Smart Growth

I BEGAN looking into Maryland's Smart Growth plan only when the national press was reporting that Portland, Oregon, the world's crown jewel of growth planning (and my home town), is experiencing an intolerable overgrowth of its "urban growth boundary," beyond which development is severely limited.In the 20 years since Portland's growth boundary was set, the population has increased by 700,000. Almost every available acre of land has been developed. Housing prices have doubled in just five years.

WE'VE BEEN over this before: the governor's skewed vision of Smart Growth that seems to stop at the border of Carroll County and at the border of common sense. Now he's positively myopic in his impetuous decisions.By Parris N. Glendening's definition, Springfield Hospital Center is a Smart Growth area, eligible for state redevelopment of the complex. But it's apparently not smart-enough Smart Growth for a statewide police training center.Real Smart Growth must occur in the urban areas that gave Mr. Glendening his re-election victory last November.

TWO KEY ELEMENTS of Smart Growth are growth control and growth management. Directing growth to certain inhabited areas, while protecting natural and agricultural areas from development, are hallmarks of Smart Growth. Alone, these principles will not address the underlying inequalities that have encouraged governments to funnel public dollars to new developments, which attract families with choices out of aging neighborhoods, resulting in abandonment of older communities. Is Baltimore County's revitalization plan of long-neglected Middle River/ Essex smart in its efforts to replace current residents with a "better class" of people?

IS Parris learning? Doubtful, but at least Gov. Parris N. Glendening has finally returned to a Sykesville location for the long-planned statewide police public safety training center. In his embarrassing reversal, the governor employed the ultimate sophistry. Springfield state hospital land that will be annexed by the town of Sykesville is Smart Growth; already developed Springfield state hospital land located a few hundred yards away is not. One plot is (or is to be) in an established community that is approved for sprawl-curbing development by Mr. Glendening's Smart Growth program.

LOS ANGELES -- I was more than a little embarrassed. Owls were desperately trying to deliver Harry Potter's acceptance letter to Hogwart's School of Wizardry and Witchcraft, and I was thinking about -- urban sprawl! Harry's mean-spirited and middle-class adopted family, the Dursleys, live at No. 4 Privet Drive. The Dursleys, however, don't live in the heart of London, or in a middle-class urban neighborhood. Nope, they live in decidedly suburban England, in a townhouse attached to four or five other homes of the same style.

ANNAPOLIS - Maryland's Smart Growth and Neighborhood Conservation initiative was named a winner yesterday of an Innovations in American Government award from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The initiative, a centerpiece of Gov. Parris N. Glendening's administration, was one of 10 winners out of more than 1,300 entries from federal, state and local governments. Each winner receives $100,000 from the Ford Foundation. Judges recognized the Maryland program as the first statewide effort to control sprawl and promote environmentally sensitive development through the use of budgetary incentives.

A DUTCH group toured Maryland recently to learn about Gov. Parris Glendening's Smart Growth initiative, which has been cited by Vice President Al Gore and Governing magazine as a model of how to slow suburban sprawl.An aide to the governor received strange looks when he explained how state government hoped to coax counties to contain development."You mean," one of the European visitors interrupted, "you let your local governments decide these things?"In Europe, Smart Growth has been around for a millennium, with sharp transitions from city to countryside.

Many thanks to The Baltimore Sun for the editorial calling for more action on Smart Growth ("Responsible growth," Dec. 7). With our economy in such terrible shape, we must stop spreading houses over cornfields in patterns that maximize public service costs while also maximizing the pollution of the Chesapeake Bay. The Eastern Shore Land Conservancy has been working for 20 years for conservation and sound land-use planning on Maryland's Eastern Shore....

GOVERNOR Smart Growth has done it again, this time to the solid citizens of Washington County. He's going to spend a ton of money to build a branch campus of the University of Maryland in the heart of downtown Hagerstown. Urban renewal redux. Restore a city that is in decline. More government jobs.Except the university and the county government don't want it there.They, better than the governor, recognize that the vitality of a community is not confined to the artificial boundary lines that the political scientists (e.g.