Making Smart Growth Stronger and Tougher
Those who drafted the Performance Standards bill propose five goals to set Maryland growth on a tighter track. The goals “make sure that most development is going into growth areas and not into our agricultural lands, and ensure that if you live in a community, chances are you can work nearby,” Schmidt-Perkins says.
Maryland Commons
For decades, neighborhood sprawl, strip malls and business developments, power lines and water pipes were claiming Maryland acre by acre, paving over farmland and bulldozing trees and streams.
So in the 1990s, planners, public officials and environmentalists decided Maryland should develop communities smarter: “Smart Growth” was born.
Smart planning can protect green spaces from development, help people travel shorter distances to work and amenities and lower the cost to taxpayers for building new and often redundant infrastructure. All this helps cut pollution, increase efficiency, slash fuel use and save money.
“The Smart Growth program has been around since 1997,” says John Frece, associate director for the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland, College Park. “But it’s not working as well as everyone hoped, because when Smart Growth legislation passed in 1997, there was no attempt to set specific goals as to what would be considered success.”
To bolster the program and further limit sprawl, Gov. Martin O’Malley’s administration is proposing five bills to rein in development. The bills are based on recommendations from the governor’s Task Force on Growth and Development, which was convened last year and released its report in early January.
The governor’s five-bill package seeks to curb development and help towns and communities grow taller near transit instead of wider away from transit.
The first bill — the “Terrapin Run bill” — emphasizes that jurisdictions must make decisions in line with local comprehensive plans. The second, a transit bill, would expand funding for development near public transportation stops. The third would reauthorize the historic tax credit to encourage redevelopment of existing properties. The fourth would require the Department of Planning to lay out Smart Growth. The fifth would expand the number of current planning visions for Maryland from eight items to 12.
“Those eight items in the current planning vision were laid out in the 1992 planning act to guide Maryland jurisdictions,” explains Dru Schmidt-Perkins, executive director of 1,000 Friends of Maryland. The visions were meant to guide text in local comprehensive plans, which each local government writes.
“These visions are vision, there’s no accountability, no achievement,” she explains.
Schmidt-Perkins likens these visions to a mother telling her child to clean up his room, and having him sweep the clutter under the bed: “That’s not my vision of a clean room.” Because growth in the state shouldn’t be guided by good intentions, she asserts that “our concern is that none of the [governor’s] bills looks forward and sets standards for what should occur.”
Raising the stakes for the five-bill package is a separate bill that would set specific goals for local governments to meet by 2018, and lay out consequences if they don’t.
