Marc Elrich - It is time for Montgomery County to enact a growth policy that makes sense.
==========================================================
originally posted at :
http://www.gazette.net/stories/091207/montcol201233_32359.shtml

It is time for Montgomery County to enact a growth policy that makes sense.

For too long, development proceeded in a way that packed our roads and schools and over-taxed our fire and rescue, police, recreation and social services. This hurt our quality of life and our ability to meet our children’s educational needs, while straining public safety resources and damaging the environment.

We got in this mess by allowing growth that did not pay its way, leaving average taxpayers with the bill. Growth proponents like to say that the county failed to build the roads and schools, ignoring the reality that the county didn’t have the money to build these things precisely because it didn’t collect adequate development fees and was politically unwilling to impose the massive tax increases on residents that would have been required to support growth. The problems we face are the legacy of county policies.

The county cannot afford to adopt a growth policy that pretends that there are no problems or fails to take the steps necessary to address them. We need rules, guidelines and development fees that are permanent, fair and adequate to meet our needs. We need policies that allow development only when and where the infrastructure is truly adequate, not policies that trade away our quality of life.

Stricter policies wouldn’t stop growth or hurt the economy. They will have little impact on the current cycle because there are already 28,000 houses and commercial space for more than 100,000 jobs approved that will not be affected by changes to growth policy — construction that won’t pay the true cost of the necessary infrastructure, adding to our problems. The housing alone represents seven to 12 years of on-going construction. The steps we take today are to prepare for the future. Most importantly, whatever the state of the economy and the building market, new development requires new infrastructure that has to be paid for by somebody.

The Planning Board recently forwarded a set of recommendations on growth to the County Council. It had good proposals such as development impact fees that for the first time generally reflect the true cost of providing the needed roads and schools. It was the welcome start to paying attention to long-term facility, fiscal, economic, environmental and social sustainability.

Unfortunately, those proposals fall short when addressing growth management. They essentially say that we have adequate transportation capacity because there are buses and therefore development can proceed unchecked. They recommend allowing entire school clusters to go as high as 135 percent of capacity. Ignoring congestion and school over-crowding is not acceptable.

For all the talk about Montgomery County being the ‘‘model” of good planning, the reality is that other jurisdictions are often more deliberate and more creative in struggling with the same challenges that we face.

We must recognize that a continuation of urban sprawl and over-reliance on single occupancy vehicles is counter to everything we know has to happen in order to fight global warming. Our design and planning has to address that by building transportation infrastructure that meets public needs, but for most commuters, the public transportation system is simply inadequate — too slow, too infrequent and too unreliable — to meet their needs.

We can’t ask future development to pay for past mistakes, but we can avoid making those same mistakes again. There are more creative ways to do this than we’ve employed and we should explore them. As a general principle, growth should be focused where the infrastructure can support it, kept out of areas where it can’t, and occur in a way that benefits our community.

Too many proposals, like some of the transportation ideas the council has seen, aren’t really about improving things, but about allowing things to get worse while narrowly avoiding the worst-case scenario. I don’t accept that worse is either acceptable or inevitable. I challenge all of us to think about what kind of community we want and to boldly go about creating it.

A sound growth policy should lead us to a place we want to be, not ask us to accept a continuing decline in our quality of life.

Marc Elrich, a Democrat from Takoma Park, is an at-large member of the County Council. His e-mail address is Councilmember.Elrich@ MontgomeryCountyMD.gov