Not too long ago, my wife and I finished paying off a car loan, and the task of taking the bank paperwork to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get the lien removed from the title fell to me.

Eventually, over one lunch break, I gathered up my courage and a book or two, and headed to Midtown, warning my colleagues that this might be an extra long lunch break.

I was bracing for a long wait, but I’d barely grabbed my number from the machine when a team of roving clerks grabbed me and a few others and whisked us down a hall to where another room was serving as a makeshift station. Perhaps 20 minutes later I was on my way. If this story is remarkable at all, it’s because of the marked contrast from what many of us think of when we think of the DMV. Almost everyone has a story about the opposite—in my case waiting in line for over an hour, only to be sent home because I lacked a single document.

For whatever reason—because we’re angry, or because we want to be pitied, or because it’s just more noteworthy—we tend to mostly tell each other the stories about what goes wrong.

Google “DMV nightmare” and you’ll get 1.8 million hits, many of them personal stories of bureaucracy gone way, way awry. Try “DMV efficiency”? You’ll get 300,000 and change. A few of those are stories, but many are government initiatives to make DMVs more efficient, or arguments for why they should be or how they could be.

A pair of google searches is hardly a scientific survey, yet as a snapshot, it underscores an interesting little quirk of human nature: that we’re essentially a bunch of complainers. We’re more than happy to enjoy the fruits of a government that operates smoothly and efficiently—and generally, if those first two are true, invisibly. We take plowed highways and hot-mopped skating rinks for granted when they happen punctually, and complain when they don’t.

Our collective aversion to red tape and other trappings of bureaucracy is on my mind as I write this. On Tuesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced its proposed critical habitat for the Cook Inlet Beluga, a population that was listed as endangered last year. The areas include virtually all of the upper inlet, including the Knik and Turnagain Arms, Kachemak Bay, and much of the shoreline on the inlet’s west side.

Alaska politicians from the state and federal government quickly denounced the habitat choice.

If the proposed areas become official “it would devastate economic opportunities in the region,” Republican Governor Sean Parnell said in a statement. According to Democratic Senator Mark Begich “This could potentially cost Southcentral residents hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade facilities without a clear benefit for the environment.”

Commenters on the ADN article who agreed with this position generally took it to its extreme—that the habitat designation would spell the end of the business in Alaska.

But it’s hard to see how those assertions hold up. It’s true that new critical marine habitat in the basin that holds most of the state’s population will probably mean a few changes. It might even mean expensive upgrades for a few facilities, as Begich says. And there’s even a chance that it will alter or stall a few projects.

But for the vast majority of businesses this will do nothing more than create a little paperwork. In this case, the paperwork is designed to make project managers stop for a moment to consider their aspects on one specific part of the local environment. Irksome? Perhaps. Devastating? Probably not.

In this nation, the notion that bureaucracies, with their red tape, tend to slow things down is an article of faith regardless of personal political bent. But what’s rarely considered is that there might, occasionally, be benefits to slowing down—even unwillingly. It’s easy to generalize from our own experience at the DMV and assume that the requirements proposed on businesses will be one more meaningless formality used only as an excuse to send them to the back of the line.

But a large project has much more significant public consequences—whether we’re considering the environment, or the local economy, or the mechanics of the community it’s in—than whether I renew my license today or have to come back again tomorrow.

Is it so unreasonable to ask businesses to take a little extra time to consider one more element? To allow—if the project is big enough to merit it—members of the public to comment?

If your answer is yes, well, you can submit public comments on the proposed habitat designation. Just like the activities it seeks to regulate, the government itself is subject to limitations that slow it down, that keep it from enacting swift and sweeping changes without public oversight.

And if you like the fact that this NOAA rulemaking change is a slow, reversible, and public process, consider that a process with those same attributes might be valuable when applied to businesses or local governments whose actions could affect whales, too.

krestia.degeorge@anchoragepress.com