer making a long trip into town wants everything she needs to be close together. An employee wants to be near work. A school wants to be near where the people are. A restaurant wants to be near the town center, and also near industrial employees having lunch. People should not have to drive everywhere. Etc..
It is all a complex, ever-changing equation and zoning laws are often maddeningly blunt instruments and attractors of corruption.
On the other hand, we have the basic problem of fires at fertilizer plants.
This is a narrow focus thing. A fire at a fertilizer plants poses peculiar hazards. A fire at such a plant poses an exceptional danger.
Rather than interfering with a galaxy of choices and trade offs of human priorities about land use, I think that the liberal approach is to identify the problem and solve the problem and to try to isolate costs in the problem.
The problem is that a runaway fire at a fertilizer storage or production facility can create conditions where a fire becomes an explosion. So fertilizer requires different regulation than a lumber-yard.
A fertilizer plant (in specific) located near a town-center should not be able to have a runaway fire. Such a plant should be required (consistently and effectively) to have sufficient and exceptional safety features that it is acceptably safe. (Nothing is entirely safe. All our choices are about acceptable safety.)
In an ideal set-up the state has different safety standards (in terms of impact on the surrounding areas) downtown versus the middle of nowhere, and enforces those standards very vigorously and has meaningful incentives to comply and the economics work out however they work out in individual cases.
Where do the standards come from?
They can be in zoning laws,or fire codes or federal and state industry safety regulation... it depends on the most effective answer for the case.
The cost of reliably preventing runaway fires may be prohibitive, or may not be. If prohibitive, then the plant would need to move for its own economic interest--the cost if being downtown would exceed the value of being close to the town or to the railroad or to the highway, making the correct economic decision locating the plant further out.
The goal is safety, not moving businesses. If safety cannot be achieved (cost effectively) then that is the equation in play. But the objective is not to locate businesses here or there. That is a means to an end. The end is an acceptable (meaning very low in this case) risk of blowing up the town.
(To assume that the state will not enforce safety regulations doesn't change much. It is cynical and true, but that cynicism should be applied to the entire governmental scheme — we can assume just as easily that the zoning laws will be corrupt, or variances granted in pro-business fashion or whatever... if the state is not on board for rational regulation then regulation will not be the answer in any scenario. I am talking about optimal regulation, not the practicalities of local corruption.)
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