Minnesota’s planning laws lag behind the leaders
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Under Oregon law, the Metro Council is responsible for maintaining a 20-year supply of land for future residential development inside Portland’s urban growth boundary.
Liberals frequently criticize the Metropolitan Council for not being aggressive enough in restricting growth on the outer edges of the seven-county area and preventing urban sprawl.
"I think the Met Council is not the cause of decentralization,” says former state Sen. Myron Orfield, a University of Minnesota professor and author of several books on regional planning. “It just didn't do its job to make things better.”
What the critics often overlook or minimize is that if the Met Council were more restrictive, there is nothing to prevent development from simply leapfrogging outside of the seven-county area into the adjacent counties where land tends to be cheaper and land-use requirements less restrictive.
Unlike the Portland Metro Council, to which the Twin Cities planning body often is compared, our Met Council does not have the benefit of a statewide land-use planning law that establishes “urban growth boundaries” for every city, protecting rural areas and preventing sprawl.
Indeed, in the last several decades, Minnesota seems to have developed a political aversion of urban planning.Consider this:
- State law does not require cities outside of the seven-county metro area to regulate land use.
- A 1997 law that provided incentives for outstate cities and counties to develop comprehensive plans, and empowered the State Planning Agency to review and comment upon these plans, was largely repealed four years later.
- The State Planning Agency, whose role included providing planning assistance to cities and counties, was eliminated in 2003 and a few remnants tucked away in the state Department of Administration.
- No mechanism ever has been created to encourage coordination in growth planning between the Met Council and the fast-growing adjacent counties, many residents of which commute to jobs within the seven-county area.
I will confess that I do not share this aversion to planning. I covered the Metropolitan Council and the State Planning Agency during my years as a newspaper reporter and editorial writer, and later served as public affairs director for the Met Council. These agencies performed important roles in anticipating challenges and opportunities for the state and region.
As someone once observed, “It pays to plan ahead. It wasn’t raining when Noah started building the ark.”
Not surprisingly, Minnesota’s planning laws have not fared well in several national evaluations. A 1999 study by the American Planning Association did not include Minnesota in the top tier of states with up-to-date laws that require local governments to adopt plans and give the state a role in their evaluation.
A more recent review by Douglas Porter, author of the 2008 book “Managing Growth in America's Communities,” came to a similar conclusion.
Policy gaps
“Minnesota, for all of the good things it has done, has some very strange policy gaps,” says James Solem, a former official of both the State Planning Agency and the Met Council. “This is one of them.”
In 1997, then-state Rep. Joe Opatz, DFL-St. Cloud, led an effort to strengthen Minnesota’s planning laws. Opatz was frustrated by the “hodgepodge of local government units” that plagued the St. Cloud area and prevented effective planning, and he feared that St. Cloud could one day become part of one sprawling, undifferentiated metro area dominated by the Twin Cities.
Opatz’s bill established state goals for land-use planning and required outstate counties to adopt comprehensive plans, as cities within the metro area are required to do. It also provided for the creation of urban growth boundaries in rapidly developing areas and limited growth outside of these boundaries.
In the end, the Legislature decided to make the planning voluntary and dropped the idea of urban growth boundaries. However, lawmakers did approve statewide goals for local plans, provided financial incentives for counties to adopt plans and gave the State Planning Agency power to review them.
“That’s as close as we have come to telling [outstate] communities that you ought to engage in some careful planning about what kind of community you want to be, rather than simply taking what comes,” says former Met Council Chair Curt Johnson, an urban affairs consultant and writer who has worked on projects in most of the nation’s major metro areas.
However, in 2001, with Republicans back in control of the House, lawmakers repealed major provisions of the new law that established planning goals, provided the financial incentives and gave the planning agency review powers.
Jim Mulder, former executive director of the Minnesota Association of Counties, says county officials resisted the land-planning law because they felt it required them to “give up a lot of their local decision-making authority” – that the State Planning Agency would “dictate” what would be in local plans.
“Some of our members were just livid about it,” Mulder recalls. “They thought it was communism.”
Oregon’s bold law
The history of planning in the state of Oregon is far different. In 1973, Republican Gov. Tom McCall championed the passage of a bold law that provided for the establishment of urban growth boundaries for every urban area in the state and limited development outside of those boundaries.
McCall and his legislative allies were concerned about suburban development needlessly gobbling up land in the agriculture-rich Willamette Valley. “The interests of Oregon today and in the future must be protected from grasping wastrels of the land,” he declared.
Four years later, the Oregon Legislature created Portland’s Metro Council and empowered the new, seven-member elected body to manage Portland’s urban growth boundary.
Under Oregon law, the Metro Council is responsible for maintaining a 20-year supply of land for future residential development inside the boundary. Every five years, the council is required to conduct a review of the land supply and, if necessary, expand the boundary to meet that requirement. Since the 1970s, the council says the boundary has been expanded about three dozen times, most often in increments of 20 acres or less.
The law is not without its critics, some of whom contend it has driven up the cost of land and, therefore, housing. But Curt Johnson, who has worked as a consultant in Oregon, says it has become “part of Oregon’s political culture.”
“Seven times there have been public votes seeking to repeal that law, and seven times it has failed,” he says.
Moving creatively and cautiously
In the absence of any such laws, the Twin Cities Metro Council has had to move creatively and cautiously in its efforts to manage the region’s growth and limit sprawl. The council’s most powerful tool has been its control over the regional wastewater system. By policy, it has required suburban communities to achieve housing densities averaging at least three units per acre if they want regional sewer service.
Despite this policy, the Twin Cities region continues as one of the nation’s less densely developed metro areas. According to an analysis by the Met Council research staff, the Twin Cities currently averages 1,087 housing units per square mile (or 1.7 units per acre) in the urbanized portion of the region. That’s the seventh lowest of the nation’s major metro areas.
And, of course, urban development continues to jump across the boundaries of the seven-county metro area into the adjacent counties, though this trend now appears to be slowing.
During most of his eight years as Met Council chair, Peter Bell invited county commissioners from the adjacent counties to twice-yearly meetings to discuss growth-related issues and opportunities for greater cooperation. However, the participants were cautious and the meetings did not produce any major breakthroughs.
In her first 18 months as council chair, Susan Haigh, Bell’s successor, has yet to meet with representatives from the adjacent counties. However, a council spokesperson says she plans to reinstitute the meetings later this year.
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Comments (8)
statewide planning laws
I enjoyed this piece by Steve Dornfeld, one of the most astute observers of the metro and state planning scene. I learned, for the first time, what the essence of the battle is: nobody outside of the Twin Cities Metro area wants any limits on growth and development. Reminds me of the time our former Majority Leader Nick Coleman suggested that townships in Minnesota be abolished. Was he right? John Milton, former MN Senator
Time to kill the met council except as an operating entity
While the Met Council has no power except as an operating entity for some infrastructure I find that as it should be. With the exception of their operating units they are extremely inept. In my experience with them they lack both the skills and vision to focus on anything other than details and their perspective is unrealistic. Although this may be because people who value accomplishment don't elect to stay at the Council and those that remain are those that tolerate marginal or minimal progress well.
One has only to look at their lack of leadership in transit to grade them at a c-.
I don't believe there is a need for general regional planning other than for infrastructure. I certainly wouldn't want an organization so removed from a community to do it.
I truly wish the hystericals on growth would get out more. The costs of population density far outweigh the benefits of denser development as the per capita expenditures by cities show.
Planning
If there is going to be a statewide planning law it should be restricted to those areas where there is likely to be growth. Geographically, 3/4 of the state seems to be declining in population, due to lower birth rates and lack of job opportunities.
Government has this "equal protection" obsession that if we're going to do something, we do it to everybody. But everybody does not need it. Ask the folks in Lincoln County about jobs and population growth.
Let local people and existing environmental protection laws do the planning and protecting in most of the state.
Planning Laws are lagging, period
Steve Dornfeld provides a fairly accurate synopsis of our circumstances, but his claim that we lag behind "leaders" is off the mark. We always claimed we were leaders when it came to our pride in our effort to establish regional planning. But, alas, we have fallen behind Portland, OR which Dornfeld apparently feels is the city on the hill or the Mecca which we should emulate and perhaps envy. The fact is we always have.
Our grandiose experiment (and politically courageous effort) to establish regional planning over forty years ago served its purpose a long time ago. Instead of rejuvenating it and refining it based upon lessons learned in the exercise of centralized and mandated comprehensive planning for the seven counties, the Legislature has avoided the subject. The clever effort in the mid-1990's to incorportate Transit Operations and Waste Treatment Operations into the planning agency resulted in one of the largest state agencies with minimal accountability. Planning, per se, was NOT the beneficiary. The Legislature is lagging in keeping thing current and responsive to contemporary needs. Copy-cat incrementalism of Portland and other lesser regional governnance domains is not the solution. In fact, more than forty years of the regional governance/planning have left the country with us and Portland and a meager few other jurisdictions that can stake a claim to bona fide regional planning.
We are past the chronological mark that the foundng policymakers coached by mostly academic planners foresaw in 1967 and 1976. We have not planning our future well. The paper chase that passes for regional planning and implementation is a charade that is accepted as a cost of doing business. The local policymakers and leaders in the municipalities outside the seven counties are thankful for the status quo. The legislators from those areas listen to them and to their constituents.
What is missing is a champion person or caucus not unlike those who saw a problem (treating wastewater on a large regional scale) in the 1967--1976 era, who can objectively and effectively define the needs of today and translate them in to polcies that legislators can digest and enact.
Envy of other jurisdictions who have greener grass and who have been plowing the same ground with the same old tools as we have, will not produce that champion.
http://youtu.be/avNmiHnSXns
http://youtu.be/avNmiHnSXns
A "Do Nothing" Council
Haigh is a political appointee, and as is typical of most such appointees, she has no experience and no skills to lead the Metropolitan Council. She's a hack.
All her other unrelated positions combined do not make her the slightest bit qualified for her current cushy job. Having actual experience in urban planning would be a prerequisite for anyone else if they had to apply for this job, but when you're a political appointee, the only requirement is fealty to the current party in power. It's no wonder they never accomplish anything.
We can do better, and we must.
Appointed Council
Mark Stromseth has hit on an important weakness of the Twin Cities' Met Council as opposed to the one in Portland: it's appointed by the governor, not elected by the voters.
This has two disadvantages. One is the appointment of political hacks, people to whom the governor just wants to give a cushy job to, whether they know anything about the issues or not. The other is the lack of continuity. Potentially, the entire Council could be replaced every four years and undo everything the previous Council did.
Portland's Metro Council is elected by districts, and the voters can and do vote Councilors out. I recall an instance in which one member was considered to be too much in league with the developers and was replaced by an advocate of cycling and transit--financed almost entirely by donations of $50 or less.
Since there is a sharp suburban-urban divide here in the Twin Cities, the boundaries would have to be drawn so that each Councilor represented both suburban and urban districts, but an elected Council would provide both continuity and responsiveness to voters' wishes.
Plan? What plan?
Long-range planning and democracy – in the form of an elected Met Council in this case, but it could easily be any elected body – while not automatically mutually exclusive, certainly appear to be ideas that usually have what I’ll call a “prickly” relationship. Karen Sandness is, I think, correct in pointing out that political appointees often know nothing about planning, but elected officials always run the risk of being voted out of office for making a completely rational decision that happens to run against the wishes of their constituents. That, too, makes planning in any meaningful sense difficult.
My experience as a planning commissioner in Front Range Colorado was that those bodies often do little or nothing that I would personally call actual planning. Virtually all their time is spent in what I usually call “development review.” Very little time or thought, at least officially, is devoted to trying to figure out what kind of community or region the people there want to have, and then how to go about achieving those goals stated by the residents and businesses of the area. Where I was a planning commissioner, city staff spent quite a bit of time and effort on those things, but the planning commission itself rarely considered that sort of groundwork in any official sense. It became part of the discussion only when a particular development proposal seemed to either foster whatever community goals had been arrived at, or threatened those same goals. I tend to think of planning as trying to anticipate the future of the community or area or region in question, and then make policy decisions or recommendations in relation to that anticipated future – or to multiple anticipated futures. The planning commissions of which I was a part worked hard for their communities, but that work didn’t fit my definition of planning very well.
Among the disappointments of moving to the Twin Cities as a resident, as opposed to a quick visit of a couple days, has been the quite obvious sprawl, with resulting traffic gridlock and auto-dependency. There are other issues, as well, but it’s the auto dependency that jumped out to grab me, and that still gets a disproportionate share of my attention as a citizen in a planning context, largely because it affects so many other areas of regional and community development.
There may well be legal reasons for the absence or ineptitude in regional planning. While there are states where Comprehensive Plans are formal documents, adopted by legislative bodies in formal votes at various levels, and with the added weight of legal enforceability (they have the status of law, and thus cannot readily be altered without due process), I’ve seen no evidence as a private citizen that whatever plans exist in Minnesota are “enforceable” in that sense. Given the current drift to the right of Minnesota politics, I’d be surprised if there were very much legislative support – at any level, including the state – for the adoption of “enforceable” plans.
When the plan says “X,” but Acme Corporation wants to ignore the plan, and throws enough lobbying money around, or offers enough jobs, to persuade the relevant authorities to abandon the plan in their specific case, what you have is no plan at all. It’s merely a restriction on the activities of developers or companies with less fiscal or legal wherewithal. Or – to cite the recent case of a Trader Joe’s application in Uptown – if the plan says “X” is compatible use, and the neighborhood and relevant city council member object strongly, and the application is thus denied, then the plan is similarly worthless, once again, because it’s not “enforceable.”
In those instances, what we’re talking about is not a plan, it’s a polite suggestion.
For a plan to have any enforceability, it has to have the status of law, plus the wide support of the citizens of municipalities, counties and state. Steve’s article, and some of the commentary, suggest that, especially outside the Twin Cities metro area, there’s very little support for the sort of planning I’m talking about. Without enforceability, a “comprehensive plan” is of little value except as a suggestion of what might be if the relevant community or region wants a particular outcome. There’s no mechanism built in to make that particular outcome more likely.