Land Use Planning: A Regional Perspective

by Neal R. Peirce”

L A N D use planning and managed growth are usually addressed at a city, county or state level. A federal plan is badly needed, but all we are likely

to see soon is congressional legislation to encourage and help fund state efforts. This leaves the question of coordination at the regional level.

America’s oldest, most clearly identifiable and historically close-knit re- gion-New England-ffers a chance to look at land use and related growth and natural resource planning in two contexts:

First, to see how the contrasting political cultures of the six New England states have produced quite divergent atmospheres for the enactment and implementation of land use controls, and some of the ethnic and income factors dividing New Englanders in their approach to the problem.

Second, what the need is for region-wide land use planning coordination, and what has been proposed to do about it.

The irony of modern-day New England is that while it suffers from in- sufficient growth and high unemployment on one hand, it is in grave danger of overdevelopment and a rape of its lovely countryside on the other. The region is a prototype of what is called a “mature economy,’’ a situation symbolized by the long-term decline of industries like textiles and shoes. The capital stock tends to be aged, costs of operations high and job oppor- tunities scarce.

Over the span of their history, New Englanders have been able to over- come the adverse odds posed by location and sparse natural resources through a remarkable combination of pluck, luck, the China trade and clipper ships, technological innovation, cheap immigrant labor, tariffs, smart financing and wartime stimuli.

In the 1960s, after and while traditional industries were suffering massive employment losses, it appeared that New England would be able to luck it out again-to make a relatively painless transition from outmoded styles of low-wage factory employment to a high-technology, export-service oriented economy. The new wave industries in Boston’s Route 128 orbit and else-

* Neal R. Peirce is the author of a multi-volume study of “people, politics and power” in the 50 states, including The Megastates of America, The Pacific States of America, The Mountain States of America, The Deep South States of America, The Border South States. He is a contributing editor to the National Journal and is a former Fellow, Woodrow Wil- son International Center for Scholars. This article, based on a forthcoming book, The N e w England States, was prepared for the National Municipal League’s 80th National Conference on Government in San Diego, November 17, 1974.

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where in the region, flourishing from contact with the region’s leading educa- tional institutions, were adding more and more workers a t high incomes. Other export industries like education, health services, finance and insurance, and research and development work were growing rapidly.

Around 1967, the soaring job levels of the early ’60s in these fields began to flatten out and decline, partly as a result of federal cutbacks in defense and aerospace orders. Then came the national recession of 1970-1971, ac- celerating the trend. To their horror, regional economists have seen the New England unemployment rate, which for decades scarcely varied from the national average, rise to and remain 25 percent higher than the rest of the United States. This situation has been exacerbated by major defense cut- backs of the last two years, coupled with the energy crisis which has cost New England, because of its high petroleum dependency, three times as much per capita as the national average.

For new and expanding industries, New England is not a very attractive area today for cost reasons alone, not to mention the region’s higher tax rates, higher construction costs and higher cost of living. To this one must add the problems raised by New England’s per capita income. I t remains, as it has been from time immemorial, higher than the national average. But the region has a “bimodal” pattern of income distribution in which a sub- stantial group of very wealthy families, many of whom built their fortunes a century ago, coexist with a large pool of working poor, who still await first entry into middle-income ranks.

Yet despite all this, New England’s population is growing. One government projection is that New England’s population, from a present total of some 12 million, will rise to 16 million by the year 2000. New England finds itself at the north extension of the East Coast megalopolis, which now covers virtually all of southern New England and has extended into southeastern New Hampshire and Maine’s Portland area.

As this dense development continues, the rural streches between cities may disappear at an alarming rate. Standard suburban sprawl is the chief prob- lem in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, which are in peril of becoming New Jerseyized. In northern New England the problems relate to a splurge of vacation developments, rapid inmigration to choice areas from megalopolis, disappearance of farm land, and proposed refineries and deep- water ports. All of this is occurring, of course, in a geographically confined region with little excess acreage in which to make mistakes.

Vermont, the least ethnic, the most old-style Yankee and rural-small town state of the region, now harboring thousands of exurbanites, has been ad- vanced and daring in environmental measures that run the gamut from citizen-staffed commissions to control future vacation home and recreation developments to the banning of billboards and nonreturnable bottles (see the Review, November 1971, page 5 5 4 ) . Final implementation of land use controls is in political danger now, but among the vast majority of Ver- monters there seems to be a common determination that the pastoral setting

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of an idyllic state will not be sacrificed by the thundering herds of skiers and second-home developers from New York.

Next-door New Hampshire is a study in contrast. Big mill towns, heavily populated with cautious and conservative French-Canadian workers, sprang up a century ago. The state’s Yankee aristocracy has found itself increas- ingly outgunned. The dominant newspaper, the Manchester Union-Leader, is pro-development, anti-planning and anti-tax, and the governor favors that position. Environmental legislation has lagged seriously, and land use con- trols, if they come in the near future, may be possible only because the developers have become alarmed by the complete shut-out they are experi- encing in some of the choicest towns.

Maine falls between these two extremes, but closer to Vermont. A con- sciousness of Maine’s coast and villages as a treasure to be preserved has grown rapidly in recent years, leading to a strong bipartisan environmental movement. Edmund Muskie has been a strong conservationist, and brought along the bulk of the Irish and French-Canadians, members of the Demo- cratic party he revived, with him. Great battles have been fought over oil refineries, water pollution, and industrial site location, with the conservation- ists usually victorious. Land use planning has advanced significantly, but not quite to the level of sophistication of Vermont’s.

Massachusetts has a very mixed record on environmental protection in general, and a poor one on land use controls, for reasons that hark back to the old Yankee-ethnic rivalry that burned so intensely and so long. The ethnics, mostly Democrats with the Irish in the first rank, are the dominant political force, but this has not prevented a number of Yankee Republicans from winning major offices. These Yankee leaders, from a background of fiscal conservatism, are also civil libertarians because of their abolitionist ancestry, and in recent years they have been strong environmentalists. On many issues they are close to the wave of more highly-educated, less patron- age oriented “new Irish”-f which John Kennedy was the great exemplar. The political mix has been further influenced by the professionals from Massachusetts’ universities and high-technology service areas, an articulate group with unusual political influences.

Massachusetts has some model environmental laws. But for reasons largely political, the ethnic-based Democrats controlling the legislature were leary about giving the Yankee Republican governor the authority he wanted to solidify relevant services under his newly-created cabinet Department of Environmental Affairs. The logjam apparently was broken in August 1974, but the question of environmental coordination has so preoccupied the legis- lature that in this sophisticated state, where some of the country’s most advanced discussions about environmental and land use planning go on, comprehensive land use bills are still in the study stage.

Connecticut politics have long been marked by boss control, colorful ethnic rivalries in which the old WASPs have constantly lost influence, and a strong home-rule tradition. The per capita income is the nation’s highest,

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but there are hundreds of thousands of blue collar working folk of Irish, Italian and Polish background, not normally attuned to forward-looking social programs.

Connecticut’s environmental laws up to this decade were a study in frag- mented authority. But then came the rise of an environmental coalition of remarkable potency, headed by Dan Lufkin, a young WASP of Wall Street fame. Yet in the 1971 legislative session, the leadership came from Democrat Stanley Pac, a Polish Catholic liquor salesman from New Britain-scarcely the picture of the elitist environmentalist.

The bill passed created a comprehensive state Department of Environ- mental Protection with impressive powers over virtually every aspect of pol- lution control, forest and park lands, fish and game, flood plain encroach- ment and coastal wetlands. Through its broad powers, that agency has been proceeding toward a de facto land use plan for all of Connecticut, though the planning is primarily negative in stopping ecologically hazardous devel- opment rather than positive in terms of prescribing the most desirable forms and location of development.

Rhode Island is a picture of arrested political development, where the antagonisms of the 1930s linger on-a Democratic-Catholic-ethnic party, now an overwhelming majority, versus a Republican-Protestant-capitalist party. The ruling Democrats are bread-and-butter liberals but social conservatives. The state has a powerful coastal resources management board. But air and water police powers are submersed within the Department of Health and statewide planning within the Department of Administration. Although Rhode Island is so compact that it could easily adopt a land use plan with the same facility that a large city adopts a zoning plan, there is still no unified program for statewide control of land use. The state planning council is now reviewing the draft of such a plan.

Any ranking of the six New England states on environmental and land use policies is necessarily subjective, but I would venture to say that in protection of their natural surroundings, Vermont, Maine and Connecticut are the clear regional leaders, with Vermont first. Massachusetts ranks in the middle and New Hampshire and Rhode Island must be considered last.

All of this is important because New England is going to have to cope with very real problems of divergent political cultures and state policies if it hopes to form a coherent policy to assure the income of peoples, adequate natural resource protection and land use controls in our time.

Moreover, the more one looks at the land use problems New England faces, the clearer is the essential interdependence of the region, densely popu- lated southern New England and the northern vacation lands alike. If the north is to be preserved as an adequate recreational ground for southern New Englanders, for instance, strict controls will have to be placed on big- scale land and second home developments.

Forests are another case in point. They are so important to the whole region, as watersheds and recreation areas and sources of timber and income,

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that there should be stiff controls to prevent large parcels of woodland from being broken into residential or commercial grids. There is also a crying need to stem housing and commercial development on the region’s dwindling sup- ply of farmlands. Water supply problems underscore the theme of regional interdependence. With prospective population growth in the southern states, formidable amounts of additional water will be needed from the important drainage and reservoir states of the northern tier,

Similar issues are posed by the siting of power plants, which frequently ship their power across state lines. The private utilities-New England has an insignificant amount of public power-have formed a New England power pool which decides where new plants will be located and where the power will flow. The public regulatory function occurs only at the state level, or in the case of nuclear plants, in part through the federal government. By 1983, three new fossil fuels and eight more nuclear units will come “on line” in New England, occupying thousands of acres of land. But there will be no regional overview or control of the siting decisions, which are clearly inter- state in their implications for the environment and quality of life of all the region’s people.

In the past several years, the formalized regional structures of New England, which might control all this growth, have advanced by leaps and bounds to a scope without parallel in any other American region. The first was the New England Council, an entirely private, businessmen’s organiza- tion set up in the 1920s which in turn has been an important catalyst in launching other regional efforts. Its first progeny was the New England Governors Conference, formed in 193 7, which has become increasingly im- portant as the forum for governmental coordination in the region and its common political voice.

The much younger New England Regional Commission, one of the so-called Title V commissions to promote regional economic development, has had ups and downs during its brief history but now seems to be on a definite upswing as it concentrates on a number of critical and immediate regional problems, including fisheries, railroad transportation, energy and steps required to fill the region’s growing job deficit.

Then there is the New England Congressional Caucus, which has made the New England delegation the first congressional group in the nation’s history to open a professional staff office in the capital. The caucus innova- tion has been made all the more unique by the inclusion of a professional research office.

Another important group is the New England River Basins Commission, one of the Title I1 commissions created by the Federal Water Resources Planning Act. The New England commission seems to be the most success- ful of the lot across the country, in part because of its activist, highly professional chairman (Frank Gregg) . Remarkably advanced thinking about New England’s overall natural resource base, including a compelling case

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for comprehensive land use planning, has taken place under the river basin commission’s aegis.

Surveying these regional organizations, one is impressed with how young most of them are. The New England Council and Governors Conference antedate World War 11, but the New England Regional Commission was not organized until 1965, the River Basins Commission until 1967, and the formalized Congressional Caucus and Research Office until 1972.

Obviously, the region has taken unto itself a fascinating set of mechanisms to try to cope with its problems. New England presents an important laboratory and test case in America today of the meets and bounds of what can be accomplished on a regional basis. Yet serious questions must be raised, particularly in the area of land use planning. A political amalgama- tion of New England into a single state, however desirable it might be theoretically, is not likely to come about in our lifetimes. And so, one must ask, what can be done short of that?

The essential problem is that all the existing organizations can plan, recommend, exort and devise to their heart’s content, but that any single governor or state government can defy them with impunity.

It would be desirable, but probably politically impossible, to create a region-wide land use commission with members elected on a territorial, one- man, one-vote basis and independent funding sources. But short of that, there is still hope. One of the existing organizations-and the best choice would probably be the New England River Basins Commission, working closely with the Governors Conference-could be given the chief land use planning and advisory role. The River Basins Commission has the expertise and leadership potential to do the job. I t might be strengthened by having more elected officials, including not just state officers but also state legislators, officially represented on its board. Moreover, state agencies with implement- ing authority for land use plans should be closely associated with the com- mission in its region-wide planning work. Federal legislation could and should expand the title and function of the river basin commissions to include all natural resources. And finally, the federal government could help if the Office of Management and Budget were to refuse to budget projects of federal agencies which were unplanned and uncoordinated through the regional planning institution.

Such ideas have not moved beyond the talking stage in New England, and are barely that far. But unless debate, and then action, moves forward in the rather near future, it may be impossible to coordinate the land use planning of this most compact and identifiable of all American regions. And if the goal cannot be achieved in New England, it will probably not be realized anywhere in the United States.