I think that most people don't really think about sprawl per se. I mean, I'd love to think that people wake up in the morning and the first thought on their mind is, 'What about sprawl? What about my smart growth? What is my governor doing to help me on this?' This is where starting to drive people just absolutely crazy--the impact on our personal life. When you start going from 30-minute travel time to go to work to 60 minutes or even to 90 minutes each way, five days a week, and then you start to think about it, you're losing two hours a day sitting in a car. Then you say to someone, 'What would you do if someone all of a sudden said to you, 'Here's ten hours more a week that you can have,' and obviously people could have dinner with their families, they could be at the daughter's soccer game. So that's the big driving point, but there's so many other points.

Across the country smog is increasing at such a rate that asthma has become a leading children's disease and increasing just dramatically. In addition to which, people are frustrated by property taxes. When you really look at the cost of property taxes, much of it comes from trying to accommodate sprawl. In other words, we've built new roads, new sidewalks, new water and sewer lines, new schools always to accommodate sprawl out there somewhere. People are getting fed up. They're getting fed up with the property taxes, they're getting fed up with the health problems from smog and things like this, they're getting fed up with losing all that time, and they're saying, 'There's got to be a better way.' And that's why I think that all across this country people are becoming very much aware of what has happened with sprawl and saying, 'Let's do this differently.'

Now in the Baltimore area, for example, they built these major roads through the city connecting to the suburbs, destroyed neighborhoods that had been intact for hundreds of years, literally in the case of Baltimore. They built the huge, now 16-lane, beltway around the city, built major federal facilities such as the Social Security Administration outside of the city and obviously provided the loans. The net result was just this massive sprawl that drained much of the middle class out of the Baltimore City into the suburbs. Curiously enough, we're now spending hundreds of millions of dollars, state and federal money, trying to somehow or other revitalize Baltimore City, as is the case all across the country. I emphasize to people when I speak about sprawl and smart growth and dealing with issues of this type, that if we sit down and consciously said, 'Let's design a totally inadequate system that would be absolute nonsense in terms of financing,' we did it. We designed a system where we pay for the infrastructure in the suburbs and then we pay for the infrastructure in the outer suburbs, and then after we've drained all of the resources out of the central cities and indeed out of smaller communities as well, we say, 'Oops, they got a problem there.' Then we try to put hundreds of millions of dollars back to deal with social problems and underemployment and unemployment, and we say, 'What's wrong?' Well, we know what's wrong and we've drawn this picture, and now it's time for us to draw a better picture.

So when I was a local official, I was a city council member in a small town, Hyattsville, I tried to get investment in our small community, and what I found was that it was easier for builders and for investors to go out there and tear up another farm than it was to either in-fill, to re-use existing properties. Then when I became Governor the really big challenge was to protect the Chesapeake Bay, one of the great bodies of water in this country, and what became very clear was the problems in the water are caused by problems on the land. For us, the biggest problem was the silting and run-off that was occurring from the development all over the watershed, not just in Maryland, but going all the way up through Pennsylvania to New York, which flows into the Chesapeake Bay. So we just came to the conclusion that what we had to do was somehow or other reduce the sprawl.

Just to put it in perspective in Maryland, if we continue the current patterns, in the next 25 years we would have developed more farmland and forestland than we did in the first 366-year history of the state of Maryland. That's how fast we were moving outward with 5-acre lots and 10-acre lots and so on. So we set down and we said, 'Let's see what we can do to change this.' We worked on it for about a year, we looked all across the country at different examples and decided to come up with a different approach. We put together five or six pieces of legislation. I remember we said we need something to call this, to put it as a package. After a lot of debate among staff they said, 'Growing Smarter.' Eventually, it became 'Smart Growth." We liked it, by the way, because we said, 'If we're for 'Smart Growth,' what does that make our opponent for?' But the reality was we had to do something to change, and what we did was put together a series of incentives that try to affect the bottom line because as we said in many places people make bottom line decisions. If you're a home buyer, you make a bottom line -- which house costs more and what am I getting for my value? Investors make bottom line decisions. Builders, home builders, make bottom line decisions.

So the way we've done this now is that we have designated growth areas, and in those growth areas we will continue to support school construction, loans and grants for water and sewer lines, roads, mass transit, but outside of the growth areas no longer do we invest any state dollars. We're using our 19 billion-dollar state budget as a massive incentive package.

In the state of Maryland the state pays at least 50% of school construction, and in some communities based on wealth, we pay up to 90%. So what we did was to change the rules. In the past the first priority for school construction was for over-crowding resulting from growth. We switched it around and we said the first priority shall be in existing communities. What we're doing now is we're in the midst of building 13,000 new classrooms across the state of Maryland, or totally renovating existing classrooms, 1.6 billion dollars. Before the 'Smart Growth' policy was in place, 34% of our school construction money went into existing communities; the rest went to accommodate sprawl and growth. Today, 86% of our school construction money goes into existing communities, and only 14% is out there to still accommodate some of the sprawl. Literally, what we want to say to a young family is, 'You don't have to move way out there. The very best, the very modern school, is in fact right here.'

Just as a quick example: In Montgomery County, inside of the Washington Beltway, right next to the nation's capitol, communities like Silver Spring and Tacoma Park and all -- last year we either opened or started construction on five new schools or five renovations. Now, this is, if you will, the most inner part of that very large county, which means then for the young families when they say, 'Where's the new high school? Where's the new elementary school?' It's in the existing communities. It's not way in the upper county or western part of the county where you would have to commute 90 minutes to get down to the Washington area. We're seeing changes right now. We're seeing changes in patterns where people are moving, where people are building, where people are investing, as a result of this.

For example, in Hagerstown, a moderate-sized community in western Maryland, we were going to build a brand new campus for the University of Maryland. The site committee had selected a site out on the interstate, and when I went to look at it they said, 'Isn't this wonderful? Look, we got an exit right here,' and it was a farm. It was a dairy farm. So there's this great big cow standing there and everything. I said, 'Fine. How does anyone get here?' They said, 'Oh, this is wonderful. The exit comes right off here into there.' So I said, 'Yes, but everyone comes by car?' They said, 'Yes.' So we stopped, we re-thought this, and I'm pleased that we're now building the new campus in downtown Hagerstown. In fact, we're taking one of these beautiful 1880-type department stores that had been abandoned for a number of years and using that shell for the first building for this campus, and we're making those decisions everywhere.

Now, local governments have started making similar decisions. They have now started changing their zoning to reflect our smart growth policy because if they don't what happens is either the developer or the local government must pay 100% cost of the schools, the roads, the water and sewer and all, and you just can't afford it. So we are seeing those changes. We're also seeing very, very substantial investment in the existing communities. They range from several large projects in Baltimore City -- there's an 880 million-dollar project that is being built on what was a former (warehouse) that was in old industrial use -- to re-use in projects in the smaller and medium-sized communities all over the state. Baltimore Sun just completed a survey where they went across the state and said, 'What does this mean?' And community after community leaders, elected officials, including many of my political opponents, stepped forward and said, 'This program is really working,' and downtown for example, Snow Hill, a small community of probably only about 2,500 people now is seeing investment come into the downtown in those stores that had been abandoned for many years.

I guess just to give you a quick example of what really happens in this thing, up in western Maryland there's a town called Cumberland. Beautiful little city. A number of years ago developers decided to build an enclosed shopping mall about 12 miles outside of town, and in doing so, the state provided assistance to help build a road to accommodate this 'economic development.' Now, not surprisingly, within 3 or 4 years of that the stores in the downtown area all started to close. The competition was too great. They were moved out there -- we are now investing substantial money, trying to get economic life back into downtown Cumberland. Now we're starting to succeed, but the crazy part of this is we actually subsidized the destruction of that downtown area. We are now seeing downtown Cumberland starting to come back, unemployment is going down, there's a sense of vitality in that county again, and we're trying to do this all over the state. It's too early yet to have quantifiable numbers that this number of people are now living here and the trends have been changed, but you can actually see it in the projects and where people are investing.

For example, in Georgia Governor Barnes just got a new state body that can overturn either land use or transportation decision in the greater Atlanta area that the sprawl had become so great that it's become one of the worst smog cities in the country and one of the longest commutes in the country. Interestingly, it was the Republican legislators from the suburbs that gave the deciding vote to pass this legislation, and it's become a bipartisan issue. Up in New Jersey, for example, Governor Whitman has got a huge bond bill to buy and preserve open space. I was in Minnesota recently, and Governor Jesse Ventura is proposing a number of initiatives t help protect open space and to revitalize existing communities.

All across this country, and in fact, in the last state (elections), 34 governors either mentioned "Smart Growth" specifically or sprawl and programs to deal with sprawl. That's how acute it's become. I think the reality is that we can no longer do this county-by-county or suburb versus city. There must be a very active aggressive role for state government to set a new framework in terms of development patterns. What we're saying to the local governments is we're not gonna interfere with property rights, we're not gonna interfere with your local zoning decision because there's a great deal of political tradition behind this, but if you make the wrong decisions then you're responsible for paying for it. Don't ask the state taxpayers to subsidize you.

I would also add, by the way, that one of the things that people don't like the state stepping in often say is, A strong environmental program, or a strong anti-sprawl programs is going to be anti-business, anti-prosperity. That's an absolute false dichotomy; it's nonsense. Right now, Maryland has the highest family income in the nation, we have the lowest poverty rate in the nation, our unemployment rates are literally at historic low levels, and we have reduced or eliminated 22 different taxes returning 2.4 billion dollars to the taxpayers. In doing all of that we have done it at the very time that we have been most aggressive at stopping sprawl, meaning that you can be aggressive in this area and successful in this area and still have a very, very strong economy. In fact, what we find now is that many of the businesses that are kind of the leading edge of the technology, the medical tech, the information services, things like this, are also very, very concerned about the quality of life in an area, and simply--as the Wall Street Journal showed recently--make decisions based on that. Their recent survey of CEOs about where do you move and where do you invest, number one not surprisingly was education, quality of workforce, number two was location of universities and research institutions, number three was the quality of life. Interestingly, tenth out of ten was economic ascendance and tax structure.

It seems to me that what we've got to recognize is that simply adding more lanes to more highways going further and further out is not going to solve the problem. I believe what we need, first of all, is a much greater emphasis on mass transit, and when I talk about mass transit, I'm talking about convenient, affordable, mass transit. We also need to change our land use policies. Now, this is not going to change overnight; it's simply not. People love their automobiles. I mean, I love my little Blazer I drive around, and people like their automobiles. But if we are going to be successful, we have got to bring people closer to where they work, we've got to have more rational land use, and we've got to have a far greater reliance on mass transit. It took us decades to get here and it's going to take us decades to achieve that goal, but I believe it's doable if we start changing our policies.

We just announced in Maryland, for example, major expansion of mass transit; one part of which was we're putting a new fare card in every bus, light rail, commuter rail, subway system, so that with one card only you can ride anywhere in the state on that card. Now, our eventual goal is for one card with a maximum payment for the day. I don't know that figure will be: $5 a day, $10 a day, but you'll be able to get on and perhaps ride the commuter rail to work, the subway system around town while you're there, perhaps a different mass transit out for a ball game or something like that. Use that one card with one maximum fee. When we do that, then people will seriously start riding. We already have, by the way, in the Washington metropolitan area, a little over a million trips a day that are taken on the D.C. subway, the bus system. I always remind people to think what our jurisdiction would be like if you dumped a million trips a day onto the roads, and then think of the reverse: If we could double this capacity and take another million trips a day off the roads, that's a far better solution than building another 16-lane highway.

Right now what we have in many cities is a multi-billion-dollar system that we use perhaps three hours out of the day at more than 100% capacity, and then the remaining part of the day under-utilize that at 90% below capacity level. That system doesn't make any economic sense, and it happens because people don't think of mass transit as a normal part of life yet. We've got to do that if we're gonna have, not just a prosperous and a good future, but a good quality-of-life future.

I recall CNN did a-- it's okay to mention another network, but CNN did an interview in Georgia--national program on sprawl, and they talked to a young couple that were getting up at something like six in the morning now to travel into Atlanta. The announcer said, 'Why do you do this?' They pointed to their children, and they said, 'We want a better quality of life for our children.' Then he interviewed the children, and guess what, the children didn't want that at all. They said, 'We want Mom and Dad to be home, and when they come home they're grouchy and they're tired and they go to bed.' Somehow or another we're just not using either our public or our private resources very well.

Last thing I'd say on that question: I think we need a new vision. The vision was, I'm gonna be successful and I'm gonna move out to my little plot of land out in the suburbs or maybe I'm gonna move out to my 20-acre plot of land in the suburbs, and that's how I'm gonna prove that I'm successful. I see a different vision altogether. I see a vision where we have thriving communities that are true communities where you can walk to work and where you can have places where you know your neighbors and where there's a social life instead of spending time on beltways and interstates, trying to get to and from work. If we do that, if we have that type of vision, I think we're gonna avoid where we're headed now. Where we're headed now is two societies: One is going to be cities that are abandoned and just human residue left there or very wealthy people living in enclaves, and the other is going to be a series of gated communities and we're gonna lose the essence of what has made this country so great. I look for that vision where we've really come together. It'll take a couple decades, but we can do it. If we have that vision in front of us, I think we can make a tremendous difference in our development, our growth patterns, and more importantly protect our resources so that our children and their children can enjoy the same quality of life or even better than we do.