A REGIONAL VISION
York County towns' growth caps are being used as a model to prevent sprawl -- and save woodlands.
By JOHN RICHARDSON
Portland Press Herald: Monday, July 9, 2007
In southern Maine, land-use planning often amounts to the zoning equivalent of "enough is enough."
Rural towns inundated with subdivision proposals in recent years have sought relief by limiting the number of building permits that they'll give out in a calendar year. The tactic has not been popular with land-use experts, who say it makes matters worse by pushing development into neighboring towns, farther from service centers and deeper into the woods.
Now, however, some planning experts are rethinking that view. They even are using growth caps in York County as a model for regional planning, albeit an accidental one.
"It's a perfect example of comprehensive planning on the regional scale," said Alan Caron, the founder of GrowSmart Maine. "It just kind of emerged. Nobody's done it intentionally."
Regional planning has been the Holy Grail of the anti-sprawl movement in southern Maine. Planners see it as a critical step in steering growth toward service-center communities, which already have sewers, public water, highways and schools, and away from the rural communities that are more equipped for growing trees than growing populations.
Maine's most established model of regional land-use planning is the Maine Land Use Regulation Commission, the sole zoning and planning agency for more than 10 million acres in sparsely populated northern Maine. The commission oversees the 450 townships, plantations and towns as a single region.
Consider the plan by Plum Creek Timber Co. to rezone more than 20,000 acres across multiple townships north of Greenville to allow development of 975 house lots and two resorts. The commission is conducting a single, comprehensive review. In southern Maine, on the other hand, a project of that scale would involve numerous planning boards, each focusing only on its small piece of the development.
"They can look at a massive long-range plan and weigh the merits. You're not able to do that in this fragmented system we have in southern Maine," Caron said. "We're still trying to manage it at the local level."
The Southern Maine Regional Planning Commission, an agency that provides planning help to 39 towns, hopes to create a southern Maine model of regional planning.
Executive Director Paul Schumacher is working with the six towns around Mount Agamenticus -- York, Kittery, Eliot, South Berwick, Ogunquit and Wells -- to coordinate land-use strategies for the special resource they share.
The region is considered fertile ground because of the undisturbed woodland there and years of cooperation to conserve land through purchases and easements. The effort still will require six towns to share authority over land uses, however, and it is difficult to get several communities to agree on a vision for growth, Schumacher said. "Let's face it, it's hard enough to do that in one town."
With each town fending for itself, meanwhile, small, rural towns have resorted to simple building limits to slow growth within their borders.
"It probably saved us from 100 to 150 houses in the last few years alone," Acton Town Planner Kenneth Paul said. Acton gives out all of its 35 building permits each year, usually on the first day they're made available.
Even so, the caps haven't guided development into areas best suited for the growth, and most of the homes continue to be built in timberlands instead of areas designated for growth.
"Development does tend to happen where it's most cost- effective or wherever land is available," said Bud Benson, town planner in Standish. "That tends to be wherever people want to sell their land, and it happens more often in the rural areas. It's hard to push development where you want it."
Standish is trying to do just that by pioneering the next generation of growth limits -- a differential cap. As of this month, the town will issue 85 building permits a year, but only 25 of them will go to building lots in the rural zone of the town.
Now some planners would like to take that idea to a regional level. And they see western York County as an example of how it might work.
Eleven rural towns surrounding Sanford have adopted growth caps. Sanford, a service center with lagging population growth, has not.
Caron and others think the unintended result is that Sanford's population grew 5 percent between 2000 and 2006. That's a slower rate of growth than in the outlying towns, but a significant increase for Sanford.
The communities accidentally created a crude regional comprehensive plan with a growth zone and outlying rural zones, according to Caron.
"Sanford is the growth center," he said. "You don't want 11 little downtowns (in the surrounding communities), because you're actually creating sprawl."
Caron and others are using the example to promote the idea of allowing broader use of local growth caps if they are part of regional comprehensive plans. That could turn one of the more parochial responses to development pressure into a vehicle that gets communities working together.
"The best thing to do now," Caron said, "is to get people to think regionally."
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