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| Q: How do you define "sprawl"? |
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| A: Well, sprawl is - is, I think, either unplanned or poorly planned growth that has an effect on natural resources, has effect on the environment, a negative effect, which costs taxpayers more money to support than better planned development. |
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| Q: In Maryland, what are its basic characteristics? |
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| A: Well, I think what it looks like varies. You can have a badly designed sprawl and you can have well designed sprawl. There have been some great planned communities in Maryland, and in other states, that 20, 30, 40 years ago were built. Columbia's an example, Reston in Virginia's an example. They're new towns, well planned, mixed use, good design but they were put so far out from existing communities that people had no choice but to drive long distances to get there. They, in many cases, consumed farm land or forest land that these days, I think, we would think probably ought to be preserved and we ought to have that kind of good, well planned development in closer to existing communities. Why has it become an issue for Marylanders and others? I think part of it is the aging of the baby boom generation. I think a lot of us are looking around and thinking that we're beginning to foul our own nest. And that the way we've been developing this country is not the best way. That we have children and grandchildren and we have a legacy and we don't like the legacy we're leaving today, and maybe there's still time to stop what we're doing and protect that legacy for our children. |
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| Q: Talk a little bit about the historic roots of sprawl in Maryland. |
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| A: Well, I think that - I think that the history of sprawl, if you will, in Maryland is probably not any different than the history of sprawl anywhere. It probably began around the end of World War II. It was fueled, in large part, the prosperity of the country following World War II, by the relative - relatively inexpensive automobiles and fuel, by government policies that, in many ways, were well intended and did great things. Like the construction of our interstate highway system, probably one of the best national road networks in the world. Yet it made it possible to live long distances from our traditional population centers. The GI Bill is - made it easier for returning veterans to get home mortgages and they got them in places like Levittown. That - what happened in Maryland was no different than what happened in many states. And was actually supported by government policy. I think one of the things that has changed, the dynamic that has changed, particularly in Maryland, is the recognition that if those policies contributed to that kind of development pattern, that maybe if we change those policies we can reverse those development patterns. |
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| Q: What did we create when we created the suburbs? What kind of life did we create for ourselves? |
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| A: Well, we created a life that was dependent on the automobile. We depended-- we created a life that you, in many cases, could not any longer walk to your local school or walk to your local market. Everything that you did you had to drive to and from. And that added to cost of your community and in some ways, I think, alienated people from each other because you didn't have that mix that you would have if you - people were walking down to their school and walking down to their town center to go to the store. |
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| Q: Is there a loss of community in third ring suburbs today? |
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| A: I think that is correct in some cases. I think if you talk to a lot of people who live in suburbs they'll say, geez, we have a nice community here. So I think its not always true. But - but it is true that the farther and farther we go out, the more land we're consuming, the more cost we're adding to all the taxpayers in terms of supporting the infrastructure, and the schools, and the police stations, and fire stations, everything else that you need to support new development. And we're sort of squandering the investment we've had, that we already made on the inner - either the inner city or the inner suburbs. We keep going farther and farther out. I think part of it is rooted in an ethic of a throwaway society. That there's somehow this notion that our resources are limitless. I think it probably goes back to the expansion of this nation, that we could always-- there's always another-- another-- you can live a little bit farther out and there's more land, there's more of everything. And I think we are beginning to run up against the reality that there's not more of everything. |
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| Q: How has Maryland been able to do better than an awful lot of other states? |
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| A: Well Maryland - Maryland first is a - its a relatively small state. There's little more than five million people in Maryland, about six million acres. And it is a fairly heavily developed area, particularly in the Baltimore, Washington, Wilmington corridor. Maryland has a long tradition and history of land use and environmental protection efforts dating back at least to the early 70's. Much of it revolving around the Chesapeake Bay. I can't overestimate how important protecting the Chesapeake Bay has become to Marylanders and to succeeding generations of elected leaders in Maryland. Much of the environmental protection measures and then, from those, the land protection, land use measures, have sprung from a desire to protect the Chesapeake Bay. One of the reasons, this is sort of getting ahead of your question, but one of the reasons I think Smart Growth has ultimately taken root here is that many people realize it is sort of like the big enchilada. You deal with all the different environmental issues, whether its air pollution, or water pollution, disturbance of forest land or farm land, you deal with them all at the same time when you're dealing with land use patterns. Maryland is able to do this, not only because of its tradition of dealing with land usages, environmental protection issues, and has broad public support for those sorts of things. But also has a system of government in which we only have 23 counties and they are blessed with most of the land use authority in the state. I contrast that with the State of Pennsylvania, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which has 25, 2,600, something like that, different units of government that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has to deal with. Each of those units of government having their own planning and zoning authority. Much more difficult to deal with land use issues when you have so many different units of government. For us, just 23 counties. We have municipalities also within many of those counties. But primarily we have to deal with the counties. |
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| Q: What's the dynamic in Maryland between developers and state legislatures? |
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| A: Well, it's been interesting. In Maryland, the development community and the building - home building community have - have not been major opponents. One of the reasons is our - we changed the dynamic from the beginning of our Smart Growth initiative from the old equation where it was growth versus no growth. Ours really supports growth, we just want to plan it better. From the developers' standpoint, from the home builders' standpoint, they are - they are assured that we want to support what they're doing. We're just trying to channel where they do it. And there are some within those communities that have been resistant to change, that want to just keep doing whatever they were doing forever. And I think that's probably true of just about any-- any group like this. But there are others who recognize what we're doing and what they have come to the Governor and say, look, we support what you're doing with Smart Growth. But you have to make it possible for us to build in the areas where you want us to build. You have to help us remove the code barriers or other restrictions that make it difficult for us build in those areas. |
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| Q: What is the system by which Maryland distributes funds for development? |
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| A: Well, Maryland's - what distinguishes Maryland's Smart Growth Program from the land use programs in all other states, or most other states, is that ours is entirely incentive based. If you - if you go to a place like Oregon, which has been doing really good things in the area of land use for 25 years, they have a more restricted scheme in which they actually draw a boundary around their communities, an urban growth boundary, an inside it they allow growth and outside of it they essentially do not allow growth. We never tried to do that, politically could never do that, I don't think, in this state. What we did is to control the one thing that the state could control, which is where the state spends its money. And so we set up a system in which we designated certain areas of the state in every county as growth areas. We call them priority funding areas because they are the priority areas for the state to give funding. And we started by saying every municipality in the state is a priority funding area. We have about 155 or 160. And we said that the heavily developed areas inside the Baltimore and Washington beltways were automatically priority funding areas. And then we said to the 23 counties, you can designate any other area you wish to be a priority funding area but those areas, for the first time, had to meet some minimum state criteria. They had to have water and sewer service, either existing or planned. They had to have a minimum residential density of 3 1/2 units per acre or greater. And each county's priority funding area plan had to be consistent with the county's long range growth projections. So that you wouldn't have a county drawing a huge area on a map that's much larger than what their growth projections say they need. And then they had to submit those maps to our department of planning. And the department of planning reviewed them and had to certify that the areas were consistent with the law. And so what we're doing is we're using the entire state budget, or at least certainly a large chunk of it, as an incentive for growth in certain areas and, by withholding it, discouraging growth in other areas. For example, in a priority funding area the state can spend money on road construction, on sewer and water extension, on economic development loans and grants, a whole range of housing programs, but they can only, as of October one, 1998, we were prohibited from spending money on any of those things outside of a priority funding area. It does not mean, and I want to emphasize this, it does not mean that a county in Maryland cannot approve growth outside of our priority funding areas. That authority still rests with the local governments. But what it means is the state - |
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| Q: What does it mean? |
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| A: What does it mean? It means that the state - it means that if - if where the state spends money makes a difference in development patterns then we're going to change our development patterns. Because we're putting our money in growth areas and we're not putting it in areas that aren't designated for growth. And if that, over the long run, year in and year out, proves to make a difference in where local governments and private developers plan their developments, then we are going to change the way this state is developed. |
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| Q: Historically, what happened to Baltimore in terms of the interstate highway system and the development that came along with it? |
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| A: Well, I mean the interstate highway system was a part of - part of the exodus, I think, for many big cities around the country and smaller towns and cities. I mean it's not just a Baltimore phenomenon. In western Maryland there's a community called Cumberland. And Cumberland is half the size it was during World War II. And this is true of a lot of smaller towns and cities. Baltimore has gone from just about a million people in the middle of the last century to about 635,000. It is beset by the same problems that many big cities are beset with. It has crime problems, it has school/education problems, and it has suffered from a disinvestments caused in part by government policies that rewarded the outer suburbs and then the suburbs outside of those and drew people out. Now, I think its fair to say that-- that probably there's been-- that racism is also a factor in the exodus in many of these cities. But I think that the policies that allowed us to put money, for instance, in public schools outside of-- of older areas and in the suburbs meant that families with kids moved out where the good schools were. One of the things the Governor has done is he has completely reversed the priority of where we spend money on public schools. When he came to office back in 1995, about $4 out of every ten we spend-- the state spends, on school construction went to older schools and older neighborhoods. Now its more like eight to eight and a half dollars out of every ten the state spends goes to older schools and older neighborhoods. And at the same time, we've tripled the amount of money we put into school construction. So what that means is we are gradually removing one of the reasons that families leave older areas by making the school facilities better in these older areas. |
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| Q: Has the impact of investment in schools been measurable? How does one measure the success of that in terms of what's happening elsewhere? |
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| A: Well, what you're talking about is, and I'll repeat that, what we're doing with school construction is the state controls about 50% of the school construction budget and the counties pay for the other half. And over the last five years the Governor has essentially tripled the size of that school construction budget. We're up to something like 250, 260 million dollars a year. But what he has done at the same time that he has tripled the size of the budget, is he has changed the priority of where we are spending the money. He has tried to make school construction consistent with Smart Growth so instead of spending most of the money-- we used to spend almost 60% of the money on schools out in the suburbs somewhere, sometimes in the far-- far, far suburbs, now we're spending about 80 to 84% of the money on older schools in older neighborhoods. We're rewiring them for computers, we're adding computer labs and science labs, in some cases we're completely renovating them. In some place - some cases, actually completely replacing older schools in older neighborhoods. What the Governor is trying to do is remove one more reason why families, young families with kids, would leave an older area and go out into the suburbs. I mean there are many reasons that happens. That's just one of them. And what you try to do with a program like Smart Growth is hit all these different reasons and one by one you get enough change that people will begin to find comfort in staying in some of these older, traditional neighborhoods. It'll save them money and it'll save the state money over the long run in terms of infrastructure and services. |
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| Q: So, yeah, so is it true that there has been a way of measuring that thus far? |
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| A: I think the fair answer is, no. The fair answer is that it took us 50 years of sort of sprawl development patterns to get ourselves into this predicament and we're not going to undo it in two years. Our priority funding areas law has only been effect since October of 1998. We've - we can give you anecdotal evidence of change in certain neighborhoods, we can show you specific projects, we sense that there is a beginning of a cultural change and how Marylanders think about land use. Maybe they were thinking about it even before the politicians got there because they too knew that the way we were developing wasn't the right way. But can we say to you today that we can demonstrate that there are-- there's a mass migration back into older cities? No. It's too soon and it remains to be seen whether these are effective policies or effective enough. Whether we're going to have to add other things. I think the Governor has always believed that what we did in our 1997 law was the beginning. It was never the end. It was the first step and what we have tried to do in each succeeding year, and I think what we'll continue to do in Maryland, is add to the Smart Growth Program with new layers of incentives to try to make it work better. And as both the public and elected officials, state, local, and even federal, begin to embrace this approach there will be more support for doing more things to make it work. |
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| Q: Many first ring suburbs have decay problems that are reflective of inner cities. How's that being handled in Maryland, if at all, and how does it relate to the inner city? |
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| A: The biggest first ring suburbs in Maryland are the ones around Washington, D.C., and the ones around Baltimore. In some instances we have statistics that show that they are suffering from a loss of population even faster than the inner cities. In both of those cases, those first ring suburbs are inside, respectively, the Baltimore and Washington beltways and automatically designated as priority funding areas. So that means the state resources are going to continue to flow to those neighborhoods. And in fact I would say are going to flow to them in levels that are much higher than they were before Smart Growth. Before Smart Growth they were often neglected. In fact, Governor Glendening stated his career in politics as a - as a city councilman in a little Prince Georgeis community called Hyattsville. And one of the things he often talks about is how because it was an older suburb it was always neglected when the state spent money. They were always putting the money out into the new suburbs. And I think it really made an impression on him that when he became governor that is one of the places he is trying to focus attention. There are a lot of examples around the state where we're putting in housing programs to help older suburbs to boost home ownership onto the theory that home owners are - will take better care of their property and increase the property value for everybody in the community if we can stabilize a community with higher - higher ratios of home ownership. We are doing transportation projects in these older areas. The Governor's put $150,000,000 into a - a six year transportation program called Neighborhood Conservation, where we are taking gas tax money essentially, money that most states, including Maryland, have traditionally used for new highway construction, and we're using it for landscaping, we're using it for park benches, for brick sidewalks, for ornamental lighting, for things that make downtown areas particularly in these older, inner ring suburbs more attractive places to live, and to work, and to stop. We're doing things with transportation projects like putting roundabouts in that slow down the traffic, beautify the neighborhood, and again make them more attractive places to visit. One is Mt. Rainier in Prince George's County, which is right on the district line, Rhode Island Avenue comes through Mt. Rainier and people just fly through there on their way into the District of Columbia. We're putting a roundabout in there. It's got sculpture, it's going to have nice landscaping, nice sidewalks, and it will slow people down and they'll say, hey, this is a better place. This is a place maybe I'd like to live. Maybe I'd like to stop and shop. Maybe - it'll change their attitude about this community. |
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| Q: One of the things you hear in this area, that is considered to be sprawl, is the issue of clogged highways and traffic. How does a state like Maryland tackle the issue of clogged highways and traffic? |
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| A: I think congestion is probably the hardest problem we face. And I don't know that we have the solution. And I don't - I don't know that I'm real optimistic that there is a solution out there. If - if there was the money, and if there was the political will to do all the things that you might do to try to cure congestion problems, I'm not sure we could cure it all. I'm afraid that the congestion is going to get worse before it gets better. There are some cities around the country, such as Atlanta, where the congestion has gotten so bad that people are voting with their feet. They're moving back downtown because they don't want to deal with that, you know, two-hour commute or whatever. We are trying in Maryland to think about transportation in terms of moving people and not just moving cars. So what we're trying to do is get a more balanced transportation system. We're not ignoring roads, we're building roads, and we're trying to improve roads, and we're trying to maximize the capacity in the existing network. But we're also going to put more emphasis into transit. The Governor has set a goal of doubling transit rider-ship to a million people a day by the year 2020. We're adding more buses, we're adding more rail, and we're trying to put more emphasis on things like walking and bicycling. We - the legislature passed a bill this past year that sets up a position within our Maryland Department of Transportation to just focus on biking and walking. I think over the last two or three years, under Governor Glendening's leadership, we have built something like 50 miles of new sidewalks. There were - but when he came to office there were legal restrictions against the state constructing sidewalks on certain roads. And we've removed those restrictions and we're now building more and more sidewalks. So we're trying to make that part of our effort. The other thing we're trying to do is we're trying to tie transportation planning to land use planning. We're trying not to just do a one-size-fits-all transportation project but rather to go into a community and rather than say, your highway can be here or here. We're starting with the question of, do you want a highway. And if you want a highway, what kind of a highway do you want. And if you want a highway, what do you want it to do in terms of your land use. When we - when the priority funding areas law went into effect of October of '98, one of the first things that happened is the Governor asked all the Cabinet Secretaries to go back and review their budgets, and their programs, and their projects to see if everything was consistent with Smart Growth. And the Department of Transportation discovered that they had five highway bypass projects that had been on the books for years and they were inconsistent with Smart Growth. In most cases they were outside of the priority funding areas and they didn't connect priority funding areas. They just kind of went out into an area that they - where they would have fostered more sprawl development. So the Governor said take them out of the budget. So he took five highway bypass projects out of the budget. And there's been a lot of gnashing of teeth over doing that, as you could imagine, in some of those communities. But what we did is we saved the money and we said what we want to do is we - it was only planning money, it was only about a million and a half dollars in planning money. But had those five been built, it would have cost about $360,000,000 in today's dollars to build them. What we did instead is we saved the planning money and went into each of those communities and offered to help them find alternatives to their congestion problems but in-town alternatives that didn't create sprawl. One of the communities was Brookville, which is in Montgomery County, it was, for one day in 1814, was the capitol of the United States. It still looks a lot like it probably looked then, with beautiful old brick colonial buildings right up on the road. But the road that goes through Brookville is Route 97 and it becomes Georgia Avenue into Washington. And in the morning, traffic from sprawl development north of it comes flying down through Brookville and in the evening, coming home from Washington, it comes back up. And it makes the community almost unlivable. Well we cancelled the bypass around Brookville and Montgomery County and Brookville residents said, what are you doing? We can't live with this traffic.
So we went in and worked with Montgomery County and came up with a solution that puts the Brookville bypass back into the budget. |
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| Q: Tell us what you wound up doing with Brookville as far as planning the bypass. |
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| A: Well, what we did is we came back with a new type of bypass that took into consideration its effect on land use. We said, well, we'll put a bypass back into the planning, into the Department of Transportation's planning document, but this bypass will have to have easements on both sides -- its about a mile long, easements on both sides so that there is no construction prompted by it. There will be no connections to it, other than at the top and the bottom, the north and the south, that the county agrees not to use its existence to justify more development north of Brookville, which is outside of their growth area, and that if all that fails and the construction of this creates a lot more traffic then Montgomery County will come back and reimburse the state for the cost of the project. Now, there are a lot of parts of this that I think are, as a practical matter, might be difficult to enforce. But I think that the spirit of the compromise is such that we have created a new kind of transportation project that says, we recognize that transportation projects have an effect on land use, have an effect on development and we can try to build them and design them in a way to minimize what that effect is. And that's why Brookville is an important example. |
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| Q: I want to change the subject completely; get back to cities and infrastructure. I'm thinking of the City of Detroit where water and sewer pipes run 40, 50 miles out of the city and are fueling development in rural areas. |
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| A: Well, under our program the state is now prohibited from spending money on infrastructure, such as sewer and water lines, outside of a priority funding area, outside of a designated growth area. So if it doesn't already exist, someone else would have to pay for it. We don't -- we don't prohibit it. It is a county government decision on whether to allow it. But the state is no longer going to subsidize it. I think the state takes the viewpoint that you have -- the state has limited resources and that you cannot afford to spend taxpayers' dollars on growth, no matter where it is, no matter what its effect is on existing communities. And we can't afford to waste the investment we've already made in many of the older communities in terms of infrastructure. So under Smart Growth our infrastructure investment from the states - state level is targeted to these growth areas. |
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| Q: When you limit infrastructure do you have projections that say that you save tax dollars for taxpayers? Is there a correlation there that you know of by limiting that infrastructure? |
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| A: Well, I don't -- we don't have any scientific studies that say what we're doing here in Maryland is going to result in X dollars of savings. But there are enough cost of sprawl studies around the country to -- that show that the more you build farther and farther out the more times you are adding layers of -- of both infrastructure investments and service investments onto what you already have. It is only common sense that if you aren't building a redundant roads, redundant sewer and water lines, providing redundant transit services, or police services that you're going to use your money more efficiently. I think that it would be wrong to believe that we're going to suddenly have huge savings that are going to be put into some pot off to the side. I think what it means is we will have more money to deal with other things on our needs list. |
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| Q: I want to ask you about new urbanism like in Portland, Oregon. Talk a little bit about new urbanism and how you view it. Is it something that can be used in a state like Maryland? |
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| A: Well, I think where new urbanism fits into a program like Smart Growth is that it is -- it's focused on good design, and mixed uses, and sort of traditional neighborhood designs and mixes is what we're going to need to make more compact development more acceptable. Marylandis population has gone from four to five million in 30 years. Itis going to go to six million in 20 years. We have another million people and we're going to have put them somewhere. And Smart Growth, at its core, is really a matter of trying to plan better for where those people are going to live and work. And if you are going to target a lot of that new growth to existing communities, by definition you mean -- it means that there are going to be some higher densities in those areas. A lot -- the old saw of a new program is there are two things people don't like, one is sprawl and the other is high density. And -- and the reality is, to avoid sprawl you're going to have to have some higher densities. And if you're going to have some higher densities, which what it really means is - can mean, is communities with more amenities, with more services, with more walkability[sic]. If you're going to have that, the way to make it acceptable to the public, I think, is to demonstrate that you can do it in a well designed way. And I think that's where the new urbanism comes in. It really encourages better design, better thinking, a more lasting design, something that you can be proud of that's sort of a restoration of the value of public places. |
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| Q: I'm thinking of Kent Lands as you're talking, and aren't you really, in some ways, returning to what communities and inner cities used to be, the more neighborhood kind of a place? |
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| A: Oh yeah, I mean a lot of Smart Growth is back to the future. |
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| Q: There is a tendency in Americans to follow the Horace Greeley admonition of "go west, the land is great, it'll never run out." What is the cost of that thinking in the year 2000? |
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| A: Here's the prediction from our Department of Planning, they say that if we continue the development trends that are now - that we've had for the last 50 years in the state, if we continue those trends for another 25 years we'll consume as much new land with development in central Maryland alone as we've consumed in the 366 year history of this state. It is something that we can't afford financially and its something that we can't afford environmentally. It's ruin - it will ruin our quality of life. We're at a point now where something like 85 or 89% of the public in a very recent poll say that they think Maryland's quality of life is either excellent or good. And it is one of the reasons that we have such a strong, prosperous economy, such low unemployment, low poverty rate, low poverty rate among children. All those things are happening in Maryland, I think, in part because we have the kind of quality of life that attracts businesses here. I think that the long range danger for any state or community that simply allows rampant growth without any planning, without any thought, is that they're going to ruin that quality of life and lose their economic prosperity, I think is going to happen. And I think that we're going to be ahead of the game, particularly in a high tech world where businesses can locate just about anywhere they want. They come to places like Maryland because they can sail in the Chesapeake Bay, because we have pristine mountains, because there are things to do here in the open space that we have preserved for decades. |
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