Ever since Cheshire's Planning and Zoning Commission approved the zone change for the Enterprise Zone at the north end of town on July 2 - quite literally paving the way for a shopping mall, condos and 110 acres of impervious surface covered by ill-conceived, speculative development that will alter the town immeasurably - I've heard from many people. Some ask, "How could they do that?!" Others tell me, "That's a big mistake." Most just say, shrugging their shoulders, "Money talks. What can you do?"

There is a lot you can do, although there was also a lot you could have done before this decision was reached. Just to reiterate what has gone down - for those who might have missed it, here it is:

A few people have enriched themselves at the expense of the rest of Cheshire's tax-paying residents. That is, all of Cheshire will foot the bill for the added services required to properly monitor a large shopping mall and hundreds more units of housing. More police, more fire department personnel, more strain on water, more strain on sewers, more strain on the school system, more strain on the roads, more strain on our nerves as we fight traffic, car pollution, litter and noise.

And for what? For less than nothing, that's what.

Seemingly intelligent people told me to my face that this development would be great for homeowners because it would lower taxes. If I politely pointed out, using statistics from similar developments in other towns, that they are flat-out wrong, they did not believe me. If I asked them to provide proof from any source, anywhere, to back up their rote claims of benefits that retail development of the sort proposed here actually benefit a community, they could not provide it. That's because it existed only in their pipe-dreams.

Since the start of this disgraceful exercise of "democracy," I've put my faith in the facts. Indeed, my source is no less an authority than Professor Fred V. Carstensen, director of the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis at the University of Connecticut. It is Dr. Carstensen's learned opinion that "retail development" of this type "is weak as a strategy" for lowering taxes. He said, "The total dollar sales the retail footage will generate in central Connecticut must essentially all come from other businesses in the area (the so-called Wal-Mart effect), necessarily leading to store vacancies."

In other words, this mall will hurt local businesses, and there's no guarantee it won't be a bust itself, leading to a mass of new retail space going unleased.

Professor Carstensen is a non-partisan research scientist. He was being polite when he spoke to me, but the numbers don't lie. And I don't feel like being polite. Thus, I say that this development will be a disaster, pure and simple. However - and here's the real rub - the onus should never have been on opponents to prove this negative. It should have been on proponents to prove the positive. After all, they were the ones who wanted the special treatment, in the form of the zone change.

We, the opponents, wanted the town to simply enforce the regulations on the books. However, the proponents can't prove that this will have any benefits, and will likely have unforeseen (by them) disastrous impacts, so they just keep repeating the same mantras over and over until they actually begin to believe them.

One of the projects on which I am currently working is a book about disasters, one that examines the commonalties between events like Katrina (and its aftermath), the Columbia Shuttle destruction, Arthur Andersen, Enron and Chernobyl. In all of these cases, as well as in the run-up to the zone change here in Cheshire, one of the several elements in common was "bystander behavior" - people who knew better keeping their mouths shut or assuming it would all work out fine. There was also, in all of these disasters, a great deal of secrecy and suppression of the real impacts that people were likely to see.

Mark my words: Ten years from now, Cheshire residents will say what all victims of the above disasters have said: "How could this have happened?"