Purpose: The growth of urban and suburban areas is leading to an increase in impervious surfaces and a related slowing of reversal of water quality in local streams and rivers as well as the Great Lakes. This session gives local government officials and the public a chance to interact, discuss and brainstorm issues related to sprawl and water resource management. The goal is identify solutions that optimize development and preservation so as to maintain the character of communities while protecting habitat and water quality and reducing the threat of floods.

Moderator

Brian Burke, Wisconsin State Senator

Introductory Presentations

John Norquist, Mayor, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Peter Yeomans, Mayor, Dorval, Québec

Economics of Sprawl

Dr. Robert Burchell, Rutgers University

Maryland's Smart Growth

Ron Young, Maryland Office of Planning

Tennessee's Unified Design and Arbitration Process -- Local Government Owning their Own Regional Approach

Sam Edwards, Tennessee Chapter, American Planning Association

Role of Local Governments in Effective Land Management

Lynne Woolstencroft, City of Waterloo, Ontario

Better America Bonds

Questions and Discussion

Brian Burke

Good Morning. Welcome to Milwaukee. My name is Brian Burke. I represent the City of Milwaukee in the Wisconsin state Senate. I want to welcome you to the municipal caucus. We have a distinguished panel but, before I introduce them, I want to note the timeliness of this subject for the state of Wisconsin. We are poised to enact, next week, as part of our biennial budget, our own version of "smart growth." Two of the speakers who are part of the panel today have influenced our smart growth legislation probably more than they know.

I also want to give a local flavour by pointing out that we have a publication available, produced by Citizens for a Better Environment. A fairly influential constituent of mine has asked me to at least point out its availability. It provides a plan for alternatives to sprawl, an alternative to the automobile-dependent society that we have here in America. It lays the groundwork for a plan that would save as much space in the state of Wisconsin that is currently dedicated to all the state parks in the entire state would be saved in the next 40 years if we adopted the traditional neighborhood that is advocated in the publication.

Let me first introduce the mayor of my home town and my predecessor in the Senate, Mayor John Norquist. Many of you are familiar with his writings. He authored the book "The Wealth of Cities." He's certainly much more than an effective administrator here in the city of Milwaukee. He's certainly well known as a proponent to the new urbanism, and a crusader for America's cities. But not for hand-outs. His thesis is that if the federal government would stop subsidizing sprawl, and let cities use their own natural advantages to generate wealth, that would be the best antidote to sprawl and the unconsolidated development that we've had here. Ultimately, thriving cities are the best answer and, conversely, the way to make cities thrive here in America is to stop subsidizing, at all levels of government, this sort of development that encourages sprawl. With that, let me introduce the mayor of the City of Milwaukee, Mayor John Norquist.

Thank you very much Brian. Welcome to Milwaukee. For any Quebecers in the room, bienvenue à Milwaukee . I will have more to say in French tonight. I'm not good enough at it and although I studied it for two years in university, I can't speak it fluently. But tonight at the banquet, I'll speak more in French. I always feel bad about French Quebecers when they come to North American meetings in the United States and their language gets totally ignored, and then when we go there, they all speak English very nicely to us. The mayor of Dorval, Québec and I are old friends from the Great Lakes Mayors Conference, a very unorganized group of mayors from both sides of the border. We occasionally exchange information and visit each other's cities.

I want to compliment the Canadians on their approach to land use. It's not so much the great things they've done, although they have done some great things which the mayor will talk about later, in terms of having green-land, having stronger protection and regulation than land that is not green. They've managed to save a lot of land in the Montréal region, and Toronto and Vancouver. They all have their own ways of doing things but, also, by incredibly good acts of omission.

The federal transportation policies in Canada do not provide the huge subsidies to giant road building that happens in the United States when most of the big roads that were built in places like Detroit, just to pick a city that Canadians, particularly from Ontario, are very familiar with. The federal government paid 90%, the state government paid 10%, and the local government paid nothing for all the roads that were built. The roads had no cost to the local government, whereas in say, Toronto or Montréal, the locals had to actually cost these things out.

So when you look at Canadian cities, they don't have the automobile only investment. You can drive a car in Canada, can't you? But they didn't oversubsidize it compared to the other modes of transport. So the land-use patterns are tighter. Even though it's a country where you would think that land wasn't much of an issue, they have more land than almost anybody in the world, but they have a much tighter pattern of development. Some of us, like Brian and I, are jealous of that. We wish we had that kind of situation in the U.S.

The set of issues that we have are very challenging. We have metropolitan areas that almost doubling in the land area that they cover and, at the same time, are stagnant. In Detroit, for example, from the '80 census to the '90 census, population went up 2%. The land area it covered by metropolitan Detroit went up by 84%. Here the numbers weren't quite as dramatic. The population went up under 10%, the land area growth was something in the range of 30 to 40%. This is happening because of sprawl, that undifferentiated development that sort of oozes from American cities. We are trying to figure out how to deal with it. One of the great things that's happened is that it turns out that the public doesn't really like sprawl that much. This is a new development. Twenty years ago, with all the marketing and the disrepair of older places, older cities and suburbs, and the sprawl being brand new, it was thought of as the only thing that was good. But now that people have looked at it, and they have decided that they actually do like community, they like two main streets, they like the feeling of the village, the feeling of the city, the feeling of the neighborhood, as opposed to living the life of a subdivision, living in sprawl.

In the last few years, 1,500 families have moved into downtown Milwaukee. Some new buildings, some rehab buildings. The same thing is happening in Chicago and other cities. Even Detroit is starting to experience a housing renaissance. I wouldn't use the word "renaissance." It is sort of a bad word for Detroit, but they are developing a private housing market there. Things that were taken for granted in Canada. The center of Vancouver has always been a hot real estate market, particularly with all the immigration. They never did build the roads that spread the economy out there, so they never went through the kind of changes that happened to American cities.

The market trends are now favoring urban development, which is really good, because you can't build something on just good intentions, or feelings of regret, feelings of idealism. Those are all important but, in real estate, ultimately consumer preference is a much stronger foundation to build on. So cities right now are becoming much more liked. There is a reason for that. There are a lot of virtues that cities have. People in businesses are relatively close together. Culture can develop. There was a writer who said that "cities are dead because, with the new information age, people can live wherever they want." I am trying to forget his name, no, I've been trying to remember his name.

There was another one, Tom Peters, a futurist, who was debating him. He said, "Cities will thrive because we're living in the information age and people can live wherever they want." That's turned out to be the case. The prediction that all the credit card processing business would go to North Dakota didn't happen. Because in North Dakota, there's not enough density of population, there's not enough people to create what everybody wants. So it turns out that the biggest concentration of credit card processing business in America right now is in the suburbs close in of Milwaukee.

People said that, with web-site creation that would be a natural to be anywhere -- in Wyoming or Montana. With the Free Trade Agreement -- Alberta or anywhere. But the center of the web-site creation business turned out to be in the Chelsea neighbourhood of Manhattan, New York, in the '20s, in the old book publishing district. The reasons that it's there is because that people who are creative can't do everything by themselves. They like to have a community. They like to be able to talk to other people. When the work day is over, instead of walking out into a vast sea of cars in a parking lot, it's nice to be able to go down to the bistro on the corner and share some relaxation and some ideas with other people. So it turned out that Manhattan was a really good place for web-sites. So instead of the information age killing New York City, it's enriched New York City.

These are trends that I think are really good. If you look at the land-use impacts of the last 40 years, there's a lot of things that people find appalling. Not just the unsightliness of sprawl. The fact that most of the landscape that has been created in the last 40 or 50 years does not yield scenes that you could put on a postcard. You go to one of the sprawled suburbs, you can't find a place to take a picture of. You have to go to the older places, the older suburbs, or the old village centers that still exist, or to the city itself before you can find scenes worthy of putting on a postcard.

But it is not just that. It is the waste of land and time that's bothering people. They want to fix it. They want to look at reasonable ways to do it. This includes developers. Instead of everybody lining up and figuring out who's on one side and who's on the other which is the usual way we sort out our differences. Except with Canada, of course. We haven't had a war with Canada since 1815. That's when the last one ended. We'll try to keep it that way today if we can.

In American politics we tend to look for who's the good guy and who's the bad guy. Sometimes there really are good guys and bad guys but, in the case of this issue, I think developers, planners -- there is a whole bunch of people that have a lot that they could feel bad about, but there's a lot to learn and there's money to be made. Some of our developers in the Milwaukee metropolitan area are starting to figure out that, if they can put more houses per acre, for example, they can make more money. The yield on the land would be higher. Smaller lots don't necessarily have to be unattractive to consumers, that spending your entire weekend mowing the lawn isn't necessarily what everyone want to do. It may be a choice for some people but, increasingly, a respectable choice for consumers is urban, or smaller lot sizes like we had 40 or 50 years ago, which often still happens in Canada. We need to create these choices and relearn the lessons that created the environments that we liked from the past. Not to make buildings look like they are from the past, but to recreate the rules that create a civilized environment where people love to live. For planners, that means relearning a lot of lessons, just simple things.

I was looking at an old high school that is about a mile away from here -- Tech High School. It's an old building and we have to replace it, but I was standing on a street about three blocks west, and I looked down the street, there were five doors on the school that terminates the vista. In the middle of the street is the middle of the middle door. So whoever built that school was conscious of the fact that three blocks if somebody looked down the street, or 20 blocks away, you could see the front door of the school terminating the vista. When you look at the sprawl environment we have, those rules aren't obeyed any more at all. Buildings are turned against the axis. Everything is set back.

The basic rules of civilization that were established by the ancient Greeks and Persians and so forth, that were followed by the Aztecs. All these things about designing and building were just thrown out at the end of World War II, with America's obsession of being avant garde at the end of the war. So the planners, the architects, the developers, everybody. It's like recovering from a stroke. The sprawl really is the result of dropping thousands of years of lessons on how to build cities and build communities. But the good news is that the customers want something different. They really do want to have some choices. They don't want to just have one thing offered to them. We now have a great opportunity to change land-use regulations. That's always difficult politically, especially if you take it head on. But also just changing codes and regulations and recreating choices, enhancing the choices that consumers have about places they want to live.

If you think about it, Main Street hasn't been offered to the consumer as a new product in the United States since World War II, except in two places -- Disneyworld and Disneyland. The consumers love it. They go to Disneyworld and Disneyland but, when they want a community, they get a strip mall, a bunch of cul de sacs and streets that nobody would want to walk along. Our codes are making that happen. Our land-use patterns are partly the result of just thoughtlessness. We need to change them so that we can have the kind of choices that consumers really want to live. Of course the side benefit of that is that we'll use up less land. We'll have less silt and runoff and everything else going into these precious Great Lakes that the Canadians and the Americans -- U.S. citizens -- share. Canadians are North Americans, too. I'm trying to avoid war at all costs.

I just wanted to give you my perspective on some of these issues. This is really fertile ground to make progress on, because the public does want us to figure this stuff out and make our cities stronger, our places to live more enjoyable to live in. A huge side benefit of that is that the environment will be stronger as a result.

In closing, I want to praise Brian Burke. You know, you go to some convention and two local politicians get up and praise each other, but Brian is unusual in that he has really gone out of his way to lead on environmental issues and urban issues, and taken a strong positions. He has not been intimidated by trying to be popular every day. He only needs to be popular when he's running for election. In between he can do the right thing once in a while. Deep down inside, his constituents appreciate it, because they overwhelmingly elect him, election after election. That is unusual that legislators will look at the big picture and really put everything together. It's important that happen. It happens occasionally around the country and, in this area, we had a lot of people that did that at the turn of the century. There was one of the great "city beautiful" leaders, Alfred Klaus was here, Daniel Burnham was in Chicago and here, and John Nowlan, some of you that are planners might remember him, he was in Madison. But that was a hundred years ago and here we are 100 years later and there are a lot of people around the state that are starting to wake up and realize that we need to save this beautiful landscape in Wisconsin and all the other states and provinces, and realize that there is a better way to do things. That takes strength and leadership and makes people stick their neck out and not just sitting back and being complacent.

Anyway, I hope you will enjoy your time here. I'll see you tonight at the banquet and you'll get to evaluate my French. Thank you very much.

Brian Burke

Thank you John. Next, we'll here from the Mayor of Dorval, Peter Yeomans. His biography indicates that he's the former Director of Operations for Bell Canada. He was elected City Councillor for Dorval in 1978 and elected mayor in 1982. What's interesting is that his biography indicates that he was re-elected by acclamation in 1986, 1990 and 1994. But the last re-election, it doesn't have that same entry, so it may have been a rough time. We have much in common. Certainly Mayor Norquist and Mayor Yeomans have much in common. I looked at the website for the city of Dorval last night. It points to the fact that the city is well established, progressive, and a friendly place to live which is the usual Chamber of Commerce rhetoric, but it goes on to say that cities by their nature are very dynamic entities and the mayor indicates that the health of a city is manifested by its development trends and the respect of its environment along established paramaters. May I present the Mayor the City of Dorval, Peter Yeomans.

Thank you, Senator, table members, and presenters. Ladies and gentlemen ... en français ... That will be the extent of my French today, so don't run for the translation devices.

This is my second visit to Milwaukee. I am always impressed by the cities and towns that I visit, by what I see and what is manifested in the people who are there and the interest and concerns that they show in their lifestyles and the way they go about doing things. One thing that is very striking in Milwaukee, of course, is the cleanliness of the city, the lakefront development and the seemingly orderly approach to development. But that is interesting also on the land level but, when you fly into a city, you have another perspective. And it's worthwhile looking at the amount of cement that's used in this city. That's not a criticism, it's just a comment, versus asphalt, but in relation to total green space. I come from a community that has the second highest ratio of green space per capita in Canada. The only city that has more is Vancouver. That's because the federal government bequeathed Stanley Park to the City of Vancouver.

We have 1,472 square feet per capita of usable green space. I am not talking about areas that you wouldn't want to go and picnic in. I am talking about parks, greenspace, open spaces, and golf courses. That's an indication of what we are trying to preserve, and the topic here today. I welcome a full room. It's always interesting to see the cross-section in ages of the people in the room.

Our city has been around, and I say this because a lot of you have evolved and grown up in the cities you live in now, but we've been around since 1667. So we have homes that were built just at the time or just prior to the Lachine massacre. That was just prior to Milwaukee being discovered by those who came in canoes, and went westward from here, then south to Louisiana. So where I'm from is really the cradle of North America in many respects. We have concerns about how land has been used right from those very days.

In the days of the French colonization, there was a seigneurial system set up, because water was the transport means. All land was divided as a slice from the waterfront. The farmer, because most of it was agrarian at the time, built his home and his stables relatively close to the river for transportation reasons. Then came the expansion -- this would be in the '30s -- of the City of Montréal, because it got just too tight. People were having larger families and the place was growing, and the population spread on the island of Montréal. I'm from an area that is an archipelago. The island of Montréal is truly an island. The water from the Great Lakes flows on either side of this place. We are very, very dependent upon what you people do. Because we are going to be talking here about not only land use, but water and runoffs and that sort of thing.

Keep in mind that every person in this room lives downstream, so all of us are catching it from somebody else. If you are really downstream, like the community that I come from -- our population in the greater Montréal area is about 3.5 million -- you can see the dependencies we have on others who have to share our outlooks and, hopefully, be committed to doing the right things for the right reason.

You know, mayors have a lot in common. We represent you on a day-to-day basis. We are responsible for collecting the garbage, clearing the snow, sweeping the streets. These are all banalities but they are all issues of quality, quality of life issues. Most of us, because we don't get water from other sources, are asked and legislated, enacted and authorized to provide drinking water. As my charge as mayor, when somebody asks me what I thought my most important part of my job was, because it is a job; it's 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I say it's the management of water. Water for drinking, water for use, and water for drainage purposes, irrigation, whatever it may be. But it's the area that I think we have collectively the most responsible as stewards. We must always keep that focus. We must always look at it extremely positively, because they're not making any more of it. It is very limited and very precious.

A lot of the things we do relative to water can be done at the local level. I don't agree with anybody who says that you can't do it, because we can. The people in this room can. You can influence thinking and you can. The fact you are getting towards a smart growth legislation and the efforts and the inputs is an indication of how these issues and concerns percolate and finally become enacted.

As Mayor Norquist was indicating, our provincial government some years ago identified on a total Québec map, those areas that would be seen as green and those who would be seen as white. White would be where you see development for housing purposes or economic development purposes, but you would also have a green area that is dedicated strictly to agrarian uses. Because arable land is becoming very scarce. Good arable land is to be preserved and these green spaces or green zoning as it is called, under Law 125 of our province, are sacred. There's no way of getting those de-zoned, even if you have unscrupulous developers who try to buy their way into things. These are the kind of people that we've got to defrock before the general population, and say "Look, that's not right."

You know, I won't meet with a developer in my office unless I have at least a city manager or another city employee with me for that very reason. I think people in elective office, have to be extremely careful that they do not get compromised as a result of the issues of development and popular decisions. Sometimes you have to make tough decisions. The tough ones most people will understand when they look further than the end of their noses, and they are looking many years out.

Let me digress a minute on the question of who should be doing what on our question as stewards. We have discussions with our business interest in our community. We have a major series of aircraft, pharmaceutical, and telecommunications outfits. We are an endowed community from an economic perspective. But by the same token, there's a lot of things that have been done since World War II that are wrong. One of them and I will cite as an example is the deicing facility at the airport. The airport happens to be in Dorval. It is an international airport. Everything comes in and out of there from the eastern seaboard. The deicing facility really didn't have any capturing mechanisms, nothing other than some very fundamental ditching that took place and that goes back to the early days of the airport. The new thinking was that, with the glycol and the fact that streams run into Lac St-Louis, which is part of the St. Lawrence and it's just upstream from water intake facilities, the aqueduct for the city of Montréal, plus, plus, plus a lot of communities downstream, that something had to be done. The issue was brought right up to the federal government. The federal government funded the vast majority of the works involved here. The end result is that it's a new deicing facility, the second in the world of its type, and all the liquid from the deicing of aircraft which takes place between October and April of every year, and in large numbers of gallons, it's millions of litres we talking of here, is captured. There is a facility on site to extract the glycol for other downstream glycol use in industry. And the wastewaters are put into the sewage treatment facility and are handled correctly at the primary plant. It happens to be that the Canadian Council of the Ministers of Environment are going to be reviewing this proposal to recognize this initiative in their pollution prevention award that they give out annually.

The other thing is, and I say this because I am involved in the marketing side of the airport. So marketeers sometimes say, well, something will have to take the back seat while we move ahead and do this promotion, get more passengers, more aircraft. But we've said from the beginning, that we've go to do this in a fashion that is in keeping with wishes and desire of the population as we move ahead. So our airport -- I suggest to you, for most of you have airports in your towns -- have as a credo to make it a green airport. That's rather revolutionary to say the least. That covers all elements from water, vegetation, fauna, the whole bit. Even to the point of planting shrubs with nursery school children. We did that this last fall. It's an ongoing program. That the ponding for runoffs, the protection, to make sure there's no spills, etc. are just some of the local initiatives.

As far as the city is concerned, I just want to cite another example, but it's a big one. We have each year, probably 150+ cm of snow to contend with. Up until 10 years ago, we the good city was trucking salt-laden snow and other debris -- it could be anything from plastic bottles, to pieces of asphalt, hydrocarbons, etc. -- and systematically for reasons of economics only, dumping all this in the river where there's a current and it was carried downstream and somebody else had to worry about it. The council that I head up decided that was enough and we had to stop, so we did. So the trucking of all this snow is sent to a land surface in remote areas of the municipality. The cost to us incrementally on that particular initiative was $185,000, annually which we readily accepted on behalf of the citizens. Now provincial legislation has come along, and I suggest that some of you inquire of that, where special development has to take place for the snow elimination sites. Ponding has to be controlled in runoffs. Tests have to be made of the runoffs to make sure that it's in keeping with environmental standards. These are some of the local things that are being done that are significant, and big enough.

As to the sprawl, and I'll terminate on this. In Canada we are fortunate because one of the issues we have at the local level which we cherish is called zoning. A decision as to what zoning or land use is to be, and how it's to evolve, and how it can be changed, or not changed. That is sovereign to the municipalities. And it will be forever thus. We are going to make sure of that.

So people at the local level have a say as to how land is to be used. There's a register, there's bylaws, there's opportunities to consult. There is a legislative process that goes through a whole series of steps. It's very consultative and, certainly, the input at the local level influences the decisions. I speak from experience when I say that. We have been able to do a lot of things that have been revolutionary, I might say. Especially when it came to seniors housing. It was a good example. And how we were going to fit that into the city. Instead of putting seniors in industrial parks, we put them close to the action. We've integrated the activities as far as the urban landscape is concerned. Mayor Norquist was talking about profiles of buildings. We have to be very conscious of this. Safety for women in an urban environment, very important. Lighting. The fact that we live in a Nordic country or most of us do live in areas where the winter, the sun actually shines, not like in Europe. We should be making maximum use of daylight. We have at the city hall, as an example, that every employee must be able to see daylight in the conduct of their work. I congratulate the planners of this convention center that you actually see daylight here. It's not like a great big airplane hanger in which you dump people for three days and they try to suffer air-conditioning systems that hardly work, etc. etc. This is a real example of what can be done when people put their brains to work and come up with good ideas.

I am especially interested in hearing what you have to say today. I am going to be here for the whole session. I certainly want to be able to take back to people that I interact with and the other mayors in Canada, and also the Great Lakes mayors and these areas that you'll bring forward. I am sure a lot of innovative ideas. For goodness sakes, there is no such thing as a silly question. All ideas are excellent. So speak out. If you don't speak out, you're going to go home frustrated. You are here to say something. You are here because you want to be and we're glad you're here, so please participate. Thank you.

Brian Burke

Thank you Mayor Yeomans.

Dr. Robert Burchell will provide us with a view of the relationship between land-development patterns and infrastructure costs. He is a distinguished professor at Rutgers University. He is the author of 15 books and more than 50 articles on fiscal impact analysis, land-use development and regulation, and housing policy. He has served as the principal investigator on more than $2-million of research spanning his 25-year career at Rutgers. He has served as the consultant to a host of state and federal agencies. He serves as a fellow of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is also a trustee of the Housing Research Group at Federated National Mortgage Association. His doctorate is in urban planning from Rutgers. He is a licenced professional planner. And he is in demand as an expert witness nationally. With that, let me introduce Dr. Bob Burchell.

I was giving a presentation in another setting and they disassembled a grand piano in front of me. This is nothing! While this is going out, let me talk about one more instance while I was giving a presentation. I was in Orlando recently. We had a room filled about like this and someone screamed in the back of the room "Last chance to see Shamu, the whale." The entire room left to see Shamu, the whale, including, I might add, the moderator. So, this is nothing in terms of rearranging. So when you are prepared to talk to 200 - 300 people and you end up with six, because Shamu has beaten you out, you know you have problems.

What I would like to talk to you about today is the impact of sprawl on land-development costs. Most of our experiences in the United States reflects for the most part on the American experience. I want to comment that, in terms of the European experience, not at all as it relates to the Canadian experience, but the European experience. Every single trend that we have experienced with the automobile in the United States is being replicated in Europe. Not only are those trends being replicated, they are being replicated at faster and faster and higher percentages -- not numerics -- but higher percentages. And that's in terms of total number of trips, number of vehicles per household increases in each of these. What we are experiencing in the United States certainly has been transferred to locations where we thought that, indeed, those development patterns could be illustrative to us as it related to the future.

Let's talk about land-development patterns in the United States. One. The United States is typified and goes back long in history in terms of pursuing the land-use pattern that's developed by a philosophy called "prairie psychology" or "horizontal determinism." In other words, what we view is that the supply of land is unlimited. It's open to all. We further believe that the forces of economic development are not fully understood and, as such, land development in the market is not to be tampered with. The market makes future land-use decisions. And land-use professionals in the U.S. and their regulations are there to make sure that the land is ready to receive development, not to oppose development.

Americans and certainly people in the United States believe very strongly that we have a right to own land and possess land, a constitutional right and one is that is free from government interference. We also know that, historically, land in the United States is cheaper at the periphery and we do not deny access to that land at the periphery. We further sanctify single-family housing as the highest zoning category and we protect that single-family zoning category from all other uses. That's termed "Euclidean zoning" and one that is long and historically associated with the United States. We also have a long history -- not including people here -- of a distrust of politicians, so we codify all land use in the United States and we develop essentially "as of right." In other words, if you meet the regulations, you can go ahead and develop. Not a lot of negotiation, but development "as of right" in the United States. So we keep zoning, subdivision control, and sight-plan review very, very close to the vest in terms of allowing that power to be concentrated in about 10,000 local, county, and municipal organizations throughout the United States.

We further have a unique relationship with the automobile in the United States. In other words, the pattern of land development in the United States is determined by the automobile. Without question, the automobile is the most efficient and most democratic way of trip choice. They is no equivalent for a trip larger than five miles on any system of costing to the automobile. The automobile is the most efficient and the most democratic way of trip choice. Automobile registrations per household, except for the highest and lowest income classes, do not vary by income in the United States. You may have a different valued car but, except for the highest and lowest income categories, the number of automobiles are relatively flat across income. In addition to that, regular gasoline prices at $1.10 a gallon in the summer of '98 -- they've peaked since -- were equivalent to -- in real dollars -- to gasoline prices in 1968. So the reality of that is that, in 30 years, we have not had a real change in the dollar-cost of gasoline.

We also learned lessons from the 1973 fuel embargo when we did not have gasoline available to us without queuing in long lines on odd or even days. The lesson that we learned was that we will not change our development patterns. We will not move back to inner suburbs or inner cities. And for the past 25 years, house size has increased every single year. So both the share of the number of people and the share of households moving to non-metropolitan areas, and non-central city portions of metropolitan areas, an average house size -- not household size, but average house size -- both have increased over the last 2½ decades.

Let's take a look at growth in the United States. The United States is a country of 265-million people, 110-million housing units, and 150-million jobs. Population and housing growth -- it's an easy figure to remember -- at 1% a year on average, and jobs grow at about 1½% per year. So if we take a look at essentially ... (tape change) ... and 40 million jobs, 80% of that housing unit growth and two-thirds of the employment growth is going to be in the south and the western portions of the United States. So where the United States grows is, essentially, not necessarily in this area and not necessarily in the northeast, New York, where I'm from but, rather, in the south and the west. In the state of Florida, Floridians would like to slice off Dade County and not consider it as a part of the state. Yet, the reality of Dade County, due to both immigration and retirement, is that one county out of 3,200 counties in the United States will have 1% of the United States growth over the next 25 years. That's the kinds of growth that is taking place in the United States -- very regionally concentrated -- often in regions in which this region and our region in the northeast are not necessarily a part.

The other characteristic of growth in the United States is that, of that housing unit growth, 25-million housing unit growth, 90% of that growth will take place outside the central city. So, nine out of ten housing units in the United States, even in thriving central cities in the west and the south, 90% of the housing units in the United States will be built outside the central city.

Now, why do we grow? We grow for the following reasons: To answer that housing unit and employment demand that I talked about, but we also grow because growth is associated with quality of life. This definition of quality of life may differ from your definition of quality of life but, if we define quality of life as (1) being employed, or in other words "having a job"; (2) home ownership, owning a home; (3) having that home appreciate in property value, in other words, while you own it, it increases in value; (4) getting a good public education confirmed by high SAT scores, and that's important -- a good public education has to be confirmed by high SAT scores; (5) living in communities with low violent crime rates; and (6) relatively low property taxes. The single most important variable associated with that definition of quality of life is expansion of the tax base, especially the non-residential portion of the tax base. So we grow essentially because growth gives us what we need essentially to survive. One, in terms of answering both housing and employment demand and, two, answering what we would define as answering the needs of quality of life.

Now, that's the good side of growth. The bad side of growth is that growth costs. If we take a look at the cost to provide both education and non-educational services in the United States, using the 1997 census of governments, what we find is that, in terms of annual operating costs in order to provide services, basic operating services, to each new resident, each new school child, and each new worker, it is $600 per new resident, $6,000 per new school child, and $150 per new worker annually. Residential uses, single-family homes in most jurisdictions pay one-quarter to one-half the cost of public services. Why do we have rateable wars in communities? We have rateable wars in communities because, politically correct or politically incorrect, the reality of it is that housing does not pay for itself. Housing does not pay for itself in property-tax-dominated states as it relates to the cost of providing public services.

On the other hand, non-residential uses -- and here we are talking about industry, office space, and retailing -- pays two to five times what it costs to provide in government public services. So communities react in terms of land uses for economic reasons. One, to try to get as much non-residential as they can because that pays more than the service costs; and (2) to find ways, and that's called "exclusionary zoning," that, if you take residential uses, you make sure they are the most expensive residential uses once you are comfortable and comfortably in that community. Within that hierarchy, regardless of what the American Farm Land Trust says, open space is not a fiscal boom, but basically breaks even, and essentially causes you not much cost but also, given the agricultural revenues, doesn't provide very much in revenues. So every time you make a development decision at the local level for life, you are making a fiscal decision. Residential uses for the most part do not pay, non-residential uses do pay and open space essentially breaks even.

There are categories of residential uses which actually pay. Those are those residential uses that do not have children associated with them. Planners did a lot of field work and found that children were produced in bedrooms. The reality of that fieldwork, which indeed we liked, is that there is a direct correlation between housing unit size and the number of people and, specifically, the number of school children associated with that unit. So as bedrooms rise, so do the propensity to fill those bedrooms. So the largest number of units with the largest number of bedrooms have the largest number of public school children, and also people who require public services.

So we have a hierarchy of land uses, again, going from the research office park at the top, to mobile home parks at the bottom. At the top you get the highest bang for your buck in terms of revenues over cost. At the bottom, the lowest bang for your buck in terms of costs over revenues. As you move down that hierarchy, you go from the research office park, industry, commercial, retail, open-space break-even, also on the plus side -- retirement housing, vacation homes. Start to go down, negative but near the top, are the non-common configurations of commons housing types. In other words, if you have a two-bedroom, single family home or a one-bedroom townhouse, or a studio garden apartment, it's relatively close to neutral in terms of opposing costs. Then you move down the fiscal hierarchy and you have common configurations of standard housing types, your three- and four-bedroom, single family home, your two- and three-bedroom townhouse, your one- and two-bedroom garden apartment and, at the bottom, you have affordable housing, most high-bedroom rental housing and also mobile homes.

Also, there is a capital side to costs. We just talked about the operating side. The capital side to costs essentially say that, if you fully fund infrastructure and the average house in the United States pays $2,500 in property taxes annually, if you fully funded infrastructure, you would double your property taxes. In other words, to fully fund infrastructure, that is, build development-related infrastructure, non-development related infrastructure, and repair that infrastructure, do backlog projects which we don't clear any more in the United States. In infrastructure in the United States, we used to have a category of project called backlog, which meant it was too difficult or too politically difficult to get that project through. We would do that project later on. We never do that project anymore because the cost of infrastructure is so significant. We just leave it and we have various components of our infrastructure as a result of that, not completed. That's happening increasingly -- backlog is never done.

The average capital costs individually are around $750 to $1,000 per capita, and the reason that we worry about building roads in the United States is that about half of all future capital costs are the costs to provide roads; about 40% actually in roads, 10% for other transportation, 20% for education, 15% for health, 5% for public safety, and 5% for recreation and culture and economic development.

The cost to provide roads in the future is essentially two times what you would spend on all educational -- both public and higher education -- capital infrastructure, 2½ times what you would spend on all health capital costs, 8 times what you would spend on public safety capital costs, 8 times what you would spend on recreation capital costs, and 8 times what you would spend on economic development capital costs. Why do we worry about roads? When we build capital infrastructure into the future, we do nothing but provide for roads.

Costs overall. Now, if we take a single-family home with a family of three -- one child and one worker living in a $200,000 house -- we have associated with that unit about $8,000 in operating costs; $2,500 in capital costs; for a total of about $10,500. With regard to annual revenues, property taxes give us about $3,000; exactions, impact fees, and other forms of revenues, about $2,500; a total of about $5,500 in terms of total cost. The unmet difference is about $5,000 per unit. How are these payments made so that we don't go broke as a society? The payments are made essentially by other land uses. Again, non-residential helps offset the deficits that we see here. We don't build all the needed capital that we require.

Increasingly, we don't repair any infrastructure in the United States. Infrastructure in the United States is put in place with an idea that it will last forever without any level of repair, or without any level of inspection. We had an experience in the United States where a segment of a bridge fell into the Connecticut River, and increased and accentuated and upgraded inspections lasted one political cycle. So we don't repair at all infrastructure in the United States. And we are always looking for a patsy, and the current patsy are developers and new homeowners. So we are shifting the burden of paying for infrastructure to the future to developers through impact fees and exactions and also to new home buyers through a variety of user charges associated with those costs.

Now, let's take a look at growth and sprawl. In my definition of sprawl, sprawl is all development that is taking place in the United States -- ALL development. In our two most famed locations -- Lexington, Kentucky, the earliest growth boundary, 1954; and Portland -- there is sprawl inside the urban growth boundary. They have been relatively successful keeping sprawl from outside the urban growth boundary and, particularly, in Lexington, Kentucky, but inside the urban growth boundary, there is sprawl all over both of those very, very famous examples.

What do we mean by sprawl? Sprawl is low density, or low FAR (floor area ratio) which is the same kind of definition except for businesses as opposed to residences. One characteristic of sprawl is low density. A second characteristic is that you have unlimited and uncontrolled outward extension into the metropolitan area. A third characteristic is that you have skipped over or leap-frogged development. You go to the cheapest land. A fourth characteristic is that you have no attempt at clustering uses or mixing uses. Finally, sprawl development is very, very resource consumptive.

Why does sprawl work and why is it with us to such a degree in the United States? One, sprawl allows unlimited use of the automobile and we want unlimited use of the automobile. They are doing a study now in which they are tracking automobile registrations that haven't been renewed in a number of years and we are finding that we store more useless automobiles in the United States than most cultures have automobiles. So no one is going to separate Americans from their automobile, even if they don't actively use that automobile.

Sprawl also relieves (and we have to give it credit) inner suburban and inner-city congestion. If you abandon those areas, indeed, you do not have congestion in those areas. So, if we want to move quickly out to the outer reaches of the metropolitan area, we have to go through the central city and the inner suburbs. One of the things that sprawl does is to relieve congestion in those locations. Just close down one of those spokes for repair that take you from the core out to the outer reaches, and you see what old-time 1940s - 1950s congestion was like.

Further, sprawl reduces suburban-to-suburban travel times. So the fastest growing trip is the United States is actually reduced by having sprawl, because you reduce the time that's involved in suburban-to-suburban trips. Sprawl provides physical distance -- and we love it -- from urban problems. Finally, sprawl guarantees that we have reasonably increasing real property values associated with our housing. And good public services, not equivalent public services, to urban areas, but at relatively low prices.

Where is sprawl taking place? If we view sprawl as a national problem, it really isn't a national problem. This is the kind of counter to we're losing all of our land argument. The reality of it is that sprawl is only taking place in 600 of 3,200 counties in the U.S. If we define sprawl as growth where it shouldn't be, that is significant residential and non-residential development, in rural and undeveloped counties. Now if we define sprawl as significant residential and non-residential development in rural, undeveloped suburban and rural center counties, it only goes to 750 out of 3,200 counties. In other words, we are saying that there are 75 to 80% of the counties in the United States that are not significantly sprawling because those counties are not growing, or are actually declining. So if anybody says we have a national sprawl, we do, but in very, very selected locations, typically around newly emerging metropolitan areas.

What if we were to say that we want to control sprawl, that we want a war on sprawl like we have war on cancer? Well, I think that we would be about as successful as we've been in terms of the war on cancer. What we would be able to achieve would be that, of those 750 counties, if we wanted to take within a metropolitan area, and redirect growth back to the core of that metropolitan area, we could only do it in 400 of those 750 cases. When you get to states, essentially like Florida, Arizona, southern California, Nevada, Colorado, and Georgia, there is no place to put what is going outside in the metropolitan area. As a matter of fact, those areas are developing so new, there aren't even established centers to redirect that population. So if you wanted to redirect and refocus population in a metropolitan area, of those 750 counties that are sprawling, you would only be successful in about 400. Yet also, and this is the unique thing about sprawl, if you come from upper New York state, which I spent a lot of my early childhood in and where you see in every cheap tabloid, 15,000 acres for $15,000. Even in those areas, you have sprawl. Even in locations of no net growth, you have sprawl because there is movement from the outer portions, or the formerly developed portions, of those areas to other portions. So you have sprawl every time you have growth and yet you only have it of a significant amount in 25% of the counties throughout the United States.

What is an alternative to sprawl and this is what we are going to be hearing about later on. An alternative to sprawl is "smart growth" or "compact growth." That means essentially what you do in a metropolitan area is, you let a third of the development go where it was going to go in the first place. You contain the second third around the edges of existing development, and then you redirect the final third into the inner cities and inner suburbs which are not growing. That has a massive effect in terms of the ability to control. By redirecting just a third of the growth that is headed out to the outer regions of the metropolitan area, you double and triple the growth that's taking place in the inner suburbs and inner cities. So there is a massive effect in terms of doing it. But if you look at it, you're not fooling with market trends simply because two-thirds of that growth is going where it was to headed to in the first place. The first third actually out in the metropolitan area, the second third out in the metropolitan area, but closer in than it would have been and, finally, the last third redirected into the central city and inner suburbs. You do the two-thirds, the inner city and the one that you've held close in at a slightly higher density; that's a 10 - 30% increase in density. If you develop at a 10 - 30% increase in density by refocusing in the metropolitan area, you don't raise housing costs. All the growth control, all the growth management studies, and many of the current examples -- Portland being one of them -- in which you attempt to concentrate growth, you increase housing price. The only way that you can avoid that is to increase density. Now, no one wants to increase density in the United States. The minute you talk about increasing density, all the metropolitan solutions are off. But, you can increase density again at 10 - 30% and increased density is not visible with good land planning by the naked eye, simply because our densities are so low that, with good land planning, you cannot tell the difference between 2 and 2.6 units/acre, between 3 and 3.3 or 3.9 units/acre. You can't see it, so those levels of increase in density are acceptable.

Under "smart growth," we develop closer in to the center of the metropolitan area. Under smart growth, we emphasize both infill and redevelopment. We emphasize of both cluste r and mixed-use development. And we have specific goals to save natural resources and man-made capital. By the way, when you make a specific goal to direct growth in a particular location away from natural assets, you can save agricultural land and you can save fragile environments to a level that you cannot believe. The greatest saving as it relates to smart growth is in land and natural habitat savings. That's where you can really get significant savings.

What are those savings? Taking a study and doing six or eight studies nationally across the United States, we've taken 25-year futures in states and in regions and have projected two alternatives relative to those futures: one a smart growth future or a compact development future; and one in existing development or essentially a sprawl future. If you go with compact growth or smart growth with regard to land, essentially you can save about 20 to 40% of the land that you would have committed to development. In an average state, thousands of acres over a 25-year period.

With regard to infrastructure costs, about 15 - 20% in local and state roads. About 8 to 15% in water and sewer laterals. Housing development costs, again about 4 - 8%.

And finally, the costs of providing services. Again, reduced number of roads emphasizing larger delivery systems, etc., about 4 to 8% savings. About 15% in terms of savings overall.

What does that mean in terms of the United States as a whole in a 25-year development future? It means $250 billion. That ain't hay! $250 billion saved over a period of 25 years. Very, very significant. An average of about $5-billion per state over that period.

Now, why would we even do it? Why would we even engage in an exercise like that? Number one, we can't afford two systems of infrastructure. One, the one we are running away from and we underutilize, and the other, the one we are running towards and we also underutilize. We are able to provide for two simultaneous, undersubscribed systems of infrastructure because we don't build non-development-related infrastructure; we don't repair any infrastructure; and we don't build the full needs of the development-related infrastructure. So we're getting away with murder in the short run. What we are creating are two systems of infrastructure: the central city that we are running away from, and the one on the urban fringe that we are running towards, neither of which is fully subscribed.

The other reason that we can't continue to go the way we are going is that we have invented revenues, impact fees, exactions and user charges which we've getting away with murder with. We've been saying that, for every patsy that comes along, if you want to do that, you pay for it. We paid for it in the past but, if you want to do that right now, if you want to develop in that location, you pay for it. The courts are saying now, closely to private property rights, you can't do that. You can't impose that impact fee. You can't impose that user charge. How dare you put a tax on motels to pay for infrastructure in those areas, simply because those motels are a business, like any other business. If you want to tax the motel, the rental car to pay for infrastructure in an area, tax the candy store, tax the business, tax the corporations, and the minute you do that, you're going to be out of the taxing business. And the courts, right now, are on a private property rights campaign to strike down impact fees, user charges, and a variety of others.

Also, the easy avenues for privatization are finished. We have privatized everything that we can privatize. We share everything that we share. We share building inspectors. We share municipal attorneys. We share police. We've privatized the garbage. We've privatized the collection of large items from houses. We have done everything on a municipal base that we can do to stop the costs of municipal services. Most of what we've been able to do, or what we can do, has already been done.

Finally, regionalization is not occurring. Myron Orfield to the contrary, regionalization is not occurring in the United States. We have 567 municipalities in New Jersey. It took us ten years. We now have 566. We had one community that had eight people living in it, three school children, eight people, there were two or three dwelling units that was allowed to consolidate with its neighbor, and the only way the neighbor would agree to consolidation is that if the county signed on the bottom line and said that, for any anticipated costs, we will guarantee, 25 years in the future, that we will pay that municipality to take the eight people and the three dwelling units as part of that neighboring municipality.

If you look at school districts, a 100 to 1, school districts want to get out of the regional relationship as opposed to joining a regional relationship. So regionalism as a government structure in the United States -- I am not saying that we don't share as a result in a region, I'm not saying that we can't provide inside through MPOs and councils of governments -- but, as a government structure, regionalism is dead in the United States.

Why should we go the direction that we are going? We have no other alternative to save as it relates to the costs of growth. We cannot continue to borrow against the future. And currently our infrastructure is crumbling. We had an old slogan in the fuel embargo and that was, how are we going to save oil if we need that oil and that oil isn't coming to our shores from the Mid-East to the degree that it was coming before. We said that "we were going to mine the oil in old buildings." That meant that we were going to put insulation into the old buildings to use heating less, so that we could be better protected from the elements. That's what we have to do in infrastructure. We have to mine the old infrastructure. Again, repair what has to be repaired and depend on that infrastructure, because that infrastructure, for the most part, is in place. It needs to be repaired but it's in place. It makes no sense whatsoever to build an entire new system of infrastructure further out in the metropolitan area.

If we do that and, again, a relatively painless way of doing that, we'll be successful and reasonable and smart in terms of smart growth in the future. Thank you.

Brian Burke

Thank you very much, Bob. For both Bob and our next speaker, Ron Young, these are return engagements in Milwaukee. They were here less than a year ago, last October, as part of a conference on sprawl sponsored by our local clean water agency, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District. Their remarks, particularly our next speaker, Ron Young's remarks, formed the basis for nearly a year of legislative work that hopefully will come to fruition next week as part of the biennial budget when Wisconsin will enact its own version of smart growth.

Ron Young, as many of you know, is the point person for Maryland's smart growth initiative. He's deputy director of the Maryland Office of Planning, having previously served as the deputy secretary of Maryland's Department of Natural Resources. For 16 years, as Mayor of the city of Frederick. He's also taught at both the elementary and college levels. He's been a consultant in real estate and engineering, and a columnist for newspapers and magazines. Ron has a bachelor's degree in history and government, and a master's in administration and supervision.

Let me introduce Ron Young.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to come back to Milwaukee and have a chance to spend a little bit of time here. I get to enjoy it more now than I used to. About 25 years or so ago, I did circuit speaking about downtown revitalization and the efforts that we made and how you could bring downtowns back. I have four sons and, at the time, my oldest two were rather small and every time I took an out-of-town trip, it seemed that my youngest son would go down and jump in bed with my wife, and then the other would follow him. She complained that their arms, elbows, knees got moving and she got no rest, so she asked me to put an end to it. So I took my youngest son, who's a banker now -- the oldest one is a lawyer, but I still love him -- pulled him aside and said, "Look Brad, you are getting to be a big boy and your mother's not getting any rest when you go down to her room like this, so I would like you to stay in your own bed and let your mother get some rest. Can you do that for me?" And he said, "Yes, daddy, I can do it." Then I said, "Please do, then your brother will stay in the room also, if you do." Anyhow, I went off on the trip and when I returned to the airport, they were there, waiting there for me. The airport was packed, and my wife was there with the two boys, and Brad ran up in front of everybody, yelling, "Daddy, Daddy! Guess what? Nobody slept with our mother while you were gone."

Dealing with growth management and sprawl is a difficult task. I think we've had 50 years of policies that have encouraged it. I got into the fight 25 - 30 years ago as I grew up in my city. It was a very nice, small city, with green all the way around it. All development was in the city. I watched the state encourage and fund people moving out, and the county going into competition with us. Going from an active downtown to a place where we have two malls and over 50 shopping centers now, competing with the downtown. And us competing with the county because, in my state, we pay double taxes. If you live in the city, you pay taxes to the city and county both. It's one other thing that we have to overcome, but we've had 50 years of encouraging it. Finally the state's gotten wise. I've worked with four governors on it; I've worked with five governors, but one wasn't much interested in it.

Well, I've worked with four governors on it, two while I was mayor, and then I came to the state in the early '90s after we had attempted to do what was known as 20:20 back then, which was an attempt to do some smart-growth legislation that we failed. I was asked to come on and try to get people talking to each other and get something together again and moving. We did and what we created was really the foundation for what we did five years later, though at the time the critics said it was a "nothing burger" and "toothless." I understand that much better. I'm trying not to smile. I had a cap removed. I broke a piece off last week, and I broke another off at breakfast, so I'm feeling self-conscious with a couple broken teeth.

The '92 Growth Act, the Economic Growth Resource Protection and Planning Act of Maryland, laid the foundation. It wasn't the solution, it wasn't the regulation that some of the environmentalists wanted. It wasn't the answer; it was the foundation for consensus building and for laying out principles that we were to follow, the principles of which were based on the earlier effort that had failed. It changed the way local governments did planning too. It began to change all that. And '97 really fully implemented it and put the strength of the governor and the budget behind what we did. We, despite the '92 act and people feeling that we had done enough, the governor came in and noticed some trends that were still continuing. We were looking at 1.1 million new people coming into Maryland. We were looking at 500,000 moving out of the inner city and more out of the older suburbs. I think the 1990 census showed that both in Maryland and nationwide, people were moving out of the older suburbs at this point faster than the inner city. So you're not only dealing with inner city, but the older suburbs as they continued to move further out. We were looking at larger lot sizes and smaller household sizes. When those trends came together, we were looking at losing 500,000 acres of land in central Maryland for development in the next 20 years. That was as much land as was used for development since the first European settlers arrived in Maryland in the 1600s until today. So in a 20 year period we were looking at using as much land for 20% of the people as we had used in over 300 years.

There were those that questioned who cares and why, and whatever. Well, agriculture is still the major industry in Maryland, despite all the high tech that's ... in Washington cores. We don't want to lose that industry. Secondly, it was the impacts on the environment. We've got the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland which is the largest estuary in Maryland, and it is a very precious thing to us. Unlike the Great Lakes, it's very shallow. It's not very deep, and it's very fragile. The nutrients and phosphorus that were getting into it were doing severe damage, and we've been spending billions of dollars, both in trying to clean it up, and change what gets in it.

There are also the social impacts, though many people don't like to talk about that. The way neighborhoods have changed, the way neighbors don't sit on porches and talk to each other any more. The grass moats they've created around their houses so they don't have to know their neighbors. The way the whole pattern of growth has occurred. Actually when we went out and talked, it was economics that really, I think, tipped it over and brought people in this time. The governor wanted to put a program together. I think one of the major interests in Maryland has been the way he did it and the parameters that he placed on it. When he called me in late May of 1996, he said he wanted to put a program together, and he wanted it bottoms up. He didn't want state agencies telling people how they should live. He wanted people to suggest to us how it should be done. He said that he wanted a program that cost no new money. As a matter of fact, about a month after we had the conversation, he announced a tax cut, so we weren't talking about new money. He said he wanted no new bureaucracy; don't come back with suggestions for big, new agencies and study groups and whatever. He felt the answers were there. Let's start dealing with them. He also said he didn't want to get involved in local land-use takeover. So we couldn't mess with that. He said that he wanted it incentive and disincentive based. We dropped the disincentive later because, if you give incentive to someone, someone else isn't getting something. So we left the negative word out of it. But he wanted it incentive-based. And he said he wanted it fast. He said again, and that related to study groups, don't come back with major study groups, come back with some things we can do now, things we can do right now that will make a difference, that politically we can get through, so we can begin to make an attempt.

We wrote over 400 organizations -- that expanded to about 1,000 -- wrote every one of those organizations and, with a team, we called every one of those organizations on the phone, and we offered to go speak to every one of those organizations. I went out and spoke to a couple hundred organizations within a matter of a couple of months. It was two and three a day, and on weekends. We asked them for their ideas. We took the ideas and put them in a package and sent a booklet back out. We asked; you recommended. I noticed right away that nobody trusted anybody. the environmentalists were sure that this group was trying to get them and vice versa. The farmers trusted nobody; they were sure everybody was out to get them. So there were no hidden agendas, no snakes under rocks, everybody saw anything anybody else suggested. We gave them a matter of a couple of weeks to comment on it, and we built a program around it. That's what we took to the legislature.

There were a number of pieces to it, but the main two pieces were rural legacy and priority funding areas. In Maryland in '69, we passed a transfer tax that creates money for open space. Basically, 13% of it goes to buy easements and development rights off the farmland. The other 87% gets split in half: half goes to the local governments to buy parkland, the other half stays with the state to buy park and open space land. The Department of Natural Resources in Maryland now owns and manages -- we just made another big acquisition -- I guess it's approaching 450,000 acres of Maryland land -- a great deal of land. We have also seen the department cut in size and it has become more difficult to manage it, so rural legacy was an attempt to keep preserving more open space without the state having to own the land, without taking it off the tax rolls, and without the state having to manage it. We wanted to protect farm areas, natural resource areas, wooded areas, and do it together, not in the sprawl fashion, a farm here and farm here, but in belts around towns and around cities. We took some of the money -- remember we weren't supposed to get any new money -- that was there for the transfer tax for the state to buy it. We did get some new money in that the state authorized some bonds. Over the next 15 years, right now, we have about $600 million projected to buy easements and development rights off of land, to protect it from development.

The program has been extremely popular. Every year we have had four to five times the requests that we've had money to give out. We have required that local governments get together with land trusts, get together with the towns, talk to the land owners to make sure that they are actually interested, then come in with proposals which we select and then start to fund. We are also putting more and more pressure on the proposers to come in and show what they are going to do locally, to leverage the money so it isn't just us buying. We can't buy our way out of the total problem. We need to look at transferable development rights, different types of zoning, other efforts by local governments to protect more land.

We have about 6 million acres of land in Maryland. A million of it is protected, a million of it is developed, and 4 million sits in between. Up to this point, we have been saving an acre for an acre that develops but, if we continue that, it means 3 million would eventually develop and we want to save a whole lot more than that in concentrating our development.

The second part was priority funding areas. We looked at urban growth boundaries. That got into local land-use control. We knew politically it couldn't pass. So what we went to was priority funding areas. We made every municipality a priority funding area. Every city was automatically a priority funding area. We wanted to redevelop our cities. We then allowed the county to designate other priority funding areas based on whether they had sewer and water, and on density. That had to be based on the projected population. So we allowed them to establish where they wanted to grow and the governor said, that is the only place we'll spend money. We're not telling you that you can't develop outside of the priority funding area but, if you do, there will be no state resources to help you do that. You're on your own. If something goes wrong, if you need a road, if you need anything, recognize that you're going to pay for it, not the state. So we went into those priority funding areas.

The governor, six months later, came out with an executive order that took it even farther. He said that as far as spending for all government dollars on government facilities, they went in town centers. It is not just good enough to put it into priority funding areas out on the edge, it goes into town centers. That has been very controversial too.

We had other pieces that were in the legislative package. A live-near-where-you-work program where the state put up a $1,000 per house if the local matched it with a thousand, and if the institution or the business matched it with a thousand. So the home owner that bought a house in designated neighborhoods where they could walk to work or take transit, they got $3,000 towards the purchase or closing costs of the house. It's been a very successful program. We also now, with our transit, if they locate there, give them free transit passes. It's an encouragement to resettle in these areas.

We had a job-creation tax credit for the state for creating new jobs. We lowered the threshold in cities, in the priority funding areas, so that not only were we encouraging people to reinvest in neighborhoods, but that the jobs would be put in those neighborhoods that they could get to also.

We had a brownfields program and a number of others. The governor also asked every department to examine every program they had and change that program to see that it supported smart growth, that the funds were all directed ... (tape change) ... about 30 days, we're going to have the next edition out. We've added another 14 programs. There is legislation this year also that adds to that.

The governor this past year said it was time to make a point and he asked all of the agencies for programs he could turn down. That's been controversial too. There was a site chosen for a new state police training academy, a beautiful facility. It looked like a college campus. He said no, it's coming back in the urban area where you can get other benefits from it besides the police just being trained, where the police cars are moving around through the neighborhoods as they're coming in and out. It has that impact. He turned down about five bypasses. You know, bypasses have been devastating to a lot of places. People feel they want to get the traffic out of the town and they put the bypass around the town, and then allow zoning for the convenience store, the gas station, the Pizza Hut, and everything else to go out there, and that begins to be the downtown, because the downtown dies. So we are eliminating many of the bypasses and where they go in, where we do put in new facilities like that, we want guarantees of local zoning control from the places that they won't allow those things, and we also make them non-access. Any new roads, and there won't be many built in Maryland, are going to be limited access. Also in many places, we are going back and buying the access along existing roads to try to stop some of that strip-type development that's occurring. And when a new road is put in, there won't be interchanges that just go out into farmland so that, again, the gas stations, the hotels, and everything can begin developing around that. So there has been a whole change in those policies.

The governor just this week turned down a major inter-county connector that has been extremely controversial in Maryland for quite a while. We are also looking at -- and he hasn't made the final decision -- but we are awaiting a university decision in one of the towns where, again, they want to put it on the outside as opposed to putting it downtown. I made myself unpopular in that community when I tried to point out that there were great universities in great cities all over the world, but I couldn't think of one great university in an industrial park. It was a programmatic change that we had to make.

This year's version, we are looking at three things: the governor has been turning the Transportation Department upside down; we want to look at "no build" solutions before we look at "build" solutions; we want to look at pedestrians instead of just moving the vehicles. We've put a lot more money into programs for urban sidewalks and lighting and things where, in the past, the road just went through and who cared about the consequences. We are looking at traffic-calming things, development around metro stations. We've probably gotten to about 10% of the transportation funds, so that's 90% to go, but it's probably farther than most places have gotten, and we're still looking at that.

We just put a task force together -- and our task forces are short-lived -- like two months and give me recommendations that I pass in the next session.

We're looking at septics, both to clean them up environmentally and to change the impact that they are having on sprawl growth outside of the urban areas.

The other task force which I am helping run, we are looking at codes, infill in new development. We're trying to change the building codes. We looked at New Jersey's model which seems to be working well. But we are actually modelling it after a study done by the National Association of Home Builders for the HUD grant that had some Maryland people involved. Again, streamlining the codes to encourage redevelopment. It's been way too difficult to redo many old buildings. You go in and an old stairway that's been there 100 years is two inches short of code and, in many cases, codes inspectors have said to tear it out and put one in that fits. It discourages people from even trying the project at all. They go elsewhere.

We are looking at infill and I don't mean just between two houses, but redevelopment of downtowns. How to put the lands together. How to redo that. Then we are looking at an overlay piece for compacting new development. Our priority funding areas have a requirement of 3.5 units per acre. What we are proposing in this new compact development unit is that it be at least 7 units per acre. We're incorporating transferable development rights, mixed-use vehicular models -- travel is just zooming -- and most of those new trips are not job-related trips. You have to get in your car to drive five miles to get a half a gallon of milk. I think somebody pointed out that, for those of you that remember the women that used to stand in the bread lines in the old Soviet Union, the average American woman spends more time in her car than that Soviet woman spent in the bread lines. We need to change that and lessen those trips, and create communities where you can walk, where there is a reason to walk. Many townhouses being built today are not in towns. You come out, it's a parking lot at the front door, and there's nowhere to go. We are trying to do that. We are going to, again, incentivize a lot of our money to fit this new development. You only get it if you do it that way. Now we're not setting a stereotype as to how that development has to be done, it's criteria that you meet, so that we still have flexibility, that we still have creativity, but that we get more compact development.

One of the last things I did as mayor was work with a developer to allow something like that in my city before I went out. He just told me yesterday morning that he's getting 11% premium on his houses because there is so much demand for people wanting to live in what basically is an old neighborhood, only it's a new old neighborhood. It's in Frederick City but it's in a part where we annexed, and it has a downtown where 5,000 people can walk to the downtown to the grocery stores, drug stores, restaurants, etc. and don't have to get into their car to go out to do everything. He's getting a premium price on those lands.

I mentioned economics way back. We were out selling this. The day before the vote, I had a conservative Republican senator tell me that he couldn't vote for this because he was conservative. I said, "Well, senator, that's exactly why you should." I then went into some things that I stole from Dr. Burchell and others about the economic impacts of it. I don't know if that was the reason or not but he voted for it the next day. We sold everywhere that we couldn't afford to keep doing this.

One of the pieces in our priority funding area act was that we should do an infrastructure survey. All across the country I have made the statement that I think we're creating a debt of hidden infrastructure that may be larger than the national debt. Well, we found in the survey in Maryland, just in the counties, because we couldn't do it with all the municipalities because many of them didn't have spending trends. But over the next six years, there's a $9 billion shortfall in Maryland for what the counties projected they need to do, $9 billion above the spending trend of how much they have been spending on the capital budget. A $9 billion shortfall. That's very alarming.

We also did something that made them very uncomfortable. In the survey, we also asked them for a 20-year projection, what it would cost to fully implement their comprehensive plan. I've been nowhere in Maryland, and almost nowhere in the country, where a local planner has put their comprehensive plan up and said that this is it. If everybody did it this way, you would really have what we want. We're doing it right. I know not one of the 23 counties in Maryland could tell you what it would cost to implement that plan. Not one of them was able to give us figures, even forgetting inflation, at today's costs, of what it would cost to implement that plan. Some planners told us that they didn't want to know because they didn't want to have to tell the elected officials, and some elected officials told us they didn't want to know, because they sure didn't want to tell the public. We're hoping that, as a result of that survey, a couple things are going to happen. One, counties are going to recognize that they are going to have to change the way they are planning. They are recognizing that we have got to begin to change the way we grow. Secondly, it does begin to give a better picture for local governments and state government as to what we have to begin to do to fund the parts we need, so that we can project where we are going and know how to do it.

I mentioned that the governor put an executive order out to change how we are doing things. I'll give just one quick example of that. When he came in, 60% of all the school construction money -- and the state is very involved in capital school construction -- this governor kept increasing the amount. He put $300 million in the budget this year for public school construction. But 60% was going to new schools. That meant those schools out on the fringe, and quite often at the expense of closing an inner school. And as those inner neighborhoods changed or aged, there was no incentive for a young person to move back in because there was no school there. The young people wanted to move out where the new, good school was. That's reversed now; 84% of all our school construction money is going into renovating and expanding existing schools, in existing neighborhoods where there are not only schools but community centers for that neighborhood. There is no reason that the person in the inner city shouldn't have an equally good school to any new suburban school.

We are also looking, as one of the incentives to tie to the things we are doing this year, that we might allocate a high percentage of that new money to neighborhoods that develop more compactly and where the kids can walk to school.

We had a county in Maryland between 1970 and 1990 that closed 63 schools and built 67 new schools for 10,000 less students, a thumb-nail cost of about $500 million. All of that couldn't have been saved; some of it would have had to gone back into renovations, but I will bet you $200 million of it could have been saved to use for other things, and for even a tax cut. It could have been used or not used differently.

Despite people saying they're coming back in, and it is working some places, there are still more people going out. We haven't changed that trend yet. We've maybe slowed it slightly. We need to change it. I think maybe we've gone 25-30% of the way. We haven't addressed a lot of the real issues here or anywhere. Market forces are things you hear from the home builders -- market forces, and we don't have anything alarming going on. You'll hear the National Homebuilders say that only 4 - 5% of the country is developed. Well, that's probably true but, frankly, I wish them well, but I am not concerned about whether Alaska, or the mountains of Montana, or the deserts in the southwest are developing, Maryland is. We've already developed 16% of our land, not 4 - 5%, and we're headed toward 25% if we don't change the trends. We are losing a lot by doing that. We need to change those trends, and we need to change much of what we are doing.

It's interesting. I think sprawl is a problem everywhere. It hit me where I spoke in Rochester recently. The whole region is losing population and they're still moving out. Even in cases where the population is going down, they are still using more land. As Dr. Burchell said, two infrastructures. In some cases, we've gotten to three: the inner cities, the older suburbs, and the newer ones we're creating. I can't afford to keep up three houses. I don't know if you all can. The government can't afford to keep up three systems. In every way and form, the patterns that we are doing are changing. I know that, again, when I was a kid -- and all four of my sons walked to school all 12 years as I did -- most kids walked, the farm kids rode the bus in. Now almost everybody is being bused to school. In Maryland, it's $500 a kid, per year. Multiply that times the number of kids. It's a huge expenditure that we didn't use to expend, and which we can reduce drastically if we changed the way we are going.

I am going to close by just bragging on my community for two minutes. I was mayor there from 1974 to 1990, and from 2001 to 2005. I'm leaving state government in two years. We had a desolated, boarded-up downtown. I grew up when it was active, very vital. It bothered me, and we went back in and did work on it, and we found the formula to annex in Maryland which is difficult. We annexed more land than any other municipality in the state combined. We tripled our tax base, and we poured a lot of it into the downtown. I was able, in the 16 years I was mayor, to cut the tax rate six times, because property values doubled and tripled and, actually, in the downtown historic area, they increased ten fold. We had townhouses in '74 that were selling for $7-20,000, that went from $150-500,000. We've had a couple recently sell for $800,000 in the downtown. They're very nice homes but, even back then, they weren't desirable. We've still kept a good mix of housing prices and affordability. We haven't driven everybody out. It's worked, and downtown is a place of choice to live. It's active, people want to be there. The streets are attractive. We did a lot of things to bring it back, but it works when you do it. And cities can be vital.

In Maryland, and I don't know what the numbers are out here, but I bet they are not too far off. I stumbled on something accidentally recently. 60% of the households in Maryland have no children in them. San Francisco, when I spoke out there recently, is 75%.

Market force. For people that don't want to pseudo-farmers and harvest that product called grass that they then throw away, who actually might like to get to know their neighbors and do cultural things, and go away on weekends, or camping, or take trips, or travel, and just want a nice house in the city where things are close by. Marketplace. All we have to do is address certain issues like safety in some of our big cities.

In Baltimore, they've got school problems, and they've got safety problems. But if they just address safety, 60% of the households. What a market! If they bring them in, and things works, and the tax base goes up, they'll have the money to deal with the schools. So we do have market forces out there working for us.

I've run into some people along the way who say that we can't control these things. We can't do this and can't do that. I think we can do almost anything we want. Our communities and our cities are where we live. If we can't make them what we want them to be, I don't know what we can do. We have to make them that way. I used to talk about identity a lot, and revitalization. One example that I used to use was a huge metal ring with a hundred ropes tied to it, tied to a hundred horses. They are all pulling hard and the ring doesn't move because they are all going in opposite directions. I think that's quite often what we do in some of our areas. There are groups working with best intentions but in exact opposite directions, so no progress is made. I think every community really needs to look at their past, why they are there, what they are, where they are today, and where they can realistically, breaking out of the box, with a little vision, go. Then set that direction as a community and get all the horses going in the same direction, and know what you would like your identity to be, and run like heck.

A story. My third son is on the city council at home now. He was going to run for mayor but he decided to run for the state legislature instead, so I'm going to go back and do the other thing one last time. I hope it doesn't end like the book, "The Last Hurrah," but you never know. Of my four sons, he was the one that had trouble with my being mayor. My two oldest boys and I are business guys now, and they have a very hard time, they're Democrats in a business community where they are all Republicans. I tried to teach them not only to make money but have a social conscience, so they love to argue politics. They have dealt with it very well. They grew up with me being mayor. I was on the city council for four years, and mayor 16. My youngest one missed much of it. He's a junior in college now. He swore he was totally not interested in politics until a month ago. He told me that he would like to be mayor one day. My oldest three have already been elected to offices already. I don't know what I've created, but I am just glad they are involved in the community.

But my third son was the one who didn't deal with it well. And as I said, he's gotten in. He's on the city council. When he was about 12 or 13, he used to walk around with his chest puffed out, and a chip on his shoulder. "My daddy's the mayor." When he got the chip knocked off and punched in the nose, he thought it was because I was mayor, not because he was obnoxious. One day his mother pulled him aside and said, "Blaine, you're not the mayor's son, your Blaine Young. You are a good person. It's important to be you. Know who you are and just become a good person and be proud of that." About two weeks later, I was at a political event with him, and I glanced over and two elderly ladies were talking to him. Like any parent, I got very nervous and started edging over to hear what was being said. I heard one of them look at him and say, "Aren't you the mayor's son?" He looked up and said, "I thought so, but mommy says no." So we had discussions about identity at a different level.

I have just skimmed the surface about what we are doing. We have a great web page, if you want to check. We try to put as much on that as we can. I do have some booklets. I'm going to be around all day, so I'll be glad to talk to you and take questions about what we are doing. Thank you.

Brian Burke

Thanks very much Ron. I do want announce that Jan Marsh from the Environmental Protection Agency will be here at the session's end to discuss Better America Bonds. Also from the Environmental Protection Agency, we'll have Carol Browner here later. The opening ceremony is at 5:30 pm and we will be joined by Carol Browner, the Administrator for the EPA; Patti Torsney, the parliamentary secretary of the Minister of the Environment; Mayor John Norquist who started the presentation this morning; Tony Clement, the Ontario Minister of the Environment; Larry Washington from Dow Chemical; and James Denomie from the Lake Superior Chippawa Tribe. They will all be at the opening ceremony.

Let's move from Maryland to Tennessee. We have Sam Edwards with, hopefully, another success story. He was instrumental in Tennessee's efforts to pass legislation that mandates local planning to sidetrack sprawling development. He's the deputy executive director and legal counsel of the Greater Nashville Regional Council. He's been with the regional council since 1986, having previously served nearly a decade as the director of the Wilson County Lebanon Planning Office. Before that he was a planner with the Tennessee Department of Transportation. He's a graduate of the Nashville School of Law. And we need more lawyers, not fewer in public office. He holds a master degree in public administration from the University of Tennessee, and a degree in urban planning from Middle Tennessee State University. Sam Edwards.

Local Government Owning their Own Regional Approach

Sam Edwards, Tennessee Chapter, American Planning Association

This morning, the first person I saw when I walked into the room today was a Tennesseean, John Sherman. So some of the stories I'm going to tell -- anybody else from Tennessee? -- John, you can't tell. You can't go back home and tell what I say.

The mayor greeted you from Canada with a little French. I'm from Tennessee, heidi, y'all! Let me give you a little bit of a background on Tennessee. Who would have thought that, Tennessee of all places, would have had "smart growth"? This is the second term of our present governor. One of his first official acts was to abolish the state planning office. Not only abolish it, but remove the statute from the books. Here's the political climate we're in. Doesn't look good for smart growth does it? Next thing that happens is that we have a lieutenant governor who's been in office since Andrew Jackson was president. The man is old. He's been there a long time. He's a good politician, good lieutenant governor, speaker of the senate, senator from west Tennessee, a nice guy. He had some constituents in west Tennessee who did not want to be annexed by the city of Memphis. Now Tennessee has a very, very liberal annexation law. We can annex anybody at anytime, almost. By ordinance you just go out, as long as it is contiguous with the present city limits, you can annex. By the plan of services, which you didn't have to follow, you could do it. So these people didn't want to be annexed.

So the lieutenant governor during the last part of the session, a couple years ago, in '97, said, gee, I've got to help these people. They found a bill because the cut-off date for the filing of bills had already passed, that he amended, went through the general assembly. And people said "I didn't know that passed. What was that?" Well, it lowered the number of people to form a city to 225 people! One person can call for a referendum. But the lieutenant governor didn't want to create too much of a hassle, so he said that this bill would only last nine months and it will sunset itself. So, everybody was happy, right? No! The Tennessee Municipal League said, oh my gosh, we'll have all these new cities being formed and they'll have to share revenue, which we do do in Tennessee, the state shares revenue with cities and counties, we'll have to share it all over the place. Turmoil -- suits filed -- good for lawyers. Well, the Tennessee Municipal League said they didn't know anything about it because all the major cities in Tennessee ... the TML said, oh my gosh, this is terrible, terrible. Truth be known they found the bill for the lieutenant governor to do what happened. People started getting concerned, because of this. The lieutenant governor got very embarrassed because all of this turmoil. All he was trying to do is help this small community.

Also, back up a little bit, over the last 10-15 years, cities in Tennessee have not gotten along with cities. I know that doesn't happen here. I know that doesn't happen in Maryland. I know everybody loves each other. Counties and cities didn't get along. The general assembly was barraged with legislation each year, saying, you have to cut down the ability of cities to annex. Counties were saying this. The cities were saying "no, no, no," we need more liberal annexation laws. You've tied our hands too much. Back and forth, back and forth on numerous issues like that. It got so bad that some cities were annexing rivers. Swear to God, they annexed rivers, so they could go down the river and pick up a convenience store because the state has 6% sales tax, local option of 2.75%, so that city could go in, grab that convenience market or whatever, get the beer sales tax money and sales tax money and enrich itself a little bit and the county would be without. They would checkerboard annexation. They would go in and just "cherry pick" things they wanted and leave the rest out. That's how liberal Tennessee's law was. People obviously got a little upset. That's the background.

Now, when the lieutenant governor passed this tiny town law, he was embarrassed, he also had a cohort in the house, being the speaker of the house, who happened to be like a neighbor to him almost. They were both from west Tennessee. They were both very aligned to each other. Both Democrats. By the way, the Republicans control the governor's chair, the Democrats control both houses of the general assembly. So they got together and said, whoa. Wait a minute. We can't have this. This is too much turmoil, we've got too much of a problem here. Let's study it. So we formed an ad hoc committee, neither house of the general assembly created this. It was John Yerback (phonetic).

This ad hoc committee was just formed by the two speakers, not by the general assembly itself. They put a bunch of people on it -- equal number of house members, equal number of senators to study the issue of annexation, incorporation, and decide the issue of how Tennessee grows. Annexation, incorporation, growth -- everything's put together. It's a good mix. Most of the people thought they would meet a couple of times, make a slight move over here on the annexation laws, maybe jig it a little bit, move over here a little bit, incorporation, make some small changes. Well, how many of you know your state senator personally? How many of you know your house member personally? The lesson in Tennessee, you know these people. If you don't walk away from here with anything else, remember this. Know the people that represent you, because when an opportunity comes, you take advantage of it by going to these people and saying, "Listen, why don't we try this process?" That's exactly what happened in Tennessee. The state senator who was vice-chair, co-chair of this ad hoc committee happened to be the former county attorney where I was a county planner. I went to him along, a couple of us, and said, hey, we've been reading this smart-growth stuff. Let's literally steal from places like Oregon, Washington, the American Planning Association, Maryland, anybody else that has anything to do with smart growth, let's look at what they are doing. The senator said okay, write up a position paper.

To make a long story short, that was done. Two of us wrote it up. Some times you have to have luck. They conducted hearings all through the summer, into the fall. We were supposed to present our paper right at the last session of that committee before the general assembly met. We couldn't agree. A planner and a lawyer. Believe it or not, we couldn't agree. On one issue, and that was taxation. Neither of us knew beans about taxes, but they asked us to write something about taxes, locally shared, and we did. But we couldn't agree on it so we went to the senator and said, we can't agree. He said, don't worry about it, give it to me. We gave it to him and it so happens that, in Tennessee, the comptroller of the treasury was in office since before Andrew Jackson was president. He just retired after 46 years as comptroller of the treasury. He was in state government before that. Think about it. He was one of the three constitutional officers in Tennessee. His deputy, much younger, was a policy person to the general assembly trust. He was acting as part staff to this ad hoc committee. The paper was given to him. Everybody on the committee trusted him. They liked him. We thought, well, we'll see half of our work, maybe a quarter of it. He used 99.9% of our work, and then added to it, fortunate.

To make the story longer and shorter to some versions. Anything ... John and I worked on the solid waste act in '91. Put that together -- a broad piece of legislation in Tennessee there. It takes a coalition in Tennessee for major work. The coalition was the planners; they liked it. Good deal, right? Full employment act for planners. Environmentalists liked it, to save land, consolidation. The Tennessee County Services Association liked it. How many of you are involved with the farm bureaus in your states? The farm bureau in Tennessee has never been warm and cuddly to, one, environmental issues or planning issues. We went to them and said, by the way, we know you're not going to like this but, here's the bill. It just so happened that they had built a new headquarters in Springhill, Tennessee. Ring a bell with anybody? Saturn. And they saw farms galore, go by the wayside out their front door and back door and side windows. So they started getting a little interested and they became a backer, a very, very important backer because al they'd have to do is go pffft, and we would lose a lot of support in the house and senate. Who didn't support us? I'm sorry. The home builders. Surprise, surprise, surprise. And the Tennessee Municipal League did not support us.

Now, what did the bill do? Let me give you one last bit of background, because I think it's a little bit fascinating. The house speaker, the lieutenant governor both said early in the session, we want a bill. Nobody, but nobody thought that we would succeed with this bill. Nobody gave us a chance of passing this bill. As a matter of fact, the lobbyist for the county people, and the lobbyist for the city people even wrote a separate bill dealing with annexation, incorporation, tax issues and a few other things, because they were sure we couldn't pass our bill. Well, the sponsors of our bill took their bill and rattled (?) it into ours, so we had two competing bills side-by-side. It got towards the end of the session, like every other legislature's session, you have committee after committee after committee. We went into a house, state and local, which is the last before it goes into a calendar group committee which is perfunctory, then to the floor of the house. The most powerful member outside of the speaker of the house is the chairman of Finance, Ways and Means Committee, who was also the other sponsor in the house of our bill. He introduced the bill to the committee, sat down, sat next to the man who asked for recognition and stripped all the planning provisions out, every bit of it. And everybody, they voted for it like that. I'm not even sure our sponsor voted for it. It was gone. It went back on to the floor of the house and it passed. Wham, just like that!

Well, the senate sponsor said, no. He took it to his committees the same as we had written. It passed on the floor of the Senate. Like any other legislative body, it has to be mirror-image bills. Somebody's thinking a little bit. We do a little bit more than play football in Tennessee, by the way, but we didn't last Saturday night. The Senate sponsor said fine. The conference committee was formed. They held off the conference committee. The Senate the next to last day of any legislative session is always a little interesting because, in Tennessee, we're looking at an average of five minutes a bill. Wham! The last week. They backlog them to the last week. The conference committee went in the next to the last day of session, one of the busiest days of the session. It went in at 8 o'clock. We thought they'd be out at 8:30; then 9:00, no; 10:00, no; 11:00, no. The leadership of both houses were in that session, 12:00, no. The sent for lunch. 1:00, no; 2:00, no; 3:00, no; 4:00, no; 5:00, we're almost ready. 6:00, send out for dinner; 7:00, we're almost ready; 8:30 we've got a report. The house and senate of Tennessee sat for all day waiting for this conference committee to report. That's how important the leadership felt this bill was. Why did they feel that way? One, because the timing was right for it. During the process of the issues, we built a consensus. These people were committed to it. It went on the floor the next day, it passed both houses with no problem.

What does the bill do? The bill simply is like a lot of other bills you hear about in smart growth. We talk about urban growth boundaries, planning growth areas, and rural areas. Let me tell you a little bit. Planning growth is the same thing as an urban growth boundary. Urban growth boundaries are what cities have to develop. Most legislation just says, you have to do a plan. In Tennessee we're a little more prescriptive. We said that a municipality must do an urban growth boundary projecting its future population for the next 20 years. Instead of letting cities and the counties project their population, we used the University of Tennessee to project the population. Why? Because in 1990, we did it with the Solid Waste Act. They had a history of it. We let them do it. They had the inventory, the infrastructure, what they had in place. They had the inventory, the cost of that infrastructure as far as their capital improvements. Not only were there capital improvements in the present city limits, but outside. The counties had to do the same thing with the planned growth areas, which is the same thing as an urban growth boundary, and a rural area. The rural area is that area outside of both of urban growth boundary and the planned growth area, of which we want to protect farmland, forest, environmentally sensitive areas, and where intense development should not occur simply because the infrastructure is not there and won't be there.

Sounds simple, right? But it's complicated a little bit. The cities had to develop their element. The counties had to develop their element. Then they had to be put together in a one-document growth plan for each county, which had to be passed by both the city legislative bodies and the county legislative bodes. In order to put this together, there were coordinating committees formed in each county, composed of basically the mayors, county execs, industrial representatives, farm representatives, chamber representatives, school board representatives, anybody that breathed could be in on this committee, almost. Their job was to mesh the city and county's plan together. Then they sent it to the legislative bodies.

What happens if a city doesn't approve or the county doesn't approve? Everybody has to approve. The first shot's free. In my home county, there are three cities in the county. As an example, if little bitty Watertown of 1,300 people reject the plan, it's rejected for everybody. It's sent back then to the coordinating committee and they try to resolve the difference. It's sent back to the legislative bodies after they've adjusted it. Watertown votes for it. The city of Lebanon votes against it. Rejected again. What do we do? Well, in Tennessee, we said fine. The purpose of the law is that these plans be done in this manner, with cooperation, coordination between local government officials. the agencies attached to them, and the agencies that serve them, that's the intent of the legislation. It doesn't say you have to have a good plan, but do it cooperatively.

If you refuse to do it, then one of the other jurisdictions, the county can raise their hand and so, we have an impasse. Two times, nobody passed it. We can't get it passed, two times. Where does it go? The interesting thing is, and one thing the governor said to us is, "I want nothing new created. No new agencies. No new departments. Nothing." So we sent it to the Secretary of State's office where the administrative law judges are located for the state. A panel of three administrative law judges will hear your growth plan, and they'll decide. I don't know about y'all but I don't want my growth plan decided by three administrative law judges who happen to be good lawyers and judges, but don't know anything about my community and probably don't know beans about planning. After they make their decision, we have to send it somewhere. So there was one group of seven people appointed by the governor that's been in existence since the '70s, called the local government planning advisory committee. All they ever did was create planning regions for municipalities, and advise the department of economic community development local planning staff about our contracts. That's all these people did. They didn't do anything else, but they were there. So the plan gets sent to them, after the administrative law judges get through with it. They're made up of county officials and city officials, so at least somebody know something about government. They can approve the plan, but they can also change it, if there's ... administrative law judges. So, there's two different groups that can change a local jurisdiction's plan. Not good.

What happens if the cities and counties approve the plan by themselves? They don't have to go through the administrative law judges. Well, the plan still goes to the local government planning advisory committee. It's sent to them, addressed Wilson County's Plan. They pick it up and go, "About a pound. Looks good. It's approved." They don't have the power under Tennessee law to change a word. It is a locally driven plan, approved locally, and the state cannot tell them what to put in their plan. They have guidelines, they have a framework. They can't tell them it's a good plan, it's a bad plan. They can't tell them that their growth is going to be good or bad.

One thing the plan did do, for those of you that are interested, they have a duty, cities have a duty in Tennessee's law -- this is one thing they can be challenged on -- a duty to utilize vacant land, re-use, redevelop, or use for the first time, any land within their municipality to accommodate their 20 year growth. It's their duty under the law to do this. It doesn't mean they just look at it. It's their duty to do it. So if you have a challenge, one of the first things as a lawyer that I'm going to challenge is that duty. Did they do it? Did they investigate it? Show me the figures. Show me the facts.

We did allow, we said, if you did your plan by yourself and you didn't have to go to the administrative law judges, and you coordinated good together, and you did all this kind of stuff. It's your plan. But we did allow one challenge and that is, 60 days after its adoption by the local government planning advisory committee, just about anybody that walks through that county can sue on the plan. The city can sue, the county can sue, a resident can sue, a property owner can sue. But they have to show that the plan was done in an arbitrary or capricious mann