Sacramento Head Start Alumni Association

Growing Smart project

Feb 26, 2002

Growing Smart

States and their local governments now have new practical tools available to help combat urban sprawl, protect farmland, promote affordable housing, and encourage redevelopment. They appear in the American Planning Association's new Growing Smart Legislative Guidebook: Model Statutes for Planning and the Management of Change, 2002 Edition (Stuart Meck, FAICP, Gen. Editor). The Guidebook and its accompanying User Manual are the culmination of APA's seven-year Growing Smart project, an effort to draft the next generation of model planning and zoning legislation for the U.S.

"The Growing Smart project responds to the tremendous interest nationally in state legislatures on reforming planning and land-use laws to enhance their effectiveness and make great communities happen," said W. Paul Farmer, AICP, APA executive director. "The Growing Smart models replace two model planning and zoning enabling acts drafted by an advisory committee of the U.S. Department of Commerce in the 1920s that served as the basis for or influenced most planning enabling legislation in this country. Clearly, government planning and the issues it addresses have gotten a lot more complicated since then and APA believed it was time to develop new model laws to respond to the needs of the 21st century."

A unique feature of the Guidebook is the variety of options provided for statutory reform instead of a one-size-fits-all model, the difficulty with the 1920s models. Commentary provides background information (including summaries of key state statutes), describes pros and cons of legislative alternatives, and make suggestions concerning implementation. Stuart Meck, FAICP, the project's principal investigator, said the Guidebook and User Manual "are aimed at governors, state legislators and their staffs, and local government officials, as well as planners, developers, home builders, environmentalists, and other citizens." In formulating the model legislation, Meck said, "we tried to answer the kinds of practical questions that state lawmakers might raise -- what works and why, and under what conditions."

Topics covered in the Guidebook's 15 chapters include a wide range of state, regional, and local comprehensive and functional planning issues, urban growth area designation, zoning, subdivision control, development impact fees, administrative and judicial review of land-use decisions, enforcement, regional tax-base sharing, innovative land-use regulations, including incentive systems, a model "smart growth act" modeled after a well-regarded 1997 Maryland law, authorization for traditional neighborhood development, farmland and historic preservation, redevelopment, and tax increment financing. The Guidebook contains provisions on establishing a "state biodiversity conservation plan" and on integrating state environmental policy acts into local comprehensive planning. Also included are model statutes to ensure the availability of affordable housing at the local level and streamline local development permit review practices, making them less cumbersome and more predictable. Click here to read a summary of the Guidebook.

The User Manual helps those interested in statutory reform navigate through the Guidebook and, by means of checklists and case studies, select from the options available in the Guidebook and tailor a program of statutory reform that will meet the unique needs of their state.

Project Sponsors
Financial support for the project was provided by the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (the lead federal agency), the Federal Highway Administration and the Federal Transit Administration in the U.S. Department of Transportation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Economic and Community Development Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Siemens Corporation, and the members of APA.

Directorate
Advising APA on the Growing Smart project was a Directorate appointed by the nation's major organizations that represent elected officials. Included were representatives of the Council of State Community Development Agencies, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the National League of Cities, the National Association of Regional Councils, the National Association of Towns and Townships, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. In addition, there were several members-at-large who represented the built and natural environments and local government law.
http://www.planning.org/growingsmart/index.htm