Maryland smart growth laws having an impact

The first tangible results of the state’s push for a new paradigm are becoming visible, but the commitment of some local governments lags behind.Maryland’s smart growth initiative helped to spark a national debate on land use shortly after it went into effect in 1998, but the impact within the state was not immediately apparent. Signs of significant change are now emerging.

New state-funded schools and civic buildings are going up in city centers instead of in the suburbs. The state has stopped or retooled road projects inconsistent with smart growth and budgeted more money for the preservation of open space. In downtown Silver Spring, private developers are building a new mixed-use core with a new urbanist design, and plans for transit- oriented developments are moving off the drawing board. Moreover, planners within the state are saying that the smart growth initiative is creating a climate conducive to human-scale design in many communities.

Despite these successes, changing the mind-set of the local officials who have the final say on most development projects remains a serious challenge. Gov. Parris Glendening has publicly chastised those local governments that have resisted smart growth. Glendening continues to introduce new smart growth legislation, and he elevated the Maryland Office of Planning to cabinet status. Harriet Tregoning, an advocate of the New Urbanism, was tapped to head the department.

Legislative tools
Smart growth laws in Maryland pursue two principal goals: channeling growth into already developed areas and preserving rural land. The primary tool for containing growth is the Smart Growth Areas Act, which creates “priority funding areas,” i.e., zones in which development may qualify for state funds. The state’s cities and towns are automatic priority funding areas, and every county government has designated additional areas that meet specific requirements for use, water and sewer service, and residential density.

On the preservation side of the equation, the Rural Legacy program has so far designated for protection 47,000 acres in 20 of Maryland’s 23 counties. The governor’s Special Assistant for Smart Growth John Frece says the state’s 15-year goal is to preserve 250,000 acres. For the 2000 state budget, the Department of Planning submitted a request for between $35 million and $40 million to fund the program, up from the $25 million that was spent in 1999.

Earlier this year, the General Assembly passed a bill that requires all counties to adopt the Maryland Building Rehabilitation Code. By streamlining the confusing and constraining renovation regulations, the code encourages rehabilitation and cuts costs for developers. The rehabilitation code will go into effect in the spring of 2001.

Home builders and environmental groups both spoke out in support of this effort — one indication that smart growth “may forge some coalitions between groups that in the past have been at each other’s throats,” says Frece.

The legislature also passed a bill requiring the Department of Planning to draft optional “smart codes” for infill and mixed-use developments, and a working document should be ready by the end of the year. “There is no political effort to impose these model codes on local governments,” Frece says. “But the governor will set up pools of money as incentives, that would only be available to those jurisdictions that adopt these models or something substantially similar.”

Additional new layers in the smart growth legislation include revisions in the brownfields redevelopment program that allows the state to bear the cost of initial site assessments and changes in the rules regarding transfer of development rights (TDR).

The rules would require 50 percent of the proceeds from the sale of TDRs to be used for capital improvements — schools and parks, for instance — in the county or municipality that receives the development. The other half of the proceeds would go back to the Rural Legacy Program for use in areas where the TDRs originated.

The state stays downtown
Beyond crafting legislation, the state has already taken an active role in promoting revitalization of city centers. In Hagerstown, the state is building a new district court downtown after scrapping plans for a move to the suburbs. The governor also overrode a prior decision to place a new University of Maryland education center on the outskirts of the city.

“It’s a big help for us,” says Kathleen Maher, senior planner with Hagerstown. “We’re an older city, densely developed, and there is not a lot of parking. Anything that can happen to encourage people to stay downtown, either with a stick or a carrot, is great for us.”

The city has donated an abandoned department store and hotel complex in downtown for the university campus, and the state tax assessor’s office is moving into a former drugstore on a public square.

Under the law, a state institution such as the University of Maryland has to locate within a priority funding area. However, the site originally proposed was on the agricultural edge of the area and would need extension of roads and utilities. “The case taught us that all sites within priority funding areas are not created equal,” Frece says.

Priority funding drawbacks
According to Maher, the only trouble with the priority funding areas is that they include large undeveloped parcels outside villages and central cities. In effect, Hagerstown is competing for development with these areas right on its borders, she says.

A 1999 report by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an environmental group, found such wide variation in the quality and thoroughness of the mapping analysis that statewide comparisons were almost impossible, and concluded that many priority funding areas were larger than they needed to be.

Another potential problem is that the kind of development most antithetical to smart growth principles may be able to skirt the entire issue. “What we are seeing is that big companies, like the Wal-Marts of the world, don’t need the public sector investment in roads and infrastructure,” says Robert Puentes, a senior research manager with the Center for Urban and Metropolitan Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. “They are still able to develop outside the priority funding areas.”

Frece acknowledges that the political reality was that the smart growth program could not interfere with the counties’ authority over land use. “We could control only where the state spent its money, but we have recognized from the outset that the smart growth program does not have much of a direct effect on development that does not depend on state financing,” he says. The state can only hope that more local governments are becoming aware of the impacts of big-box development.

Transportation impacts
Road building and transportation planning are areas in which the state can have an impact both locally and regionally, so that’s where it set out to prove that it was serious about smart growth. Soon after the law went into effect, the Maryland Department of Transportation identified five highway bypass projects that were inconsistent with smart growth. At the time, these projects only had approximately $1.5 million allocated in planning money, but they would have cost $360 million to build, Frece says.

The effort to eliminate the bypasses has had mixed success. Funding for some roads has been eliminated, while in other communities local officials have fought to carry out construction plans. In the City of Manchester, the state brought in a team from several state agencies to work with local officials and residents on an alternative solution that addressed transportation and development simultaneously. Frece says changes in parking and street patterns could have improved traffic flow for the next 10 to 20 years, but the city rejected the ideas, fearing it would never get a bypass.

In Brookville, local officials kept the bypass in the plans by agreeing to build a “smarter” road: lining the entire length of the road with conservation easements and narrowing it from four lanes to two. Brookville cannot use the bypass to justify new development, and if the road does create more traffic, the city will reimburse the state for the construction costs.
“I don’t know if we can enforce all these conditions, but the case broke ground on the concept of building a road that takes into consideration its impact on growth. That is something new,” Frece says.

Smart growth on the project scale
In addition to its historic town centers, Maryland has viable models for smart growth in the several new urbanist projects that predate the smart growth legislation. The greenfield projects Kentlands, Lakelands, and King Farm have shown compact neighborhoods to be both aesthetically and financially successful. Hope VI developments such as Pleasant View Gardens and The Terraces in Baltimore set new standards for infill and mixed-income housing.

Of the new generation of smart growth projects, the largest and most prominent is the new mixed-use center for Silver Spring just north of the Washington, DC, city limits. In its latest report on sprawl, the Sierra Club featured this project as the state’s foremost model for combining new employment facilities and residential housing with rehabilitation of historic structures and links to transit.

Great hopes are also pinned on Owings Mills Town Center, a transit-oriented, main street development that would replace 46 acres of parking lot adjacent to a Metro line stop in Baltimore County. The state Mass Transit Administration (MTA) has entered into exclusive negotiations with a development team lead by LCOR Inc., a firm with extensive experience in public/private partnership projects. MTA expects that a final plan can be submitted for approval in early 2001, possibly with some minor adjustments in the current master plan by LDR International.

“Owings Mills is clearly a milestone,” says Adele Stephens, director for transit-oriented development for MTA. “It is a model for what we will want to build in the future.”

Maryland planning firm Torti Gallas & Partners/CHK has several projects in planning that respond to the call for compact growth and links to public transportation. Rock Springs Centre in North Bethesda is a fairly intense new urbanist development with 1,525 residential dwellings in mid-rise buildings and more than a million square feet of office and retail space. About a third of the land area is dedicated to parks. The project has zoning and site plan approval for the first phase of 380 apartments and will begin construction in the spring of 2001. On the transit-oriented development side, Torti Gallas has planned a residential and retail center next to the Grosvenor Metro stop on a site owned by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. Gov. Glendening has indicated that he will use the power of the budget to encourage these types of development, even in the face of local opposition.

Change is slow on the local level
Emerging new urbanist projects are encouraging to the Glendening administration, but the battle for the hearts and minds of local officials is not entirely won. Lee Epstein of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation says that on the local level, things “are closer to business as usual. Yes, counties have mapped their priority funding areas, but as a whole they have not taken very many steps in the right direction.”

The consensus among Maryland planners interviewed for this article is that while some communities are more receptive to smart growth, much work remains in educating local officials and the general public. Says Richard Josephson, a planner with Anne Arundel County: “Smart growth is like public transportation. Everyone can agree it’s a good thing, but not on where it should go.”

Two new education projects may help change the status quo. The Department of Planning has developed a 15-hour course, a sort of Zoning and Smart Growth 101, to educate the citizen planners that have to make crucial decisions on local planning boards. The University of Maryland in College Park has received funding from the state to set up the National Center for Smart Growth Education and Research. “We hope that this will become the national repository for smart growth tools, techniques, and information, a leading research facility, and a leading teaching center for both undergraduates and government officials,” Frece says.

Opposition to density
Examples of thwarted or delayed projects attest to the persistence of anti-density sentiment. After several years of controversy, the St. Michaels Town Commission recently turned down a request from the Midland Companies of Washington to build a new urbanist neighborhood extending the small historic town on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

In Howard County, which has long had regulations encouraging neotraditional planning, Stewart Greenbaum, the developer of the 1,168-unit greenfield TND Maple Lawn Farms, has spent 30 months moving the project through the approval process.

“If I can’t get it done in a feasible way in Howard County, what’s the point of doing it in counties that have been slower on the uptake?” Greenbaum recently asked in the Baltimore Sun.

Citizen groups such as Howard Countians for Responsible Growth dismiss smart growth and New Urbanism as empty rhetoric that justifies the same old suburban growth along an already congested highway corridor. Despite the furor, Gov. Glendening continues to pressure officials to resist public protests against high-density zoning.

“You need to have the courage to demand higher density,” he told the Maryland Association of Counties this summer. “You need to have the courage to demand quality design. Good design is the other side of the high-density coin.”