LEWISTON – “We have to make our cities and towns work again,” the president of GrowSmart Maine told an audience at Bates College on Tuesday evening.
Alan Caron spoke about the effects of development sprawl to an audience of about three dozen people at a meeting hosted by the Androscoggin Land Trust.
“We can never buy our way out of sprawl,” he said.
Caron explained that he believes people have the right to live wherever they want, but, he said, “We shouldn’t subsidize sprawl.” He said some public policies, such as state funding of only new school construction, lead to the irony of higher-quality education in smaller communities where taxes are lower.
“People chase the lower taxes,” Caron noted. This results in a distribution of population outward from the service-center communities, he said. He referred to projected charts that detailed the decline of service-center communities and the rise of development in rural areas.
A single house on a large plot of land is the kind of situation that Caron refers to as sprawl.
“It’s not a traffic-clogged highway,” he said. “That’s just a symptom of sprawl.”
Inefficient land use
Caron defined sprawl as the inefficient use of land that results when residential and commercial development leapfrog existing infrastructure of towns into previously undeveloped rural areas. A major consequence of sprawl is the progressive elimination of working farms and forests, along with other open spaces that have environmental and recreational value, he said.
Another negative aspect cited by Caron is the creation of “island neighborhoods.” He stated that sprawl causes obvious environmental, tax and economic problems, but he went on to emphasize social and health problems.
“We are in the early age of the moving living room,'” Caron said as he pointed out the amenities now included in vehicles, such as cell phones and DVD players. Commutes to work are longer from outlying homes, he said, and because all activity is related to automobiles there’s more pollution and health problems because people don’t walk as much as in previous generations.
Unless reversals of sprawl are accomplished, “the next generation will pay dearly for our negligence,” Caron said.
He described the beneficial effect of conservation subdivisions as an anti-sprawl tool. That municipal requirement is being tried in Freeport, he said. It groups housing units reasonably close and provides for preservation of open space.
He also said transfer of development rights can be used to control sprawl.
Some plans useless’
Recent litigation has put some teeth in comprehensive plans, Caron told the group. He said too many municipalities have comprehensive plans that are “artfully written, but functionally useless.”
Because of a recent court ruling, municipalities will be taking notice and realizing that adherence to the plan isn’t an option but, rather, an ironbound obligation.
Based in Yarmouth, the three-year-old organization’s mission is to mobilize people in Maine to protect their communities from the negative effects of sprawl. GrowSmart Maine is committed to building a citizen network that can confront all the issues included with sprawl: affordable housing, public transportation options, protection of working forests and farms, tax policy, revitalization of towns and sustainable economic development.
The Androscoggin Land Trust is dedicated to protecting, through land conservation and stewardship, the traditional landscapes, important natural areas and outdoor experience throughout Androscoggin County and neighboring towns. Since 1991, the land trust has protected more than 2,500 acres.
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