In the News

from the The Washington Post, 9.20.03

The Right Choice for The EPA  

By Parris Glendening

Think of a key environmental issue – global warming, air pollution, storm water runoff, habitat destruction – and chances are its causes can be traced to haphazard urban growth.

When cities and states fail to plan well for their development, roads and sewers become overburdened and send emissions and effluent into our air and water. Ecologically critical lands disappear before we can protect them. Our people's health and quality of life degrade.

For these reasons, it is essential that the next administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency understand the connections between urban sprawl and the environment. Fortunately, Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, the president's nominee for the post, is one who does.

I learned this firsthand in working with the governor at the National Governors Association (NGA) over the past few years. In our respective stints as NGA chairman, Leavitt and I collaborated on an effort to raise the profile of growth issues while developing tools states can use to tame sprawl and build healthy cities and towns. In governors-only sessions, he lobbied hard, and successfully, for NGA to produce its first-ever land use principles.

Leavitt's passion in this arena grew out of his experience in Utah. While his home state is largely rural, the vast majority of its population -- and most of the projected future growth – is concentrated in an environmentally sensitive corridor along the Wasatch Mountains, stretching 100 miles to the north and south of Salt Lake City. The population of this sliver of Utah is expected to swell from 1.6 million in 2000 to 5 million by 2050.

Leavitt recognized that it was the state's responsibility to make sure that this growth didn't become an unlivable mess. At the same time, he believed that citizens and local governments should have a strong say in developing a vision for their future.

With those principles in mind, he created a commission to administer a special fund for protecting open space in developing areas. He secured funding to preserve 175 miles of railroad right-of-way for commuter rail. And, most impressively, he served as honorary co-chairman of Envision Utah, lending unequivocal support to a public-private planning effort that has become a national model. Led by a coalition of business, civic and government leaders, Envision Utah began by listening to people, thousands of them. Citizens were invited to more than 150 public workshops, where, through use of innovative planning tools, they were able show how they wanted to shape future land use, transportation and open space preservation.

Mike Leavitt participated in the workshops just like any other citizen, sitting for hours with fellow Utahns at one of the many workshop tables. When Envision Utah asked every household in the region to complete a survey on the region's future, he sat down with his family to do just that. And he recorded a television ad urging his constituents to do the same.

In the end, citizens said they wanted more investment in public transit and affordable housing, more reliance on cycling and walking, more preservation of open spaces and more town-like development along key transportation spines. The chosen Quality Growth Strategy departs dramatically from current trends, conserving 171 square miles of land; offering expanded choices in housing and neighborhood types; reducing vehicle emissions and traffic congestion; and saving $ 4.5 billion in transportation, water, sewer and utility infrastructure, which would have subsidized sprawl.

I'll leave it to environmentalist colleagues to scrutinize other aspects of the governor's record. No doubt they will press him to explain how his support of the controversial Legacy Highway squares with his quality-growth principles, as they should.

As Leavitt well knows, the EPA has become an important partner in developing citizen-friendly, market-oriented approaches to managing urban growth along the lines of Envision Utah, which the EPA helped to fund. Far from dictating how places should grow, the agency has supported innovation, served as a clearinghouse for best practices and showed admirable flexibility on redeveloping industrial brownfields and managing urban runoff.

Grappling with sprawl and creating great communities have nothing to do with partisanship. Governors from both parties have been leaders in these arenas.

As senators debate Leavitt's confirmation as EPA chief they would do well to recognize his bipartisan leadership in bringing issues of growth and quality of life to the fore.

The writer, former governor of Maryland, is president of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute and a board member of Smart Growth America, a national coalition of organizations advocating alternatives to urban sprawl.