November 20, 1973
Page 37763
OUR FAILURE TO PLAN FOR OUR NATION'S GROWTH
Mr. STEVENSON. Mr. President, the energy crisis now presented to Americans need not have been a surprise – it could have been predicted and at least partially alleviated by adequate planning. And the pressures which have led to the energy crisis – mounting demands for the use of finite resources – threaten a crisis in many other aspects of American life. Just as in the special case of our energy, only comprehensive planning can prepare us for the pressures of growth.
My colleague from Maine, Senator MUSKIE, spoke about the need for planning growth in a speech to the Planning and Conservation League, in Anaheim, Calif., on November 17. He dramatized the need for planning by pointing out that in each of the next three decades new urban growth will absorb an area greater than the entire State of New Jersey, generating tremendous demands for housing, highways, and essential services. But he explained that current planning mechanisms are woefully inadequate to deal with this growth: They tend to be negative rather than positive, localized rather than region- or statewide, single purpose, and without means for implementation.
Senator MUSKIE concludes that only a national growth and land-use policy, including all levels of government, can provide for the planning our Nation will need to guard its scarce resources.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator MUSKIE's speech be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the speech was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
REMARKS BY SENATOR EDMUND S. MUSKIE
I
America is awakening to a new age. I wish I could say it was an age of abundance and unlimited prosperity. It is not.
It is an age when we in America finally realize that our world is not a cornucopia. There are limits to its resources, limits to its air, water and land, limits to its ability to sustain human life.
Many Americans discovered only two weeks ago that there is an energy crisis. Most of us here in this room know that this energy crisis was the result of poor planning or worse, no planning at all, on the part of the Nation's energy companies.
We are reacting to the energy crisis with some long overdue energy conservation measures – too many of which are voluntary; with a vigorous Federal commitment to energy policy and planning – which will not show results until the end of the decade; and with a massive effort to increase the supplies – which will not be available to relieve our shortages for some time.
Most Americans don't realize that there is also a critical shortage of land in many parts of this country, and that the shortage is getting worse. Let us all hope that it will not take the kind of crisis we face in our energy supply to do something about it.
II
There are some encouraging signs of a growing awareness of the limited nature of our natural resources.
In just a few years, public concern has led to the enactment of effective Federal legislation to control the pollution of our air and water – legislation which requires land use decisions for the maintenance and improvement of environmental quality. The Federal awareness of environmental interests and issues has increased vastly.
At the State and local level this new awareness is also apparent and pervasive. In no fewer than nine States, statewide movements exist for protecting scenic areas, preventing over-growth, and slowing development processes that threaten to degrade the environment.
Last year in California this mood exhibited its political viability as well as its grass roots energy in several areas:
Passage of proposition 20, the coastline initiative;
Passage of height limitations for new buildings in Santa Barbara and San Diego;
Approval of open space purchases in San Mateo, Santa Clara and Marin counties;
And, rejections by citizens of the San Francisco Bay area of State highway efforts to construct a new bridge between Oakland and San Francisco.
The new mood indicates that this Nation has begun to realize how far its environment has deteriorated. But stronger efforts to retard future deterioration and to begin to improve the existing environment are urgently needed.
III
It is unfortunate that Americans have waited so long to recognize the relationship between urban growth and pollution. Twenty years ago all levels of Government could have established patterns to accommodate and guide urban growth in ways which would have minimized the harsh effects on the environment and the severe strain on our natural resources.
But the growth syndrome – not the adverse impact of that growth – dominated governmental decisions. A nation growing out of war and depression was not concerned with the by-products of exponential expansion. As with so many other crises, this country has waited and reacted to environmental deterioration when it could have anticipated and planned sensibly to avoid it.
IV
What we must now do is to take those steps necessary to repair the damage inflicted by this neglect and to make constructive plans to avoid future crises. Although our recently enacted Federal laws on air and water pollution have moved boldly in this direction, much remains to be done to control the most important causes of environmental deterioration – population expansion and urban growth.
V
With few exceptions, the varied and complex land use controls in use today by some 10,000 local governments are little more than refinements upon the land use controls developed and validated in the first third of this century.
They have enabled local governments for the first time to place significant restrictions on private land use to protect the larger public interest. Yet, in keeping with the traditional concept of land, the larger public interest was – and still is – interpreted to be protection of property values and the economic value of land. Freely translated, protection of the public interest in land use has been and is protection of the private interest. The dependency of cities on property taxes reinforces this prevailing purpose of land use decisions.
VI
Despite refinements in the last 40 years, planning and regulatory controls have failed to address the pressures accompanying urban growth.
These inadequacies have left four areas where present land use controls and policies need major improvements.
First, to protect property values and to maximize their tax bases, local governments have taken an essentially negative approach to land use. They employ their land use controls simply to prohibit what they view as undesirable uses of land. Most cities have treated these negative local land use regulations as though they represented all the land use planning necessary. Thus, rather than guiding planned development, existing land use controls have protected development while neglecting more comprehensive planning on a metropolitan-wide basis.
Second, States, with few exceptions, have failed to accept responsibility for overseeing local land use planning. The regulations and development they themselves control too often fail to promote the public interest of the local community, and existing plans of local governments too often adversely affect the public interest of larger areas such as the region or the State as a whole.
Third, where planning has been conducted, it has too frequently served single missions or purposes. Planning of this nature has seldom related specific missions or purposes to a balanced range of regional, State or national goals.
Planning for particular kinds of activities has left the planner and the citizen with narrow "either-or" decisions, often on a haphazard case-by-case basis.
Consideration of long-term alternative uses of the land is seldom mandated and even less often achieved in single-purpose planning.
The highway planning of the recent past provides an excellent example of the failure of single purpose planning. Planners have routed highways through parks – where land is invaluable for recreation but cheap for road building. They have carved up low income districts with commuter access roads. They have poured additional highway lanes into cities unable to cope with more automobile traffic and air pollution. And they have sited major interchanges without regard to the unplanned and often unanticipated growth centers which they generate.
Fourth, many municipalities have land use plans but have failed to provide for their implementation. Throughout the country, in the smallest towns and the largest cities, plans lay collecting dust – mute testimony to the inability of planning alone to achieve land use goals.
VII
Let me give you an example of these shortcomings. A short time ago I received a detailed and elaborate brochure from a small community near Los Angeles which had acquired a large tract of cleared, undeveloped land. This suburb had devised a plan for the development of its new land. It designed the tract to be a congenial mix of houses, parks, lakes, schools and light industry. The new community promised to be very pleasant indeed.
Upon more careful analysis, however, I noted that there was no provision within the plan for disposal of solid waste, or for waste treatment facilities.
Consequently, all of the increased burdens generated by the growth of the new community would fall on existing facilities beyond its bounds.
Some other community must provide a landfill site; or perhaps some coastal town must tolerate the dumping of wastes in its estuary or off its beaches. Neighboring municipal treatment plants must bear an increased burden until the growing new community realizes the need for its own facility.
In a similar way, the new city would produce an increased localized demand for electric power, which must be generated elsewhere. Provision of water for the new community would mean renewed demands on the Colorado River, or the Sacramento, or any of a number of already hard-pressed sources.
Finally, the community plan had little provision for population growth. With the light industry projected, the number of housing lots will be just about adequate for the present decade.
But what thought has been given to the next decade, or the next after that?
This well-intended scheme does not, then, really represent an adequate plan for land use. Its local design was impeccable. But it failed to consider the broader impact to its own development on neighboring communities, neighboring states, and the nation as a whole. And it failed to include a policy for its own future development.
VIII
Perhaps, more than any other factor, the failure to provide implementation of land use plans illustrates the greatest weakness in our present land use practices.
This failure has one cause: no level of government is willing to accept the responsibility to plan comprehensively and to put those plans into effect by regulating the way private landowners use their land.
Courts never have to concern themselves with comprehensive planning in the nuisance and trespass cases which they decide.
States abdicated their responsibilities for this task when they delegated their powers to municipalities.
And cities avoid the problem by not planning on a comprehensive level or failing to provide the necessary implementation mechanisms.
IX
These kinds of responses are clearly inadequate. Sobering statistics suggest that unless our land use decision making processes are vastly improved at all levels of government, the United States will be faced with a truly National land use crisis.
Over the next 30 years, the pressures upon our finite land resources will result in the dedication of an additional 18 million acres – 28 thousand square miles – of undeveloped land to urban use.
Urban sprawl will consume an area of land approximately equal to all the urbanized land now within the 228 standard metropolitan statistical areas – the equivalent of the total areas of the States of New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Each decade, new urban growth will absorb an area greater than the entire State of New Jersey.
The equivalent of 21/2 times the housing in the Oakland-San Francisco metropolitan region must be built each year to meet, the Nation's housing goals.
By 1990, according to estimates of the Department of Transportation, an additional 18,000 miles of freeways and expressways will be required within the boundaries of just the urbanized areas – more than double the total mileage existing in 1968.
Vast areas of land are required to meet plans for industrial expansion. In the next two decades, the electrical power industry alone will need three million acres of new rights-of-way-and more than 140,000 acres of potential prime industrial land for more than two hundred new major generating stations.
Not included here is the amount of land to be consumed by mining for resources, rights-of-way for gas and oil transmission and land for second home and private home and private recreational development.
Moreover, there is no way to measure the severe effects and conflicts that will develop at the local, State and national levels from this rapid depletion of our land resources.
X
The enormity of these demands makes it mandatory that we begin a new phase of land use management – a phase that corrects failures of the present approach to land use planning and its regulatory mechanisms.
We need policies and programs that treat land use as a resource to be managed, and not a commodity to be exploited.
Realizing this great need, some States have already commenced such programs.
The State of Maine established the land use regulation commission in 1969 to zone and control development in the unorganized townships of the State, 49% of Maine's total land area amounting to more than ten million acres.
Coupled with the site selection permit program administered by the State's board of environmental protection, the land use regulations commission has provided the people of Maine an opportunity to protect their public property rights against private waste.
Likewise, California voters in 1972 approved a citizens' initiative creating the California coastal zone conservation commission with a carefully designed permit program to regulate changes in land-use on the California coast.
Federal legislation concerning land use should encourage and, if necessary, require States to adopt regulatory programs similar to these. While the Federal Government may not be the best administering authority for such programs, Federal law should specify the criteria against which land use decisions should be made at the State and local level.
XI
I have proposed Federal criteria which the States should consider, although policies may vary from one part of the country to another.
These include:
Prohibition of public or private development which will result in violation of emission or effluent limitation, standards or other requirements of the Clean Air Act or the Federal Water Pollution Control Act.
Prohibition of residential, commercial, or industrial development on flood plains.
A requirement that major residential developments provide open space areas sufficient for recreation.
A requirement that utilities maximize multiple usages of utility rights-of-way.
Restriction of industrial, residential, or commercial development on agricultural land of high productivity.
Prohibition of industrial, residential, or commercial development which will exceed the capacity of existing systems for power and water supply, waste water collection and treatment, solid waste disposal, and transportation.
XII
In addition to this, however, we need a national growth policy and a Federal land use policy that would guide the management of our land resources in conformity with the national growth policy. This Nation, and the world, continue to grow at exponential rates. If the present population expands at its present rate, the world's population in the year 2000 will be double the 1970 population. Furthermore, there appears to be little possibility of leveling off global population growth before the year 2000 because most of the prospective parents of that year have already been born.
The demands of this population on the earth's resources will undoubtedly produce serious social, economic, political, and environmental conflicts here in America as elsewhere. While we in America may take some satisfaction in the stabilization of our population, we should recognize that our own leveling off will only minimally affect world population totals and the demands of that population on world resources.
Despite the enormous efforts which will be required to meet known demands, and the consequent strains on our human activity, even this Nation has no present policy for directing its growth either to avert such crises or to mitigate the impact.
What we need and do not have is a national growth policy to guide and effectuate economic development, population control, housing distribution, the use of natural resources, the protection of the environment, and the location of government and private development. In short, we must face the larger question of how large and in what directions this Nation should grow.
All levels of government should begin to ask the questions which they have postponed for so many years. Where are we, and where are we headed? The answers will necessitate consideration of major changes in life styles and institutions. They will certainly necessitate changes in our attitudes toward land and land ownership.
Rights of land ownership can no longer be treated as absolute – rather they must be modified by society's larger needs.
The lesson is obvious – and is dramatized by the energy crisis. If finite resources are to serve the needs of more and more people, their use must be planned to insure that the available supply serves the best uses our common wisdom can identify, and those uses must serve the equities of a free society dedicated to the welfare of all its citizens. And that will not just happen.