BUT FOR THE SMELL OF BAKING BREAD When I moved to Eugene, I assumed all I needed to do to start my enterprise was get a business license, build the bakery, and begin to bake bread. To my surprise, a community uprising against my little venture developed, and the intense energy with which my neighbors pursued their goal created a public NIMBY fuss that landed on the front page of the newspaper, on the local TV news, and in a pair of two-hour public hearings where one neighbor after another took the stand to rage against, among other things, having to smell bread baking every single day: “like Sisyphus, pushing the same rock up the hill, every day into eternity,” according to their attorney. Smoke from my chimney stack was going to exaggerate respiratory problems for one family, whose house was several hundred yards away. Sparks from the chimney were going to burn down the entire neighborhood. The bakery would turn into a tourist attraction, causing too much traffic in the neighborhood. My driveway was too steep for a fire truck to navigate in the event of a fire. Ashes from my oven were going to change the pH balance of the soil. Trash from the bakery was going to attract rodents. It was an Alice in Wonderland construct where just saying something makes it true; the process seemed to me to be anything but a court of rational appeal.
The residents of eleven out of eighteen homes in the small neighborhood wrote letters protesting the plans for the bakery. Here is a favorite excerpt of mine: Flour dust can be very explosive. A dropped bag of raw flour can be ignited in much the same way as volatile fluids. This may be one of the hazards of baking, but it does not belong in a residential area. In the course of due process, the legal burden was on me to refute any and all claims, no matter how seemingly absurd, like the exploding bags of flour. I produced a certified letter from the State of Oregon's climatologist identifying the direction of prevailing winds by month. (Away from the neighbors 44 percent of the time, but that didn't account for days of air stagnation, it turns out. Who knew? I had certification from an environmental engineering firm stating that the emissions output from the oven would be no greater than that from a standard woodstove. I should have tried tossing a bag of flour in the courtroom to see if it would explode. After a pair of lengthy public hearings, four months of angst, and county files at least eighteen inches thick, the final ruling was to deny my application for a business license to run my little bakery in a zone that allowed home businesses. It was time to shift mental gears.
reading a book about bread baking and naturally there is an anecdote about NIMBYism, truly there is no escape
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