Maryland smart growth program may be coming undone

Advocates of concentrated development worry as new governor empties the Office of Smart Growth. Maryland’s new Republican governor, Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., has dismissed top officers of what had been America’s premier state smart growth initiative. Harriet Tregoning resigned in February as special secretary in charge of the Governor’s Office of Smart Growth. Since then, acting director John W. Frece and his top deputy, Danielle Glaros, have been fired, and other staff members have resigned, been dismissed, or been reassigned to the state planning department. “It’s going to go down the trash can,” the Baltimore Sun quoted Democratic State Senate president Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. as saying June 23 about the smart growth program. However, Tregoning, who is now executive director of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute at Smart Growth America, told New Urban News it’s too early to know whether such a dire conclusion is justified. “All governors try to make distinctions with their predecessors,” Tregoning pointed out. In New Jersey, she said, incoming Democratic governor James E. McGreevey first “fired almost all the planning staff,” but has since “come out very strongly” with his own smart growth initiatives. Ehrlich, Maryland’s first Republican governor since Spiro Agnew, campaigned on a promise to make government more efficient. He said he does not believe the state needs a separate Smart Growth office, and consequently decided to move its activities into the planning department. The change worries many people who want the state government to rein in sprawl and focus development into denser, more compact patterns. Established in 1997 under Democratic governor Parris N. Glendening, Maryland’s program became a national model because it used smart-growth principles as “a lens through which the state’s budget investments were made,” according to Tregoning. It offered incentives aimed at making built-up areas competitive with greenfield sites, which typically are cheaper and easier to develop. A larger proportion of funds for roads, schools, sewers, and other state projects was channeled into cities and town centers, and away from countryside. Tregoning said that through conservation easements or outright purchases, the state preserved more than 300,000 acres of farmland, forest, and open space. Historic preservation tax credits became an important tool for rehabilitation, enabling developers to obtain a refund of 20 percent of their costs during a project’s first year. Even so, the smart growth program did not eliminate sprawl. “Recent studies have shown most counties continue allowing far too much development outside of the areas where Smart Growth would steer it,” environmental columnist Tom Horton wrote in The Sun June 6. Horton thinks sprawl cannot be controlled unless a high-level office is devoted to that purpose. When Gov. Harry R. Hughes gave the planning department a similar mission in the 1980s, the effort failed, according to Horton, because “planning was and is one agency among many, with no real authority over the others.” Glendening consequently had the Smart Growth office report directly to the governor, and gave it the authority to coordinate other state agencies. Some smart growth advocates have been emphasizing that there are good reasons for Republican politicians to embrace the idea of focusing development. Focusing development in existing cities and town centers is ultimately more economical, many have argued. Ehrlich, the first Republican governor in 34 years, is from Arbutus, an inner-ring suburb that “has clearly seen better times,” according to Tregoning, and she noted that “he campaigned very strongly on revitalizing older communities” and on historic preservation as well as government efficiency. So she is not ready to concede that smart growth in Maryland is dead. In fact, smart growth mechanisms such as “priority funding areas” (geographic areas that have been given preference for state infrastructure spending), have been written into state law. But the momentum of the past several years is ebbing. Tregoning expressed concern that that government staff members possessing “really deep institutional knowledge and expertise” in land conservation, farmland protection, “smart transportation,” and community revitalization — and who are mostly not partisan — are leaving.