Sprawling politics

Revitalizing Portland may be the way to save the suburbs, but getting there politically may be one long, tough drive.

by Lance Tapley

Frank O'Hara has watched Maine's initial efforts to control suburban sprawl through zoning and mass transit. As a consultant to the State Planning Office, he himself has contributed to those efforts. But he fears they won't be enough.

"If four of five people still want to move to the country," O'Hara maintains, "the political will is just not going to be there to build denser developments." It's a question of psychology. "We've got to get to people's attitudes and make living together acceptable again," he says. O'Hara, who runs a private planning firm in Hallowell, favors focusing state money and attention on attracting people to urban areas. But in a rural state, that too is a political problem.

Sprawl has become a big environmental issue in Maine. Governor King says it's the biggest, and the legislature passed several bills this year that begin to deal with it. Towns throughout southern Maine are imposing building caps and moratoriums. A state-government-organized mass-transit system is being put in place, beginning with a Portland-to-Boston train next spring.

We have sprawl because Mainers are as devoted to the car culture and the ideal of a house lot in the country as

Americans everywhere are. Maine Department of Transportation figures show that in roughly 35 years, while the state's population increased about 30 percent, vehicle registrations went up close to 200 percent. Transportation now consumes a greater share of the typical family budget than food does. Developers' bulldozers and "I'll do damn well what I please with my land" property-rights sentiment have easily crushed meager anti-sprawl efforts in the past.

But in the last legislative session, prompted by increasing public frustration with traffic congestion, anti-sprawl or "smart growth" lobbying by King-administration officials and an unusual coalition of environmentalists and business interests succeeded in getting several small reforms passed. Among these were a measure that requires state government to give preference to downtowns and designated growth areas for state-funded construction and a bill that allows the state DOT to manage access to major highways by deciding where to put the openings in curbs, technically "curb cuts," for driveway and parking-lot access.

The curb-cuts law may seem like a Band-Aid on sprawl, given that the DOT estimates traffic on Maine roads will increase 18 percent by 2017 while the population increases only by six percent. "But this is not a small bill," protests DOT commissioner John Melrose. He sees it correcting problems such as the one motorists encounter in the developed strip approaching the bridge to Mount Desert Island and Acadia National Park. Stopped cars waiting to turn into businesses can hold up traffic interminably. By reducing the number of curb cuts, the DOT can improve traffic flow.

The most publicly sexy initiative to reduce traffic congestion is the mass-transit system that the state, using both federal and state funds, has been patiently constructing over many years. When it starts its regular runs next April, the Portland-to-Boston Amtrak train will make four round trips daily, stopping at Saco, Wells, and, in the summer, Old Orchard Beach. The two-and-a-half-hour, 114-mile journey will cost passengers about $30 round-trip, making it competitive with car and bus travel.

The state also has purchased and begun upgrading coastal rail tracks all the way to Rockland. Ronald Roy, director of the DOT's office of passenger transportation, expects tourist trains to run from Brunswick to Rockland by 2002. There they will tie into what he calls "the marine highway," a projected ferry route linking Portland, Bath, Boothbay Harbor, Rockland, and Bar Harbor. Regularly scheduled trains from Portland to Yarmouth and from there to Auburn and Brunswick may be in business by 2003. Looking further ahead, the state recently paid $40,000 to a Toronto marketing company to study whether Canadian tourists would come to Maine via the St. Lawrence & Atlantic line from Montreal through Bethel.

Tracy Perez, Roy's chief mass-transit planner, says the trains-ferry network is specifically intended to relieve summer traffic on Route One and to make money for the tourist industry, but "we really believe that the system will help alleviate congestion and sprawl by offering people alternatives to automobiles and by revitalizing downtowns."

Most planners agree, however, that the dominance of the car culture will easily overpower mass transit. State Planning Office director Evan Richert calls the potential impact of mass transit "absolutely marginal" to the issue of sprawl. He thinks that the only way sprawl can be slowed is for towns and cities to institute a new kind of zoning that encourages density, and his office is working to develop a model zoning ordinance that will accomplish this. "It's going to take some brave municipality" to show the way, he feels - a town willing "to designate where you want to grow."

That town may be Freeport. Alan Caron, a longtime private consultant on Maine public-policy issues, is working for free, as chair of Freeport's Residential Growth Management Committee, to help develop such an ordinance with the help of Richert's office. The town recently instituted a moratorium on sizeable developments while it tries to figure out how to stop sprawl. Other suburban towns have recently put annual caps on building permits, but the State Planning Office discourages this move because it may force developers to go to more rural towns without caps, which ultimately would spread sprawl even wider.

Caron says the new Freeport ordinance will reduce the current two-and-a-half-acre lot size to a figure that would allow cluster development, but at the same time it will require considerable open space around clusters. The proposed ordinance, to be presented to the town council in December, will also "designate particular growth areas," Caron says. "What a radical idea! We're not going to let the market do everything," he comments.

But Frank O'Hara doesn't think developing such an ordinance will be enough. O'Hara, who wrote the State Planning Office's booklet on controlling sprawl, is skeptical about the political possibility for getting such density zoning accepted in many Maine towns unless "we make living in cities and towns more exciting. Capturing the imagination - that's what is important." O'Hara would do this by having the state "invest heavily in the Portlands and Augustas of this world" to create, as many European cities have done, "people spaces" rather than car spaces,.

If people find cities noisy, then quieter ways will have to be found to move cars through cities, he suggests. Investments need to be made in parks and housing and local mass transit - in trolley lines, for example. And he believes the tax system has to be changed to encourage private downtown investment.

Freeport's Caron agrees with the need to retool cities and notes that much of the discussion about revitalizing Portland has been about how to attract outsiders to events and shopping rather than about serving the people who live there. But if the city's residents are properly served, he believes, others will start moving to Portland.

Let's assume that Caron and O'Hara are right about state investment in the cities being a key strategy to curb sprawl. But here a further political problem emerges. How can a representative from, say, far-away, rural Washington County be convinced to vote to spend money on Portland?

The question was asked to an actual representative from Washington County, Senator Vinton Cassidy (R-Calais), ranking Republican on the legislature's transportation committee and a man familiar with sprawl issues. His reply:

"There's no question Boston is moving into southern Maine, and we need to look at mass transit. But I believe in local control. I don't want to see the state of Maine dictate to the towns. . . . This is America. People are going to invest in communities, and it's growth. How do you stop that?

"I voted against all those anti-sprawl bills. As for the curb-cuts bill, people are paying taxes on that land. They shouldn't have the state telling them how people can access it. I'm against the state being a Big Brother. That's where I draw the line. . . . Occasionally I travel down to southern Maine, and I am just so glad to get back home."

People in sprawl-plagued southern Maine could be depressed by these words, and Governor King isn't likely to cheer them up much. Always a cautious driver in the political middle of the road, even this self-proclaimed anti-sprawler doesn't want to go too fast on the issue.

While calling sprawl "the most significant environmental issue we face," King nevertheless looks at it with a degree of acceptance. It is "the negative side of prosperity," he says, and "impossible to stop altogether." He notes, "The drive to live in the country is a pretty deep one."

Having built his administration on a solid pro-business base, King, too, says he shuns "Big Brother" solutions to sprawl. What he wants is education, public discussion, and "working on the ideas" of sprawl solutions such as the legislation he pushed in the last session. There is "no single, simple answer" for this "subtle stuff," he claims.

Finding a solution to Maine's suburban sprawl may involve a long, slow, frustrating political ride.

Lance Tapley can be reached at ltapley@ctel.net.