We couldn't help but smile. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission, confronted with a proposal to raise minimum housing densities, was shocked -- shocked! -- to report that rapid growth in some places has overcome local government's ability to provide services.

So, after Planning Director Martin Cramton dropped moratorium hints and said that, to study the proposal from the Charlotte Chamber, planning staff would have to delay its long-awaited redraft of general development principles, begun in 2001, the Chamber withdrew the proposal.

So where does that leave the city and its planning procedures? The answer is, roughly where it was, although not quite.

There's still no mechanism to link permission for new development with any specific measure of whether facilities -- street and road capacity, schools, libraries, parkland, police service, and so on -- will be adequate to serve the growth. The City Council in rezoning decisions may, but isn't required to, consider the issue. Even when they bother, it's a seat-of-the-pants sort of assessment focused almost exclusively on traffic and rarely even mentioning services the city doesn't provide -- for example, parks, libraries and schools.

The appointed planning commissioners sometimes consider the concept in making their recommendations, but some have expressed frustration that they aren't even sure if they're supposed to. The upshot is that beyond some relatively standard traffic and storm water analyses, folks making rezoning decisions typically get few facts about whether new development will strain local ability to provide the services citizens expect: police, fire, parks, recreation, libraries and schools.

This is not to say that all new development should be banned, just that it's been rather clear for some time that public facilities here haven't kept up with development. Traffic congestion is just one of the most visible indicators.

As it happens, the long-awaited redraft of the city's general development policies will attempt to set some adequacy standards, although it, too, focuses mainly on transportation. The new GDPs are controversial, especially among developers who worry, for instance, about a city-devised formula purporting to measure whether transportation is "adequate." Who decides what's adequate?