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This article was originally published at PunditHouse By: Mark Pellin The Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners last month threw its support behind an effort to win a $3.5-million federal grant that would be used to help craft a regional plan to create sustainable and livable communities. The initiative centers on the principles of so-called smart growth, ripe with an emphasis on social equity for housing and education opportunities, collaborative economic development, and shared transportation options. But the sustainable communities regional planning grants program is drawing criticism for being an overreach of the federal government, designed to muscle localities into restricting where people can live, work and recreate by corralling them into dense areas connected by public transit. The first wave of grants, totaling about $75 million nationwide, is being administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) through its new Sustainability Partnership with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation (DOT). The grants are seed money of sorts for the Livable Communities Act, which is currently weaving its way through Congress and is on track to become law later this year. The act would authorize a whopping $4 billion to be administered by a newly created branch within HUD, called the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, charged with imposing what critics label "a Washington-based, central planning model on localities across the country." The Democrat majority of the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners voted along party lines to pursue the sustainable communities grant. The Charlotte City Council in July gave unanimous, bi-partisan support to the same. The Centralina Council of Governments (COG) is overseeing the grant application. If it's successful, the funding will be used to enact the sustainable-growth policies and livability principles of the CONNECT Regional Vision Plan, which was adopted last year by all 73 member jurisdictions of the COG, including Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. "This is the time to try to put legs under the CONNECT vision and to move forward," COG Executive Director Al Sharp told commissioners in pitching for the sustainable communities grant. "It's to effectively provide the basis for better planning data and basis of cooperation, so that our own resources and future federal resources can be brought to solve the problems of our community." Critics of the sustainable communities grants as precursor to the Livable Communities Act, however, contend that tying local planning decisions to federal resources can prove a slippery and dangerous slope. "Local land use and zoning has always been the responsibility of local and State governments - to coordinate transportation and zoning projects, maximizing economic growth and serving community needs," wrote Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). "But the administration's ‘livable communities' initiative ignores this jurisdictional boundary by leveraging grant money to gain heavy influence over local planning decisions. "The ‘Office of Livable Communities' reflects Washington's lack of trust in localities' ability to solve their own problems," Ryan continued, "and instead it imposes an urban-utopian fantasy through an unprecedented intrusion of the Federal Government into the shaping of local communities." Ronald Utt, a senior research fellow for economic policy studies at The Heritage Foundation, expressed similar misgivings in a report released when the Obama Administration first unveiled its livable communities initiative. "Rich in the sort of progressive euphemisms used to mask real intentions, (it) heralds a process that could likely lead to an unprecedented federal effort to force Americans into an antiquated lifestyle that was common to the early years of the previous century," Utt wrote. "More specifically, these initiatives reflect an escalation in what is shaping up as President Obama's apparent intent to re-energize and lead the Left's longstanding war against America's suburbs." Mecklenburg Commissioner Karen Bentley, a Republican whose district includes suburban north Mecklenburg, voted against the county pursuing the federal sustainable communities planning grant. "My concern is around the strings that are attached with these federal grant dollars and how, my fear, is that this is really the Obama Administration coming together with a federal smart-growth policy filtered down to the local level," Bentley said. "I think if we do a fair assessment of what those three agencies (HUD, EPA and DOT) have been doing and now are doing, I think a fair-minded person would come to the same conclusion." Sharp, with the Centralina Council of Governments, the local agency charged with pursuing the grant, conceded that Bentley concerns were justified. "I agree with you," he said. "I think the challenge for us and the region is not to get sucked in, to do it our way, and to make sure there's a full participation from all the communities. "I really think there is a danger," Sharp said. "But we only do this voluntarily, we can't be forced into it. We hope to have enough fortitude not to have things dictated to us, but to do our own decision-making on our own date and know that what we get out of it is what we want." Precedent, though, proves that might be easier said than done, according to Utt. From his Heritage Foundation policy report on livable communities: "In January 1998, President Bill Clinton's Environmental Protection Agency threatened to withhold federal transportation funds from the Atlanta region because it did not meet federal air-quality standards and said that it would agree to restore the funding only if the state of Georgia dramatically altered its land-use and transportation policies in ways similar to those characteristic of the Smart Growth polices that discourage single-family detached housing and encourage public transit use and investment. Georgia agreed to do this, at least through the waning days of the Clinton Administration, but soon abandoned the policies when leadership in Washington changed." "Carol Browner headed the EPA when the threat was imposed on Atlanta under Clinton. Today, she is Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change. With the prospect of even worse to come from this new DOT-HUD partnership on sustainable communities, those who are skeptical of the President's grandiose efforts at social engineering should be on the alert." Ironically, Mecklenburg Commissioners Chairman Jennifer Roberts, a Democrat, hailed the work being done by Carol Browner to push the sustainable communities planning grants. Roberts told her board colleagues that she was in Washington when the initiative was being discussed with the EPA and Browner. She came away impressed. "The strength of this grant is it's going to help give us resources to begin implementing some of this vision," Roberts said of the COG's CONNECT regional plan and its focus on fostering sustainable communities. "It was exciting to hear the federal government thinking about the same cross-silo thinking, the same inclusive thinking, trying to be holistic," Roberts said. "It's really an opportunity for the Charlotte-region to be highlighted throughout the nation as one of the handful of communities that are looked at as being out in front thinking about that regional collaboration." |
