Really Smart Growth
Counties around our state and our country are racing to adopt various versions of what are know as “smart growth” initiatives or comprehensive land use plans to help manage how development occurs in our communities. These initiatives are billed as sane alternatives to unrestricted development, which creates urban sprawl and “large-footprints” on the natural environment. While comprehensive land use planning may sound logical and efficient, I do not believe that telling other people where and how they should live is a role of government in a free society.
People (generally not governments) created and freely moved into high-density cities in our country when they saw advantages to doing so. To the extent that “urban sprawl” should even be called a problem, its solution should be to attract people to high-density developments not force them into such developments. A large percentage of those who move to previously undeveloped areas do so to escape two main afflictions found in most cities: high taxes and crime. County governments then subsidize this exodus by committing tax dollars (from both the new areas and existing cities) to create new infrastructure (roads and schools) for the émigrés.
When city governments offer better services for the taxes they collect and county governments stop raising taxes to create new infrastructure rather than maintaining existing infrastructure, “sprawl” will not be an issue to talk about. “Smart growth” and “comprehensive planning” are simply concepts that do not belong in a society that respects the private property rights of individuals. Right now, these schemes can be considered devices to shift future county development into the hands of a select few number of influential developers. Smaller independent developers who want to put up 20-40 homes in the county are being regulated and zoned out of the process in favor of larger, “smarter” developers, who are putting their staff on the commissions and boards making the rules.
As a county commissioner, I will not support any initiatives to restrict what people in un-incorporated areas of the county would like to do with their land. It is their private property to do so as they wish. I will also not support eminent domain land confiscations initiated to further comprehensive planning objectives or private developments.
(See my response to the TREBIC candidates' survey.)
