Government Issues and Politics
Insurance and Employee Benefits
Business and Economic Info
Human Resources and Safety
Education Policies and Practicies
Training and Consulting Services
Welcome to CBIA's Training and Consulting site!
Small Business Human Resources Workforce Development Your Questions Answered Success Stories

May 2004 — Vol. 82, No. 4

COVER STORY

Keeping growth in ‘smart growth’

Connecticut should rely on incentives, not mandates, to encourage municipalities, developers and other stakeholders to manage growth in a sensible manner.

By Michelle M. Murphy

Free-lance writer in West Hartford

You don’t need a dictionary to know that “smart” has several meanings: Intelligent. Stylish. Cheeky.

But in the realm of economic development, when “smart” modifies the word “growth,” it creates a single phrase that can mean literally opposite things, depending on whom you ask: For some people, “smart growth” means “lots of it.” For others, it means no growth at all. More commonly, though, “smart growth” means some growth — as long as it’s pursued with a plan.

Those differing opinions are prompting debate here in Connecticut in the wake of two reports urging smart-growth approaches to combating sprawl.

Concerned about the possible effects some of the approaches could have on Connecticut’s economy, the CBIA Board of Directors recently set about educating itself on the issue and asked Brian W. Blaesser, an attorney who tracks national smart-growth efforts for his real estate clients, to talk about them at a board meeting in March.

“Smart growth is really nothing more than growth management, which is a very purposeful effort by government through plans, policies and regulatory techniques to influence the rate, amount, type, location or quality of future development,” says Blaesser, a partner in the Boston office of the Robinson & Cole law firm and co-chair of the firm’s Land Use Group. “It attempts to promote economic prosperity — and hence, the quality of life — by implementing policies that prioritize or limit growth areas based on criteria, particularly the location of existing or planned infrastructure, rather than allowing development to go out further. It also is based on the preservation of natural and agricultural resources.”

It’s a strategy that CBIA endorses — with some caveats. At its March meeting, the CBIA board adopted a resolution supporting smart-growth approaches that rely on incentives, not heavy-handed restrictions or requirements.

“One message came through very, very clearly from our board: We should not have mandates,” explains CBIA President and CEO Kenneth Decko. “We support the idea of providing incentives for cleaning up environmentally contaminated properties in urban centers and encouraging growth patterns along existing transportation structures. We also favor the responsible purchase of open space, so we can preserve the character of Connecticut that makes people want to live and work here. But not everyone wants what some urban planners might want. And the board felt very strongly that municipalities should not have the state dictating to them how they should grow.”

Separate reports, similar conclusions

Although smart growth has been talked about for years, it’s received more attention in Connecticut lately because of two reports that came out last year: one from the state’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Property Tax Burdens and Smart Growth Incentives, and the other from the Con-necticut Regional Institute for the 21st Century, a nonprofit strategic planning organization that focuses on the state’s national and worldwide competitiveness.

Despite these groups’ different missions, the two reports reached several of the same conclusions: Connecticut has an incipient “sprawl” problem; local, regional and state land-use planning should be more coordinated; and better data are needed to help make that happen. They both also asserted that Connecticut’s inordinate reliance on property taxes for municipal revenue implicitly encourages sprawl, and that the state should therefore revisit the issue of property tax reform with an eye toward its impact on smart-growth strategies.

A ‘sprawling’ state?

Connecticut ranks among the top 10 states in terms of land lost to development from 1982–97, according to the Regional Institute’s report. Farmland shrinks 2% a year here, about twice as much as the national average; in fact, the state has lost more than 100,000 acres of farmland since 1988. What’s more, 170 square miles of forest disappeared between 1985 and 2002.

Forests still cover more than 50% of the state’s land (while buildings and parking lots cover about 19%), but the trend of the past 20 years or so is clear: Commercial and residential development is extending farther and farther out into rural areas. In the town of Oxford alone, for example, developed land has increased about 44% since 1985.

“We are well on our way to becoming wall-to-wall suburb,” states the report from the Blue Ribbon Commission. “Such development brings with it more roads, more congestion, and more pollution. We are losing our remote rural character, and the central urban core has become increasingly distressed. Fragmented land-use policies and patterns encourage competition for limited resources without a regional approach.”

Coordinated planning called for

At the moment, Connecticut and its towns and regions are legally required to produce individual plans of conservation and development on a periodic basis, but this planning is done on parallel tracks rather than as a coordinated effort. Nothing compels the plans to be consistent with one another — or even with other land-use components in the same jurisdiction. Currently, for example, there is no requirement that a local zoning map match the town’s own conservation and development plan.

“Connecticut has had a history of pretty fragmented growth due to inconsistent planning,” says Joe Brennan, CBIA’s vice president for government affairs.

The Blue Ribbon Commission said this should end. “The Commission recommends amendments to Connecticut’s land use enabling legislation that requires greater consistency between municipal, regional and state plans of conservation and development,” the report states. “In addition, Connecticut ... should also require consistency between local land use decisions and the plans ... and between each municipality’s set of land use regulations and its plan of conservation and development, as well as the applicable regional and state plans.”

Many of these suggestions are incorporated in a bill (HB-5044) being considered by the General Assembly. (At press time in early April, the bill was being considered by several committees. Visit the General Assembly's Web site for an update on the bill’s status.)

“The legislature sees an opportunity to make progress on smart growth through the plans for conservation and development,” explains Eric Brown, CBIA associate counsel. “In a nutshell, the proposed legislation aims to get greater consistency among local, regional and state development plans by setting up a process of greater review. CBIA believes that while more can be done to coordinate land-use planning at the regional and state level, the state should not impose consistency mandates. Towns should be able to choose how to manage their growth,” he says.

“The bill also requires that, within a certain amount of time of adopting a plan of conservation and development, a municipality must make its zoning maps and subdivision plans consistent with the conservation and development plan,” Brown continues.

The bill would also allow towns to create “priority funding areas” based on smart-growth principles. To receive state funding, a project would have to be located in one of these areas. “I think some of the sponsors of that provision feel that it will help direct more state economic development dollars to small and midsize towns,” says Brown.

More, and better, data needed

But coordinated planning hinges on something Connecticut does not have: up-to-date, comprehensive information about its land — and technology that would allow the data to be shared by those who need it.

“Smart growth embodies a lot of good principles — preserve open space and farmland, reuse abandoned industrial sites, etc. — but those are just topic sentences,” says Susan Godshall, senior vice president of the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce and the day-to-day coordinator of the Connecticut Regional Institute for the 21st Century. “To push development in those directions, you need some tools. You need more information to make better decisions.”

That information could be provided by two things, both of which are being considered at the legislature. The first is a geographic information system (GIS) database, which provides a computerized snapshot of every aspect — topography, natural resources, brownfields, infrastructure, and so forth — of every piece of property in the state. “Right now there is no rule book that says what any city or town has to adopt in the way of software,” explains Godshall. “So they end up buying different stuff, and their land-use maps are not compatible.”

The second key tool is a statewide build-out analysis, which is a projection of what the state would look like in the future, based simply on current zoning regulations and projected patterns of development.

“These have been extremely effective in other states,” says Godshall. “Massachusetts paid for one for every one of its cities and towns, and it triggered huge amounts of local action when people saw visually how much their existing zoning would allow.”

“But the problem with the methodology of the Massachusetts’ build-out analysis,” says attorney Blaesser, “was that it was based on static assumptions, without regard for historic patterns and rates of local development, the role of market forces in influencing potential new growth, whether existing infrastructure can accommodate local growth, and the impact on potential new growth of such non-zoning factors as labor supply and housing availability.”

Even if a build-out analysis considers all of those factors, residents might not like what it shows. That inevitably begs certain questions: “If they don’t like what they see [and they decide to restrict development], but they know they still need a tax base, how will they raise money for services?” Godshall asks rhetorically. “If all you can rely on is your property tax, how do you grow your grand list without development, without consuming open space — and without losing the character that drew people to Con-necticut in the first place? That’s why the ideas of smart growth and property taxes have a point of collision.”

Property tax concerns

It’s a fact of life in Connecticut: The property tax is the primary fuel for city and town operations. Indeed, Connecticut ranked third (in 1998) among all states in terms of property tax burden per capita, according to the report from the Con-necticut Regional Institute.

Most of that money goes toward public education, which costs about $7 billion per year, according to the Blue Ribbon Commission. And because grand-list growth has been sluggish, many municipalities have felt they had no other choice but to raise property taxes. Over the past five years, the statewide increase has been nearly $500 million, the report states.

Clearly, this fiscal pressure drives local development strategies. “The overdependence on property taxes to fund local public services causes municipalities to engage in destructive competition for grand list growth, which has resulted in bad land use decisions and costly and inefficient sprawl development,” states the report from the Blue Ribbon Commis-sion, which went on to recommend a number of proposed tax-law changes meant to reverse this trend and support smart growth.

“We agree that there are certain problems with the state’s property tax, but we have some concerns with the approach the commission has taken,” says CBIA’s Brennan, who was a member of the commission’s property tax subcommittee. “There is agreement that there’s a problem, but there’s no consensus in the legislature on how to reform it.

“One of the things that we insisted upon in the commission meetings,” says Brennan, “is that if we are to have property tax reform, we also need spending reforms at the local level. That means addressing municipal cost drivers such as binding arbitration and pension and health benefits for municipal workers.

“We have talked for many, many years about the impact of the local property tax on the state’s competitiveness, especially for manufacturers,” he continues. “There have been some changes, but we’re still pretty uncompetitive compared with many other areas. And it’s hard to look at the property tax in isolation. Many of the smart-growth initiatives are about directing economic development into urban centers and preserving open space in the rural parts of the state, to preserve the quality and character of Connecticut. The property tax is one aspect of that, but only one.”

Striking a balance

On balance, although it appears that the concept of smart growth is making headway in Connecticut, it may be a while before it takes hold in a comprehensive way. The pending legislation may be the first step.

“This is an effort to get some of the building blocks — the build-out analysis, the GIS — in place,” says Brennan. “Is there a huge groundswell of support in the legislature to take action on smart growth? I would say no. From CBIA’s perspective, the economy has some pretty major problems to deal with — global competition, rising costs for energy and health care, addressing competitiveness issues. These are much more pressing than smart growth.”

Plus, there is the matter of the state’s fierce independence.

“The old Yankee mentality is still there, for sure, and will continue to be a big factor,” says CBIA’s Brown. “I think there is still a fair amount of skepticism about how these things are going to be received at the local level.”

“You need to strike a balance between local needs for growth and regional planning concerns,” says Blaesser. “You need to be cautious about maintaining that balance, and also to recognize that the process, principles and regulations must be dynamic, not static, and should be tempered with a good dose of market reality.

“Working within a smart-growth framework is fine,” he says, “as long as you don’t use it as a means by which to stop growth, or so restrict it that the market can’t operate efficiently.”

 

[back to top]


Related article: