Three years ago the State Planning Office neatly captured the shortsightedness of sprawl on a personal level when it offered the following example. A young couple, one working in Augusta, the other in nearby Hallowell, decides to buy a house in the area. They notice that the property tax bill in Augusta is some $600 a year higher than in rural Windsor, 10 miles away. They opt for the place in the country and discover too late the added cost of the daily commute to work or the trip to the grocery store for bread, added car-maintenance costs and added house insurance costs because of the house’s distance from a fire station ends up costing them hundreds of dollars a year more than the higher property taxes in Augusta would have.

Sprawl, which is more of a problem in Southern Maine than elsewhere in the state, occurs in part because the costs of living outside a service or business area generally aren’t fully considered when people decide where to live. Traditionally, the state has been a partner in masking those costs. Need new or expanded roads because of housing construction? Need a bigger school in a rural area though one sits half-empty in a city a dozen miles away? The state has had programs to help out regardless of how little planning sense it made. The SPO estimates that sprawl currently costs each taxpayer an average of $200 a year.

Doing something about where people choose to live is difficult, and there are plenty of good reasons for limiting the state’s role in deciding what is largely personal preference. A legislative task force took a cautious first step recently with a report that, while it needs further work, is at least flexible enough to accommodate the wide range of development problems (such as the lack of it in some places) throughout the state. The task force, for instance, excludes low-growth areas from the effect of proposed legislation and makes distinctions between urban and rural areas for growth.

In brief, the task force wants communities or regions to manage growth so that the majority of residential growth (70 percent) occurs in planned areas and that 10 percent of new houses are low-cost. It would also have communities locate commercial development so that it did not result in congestion on major roads. Task force members say they are less interested in stopping people from choosing where to live than they are requiring them to pay the full cost of their choice. That, however, is an easy thought to accept in theory but a hard one to apply. How, for instance, to apportion costs when the 100th person to build in a rural area means that the area needs a new road? Is a town expected to ban further development before that happens? Certainly that 100th person wouldn’t bear the full cost of the road, but it is no fairer to charge families that have been living there for decades without the expanded road.

The task force report calls for “appropriate financial support from the state” to help with the planning, which is probably too broad a phrase to get communities committed to the idea. It also includes penalties, such as the loss of Land for Maine’s Future money, for those failing to implement a plan. This too, is likely insufficient – many communities would not view the loss of LMF money as much of a penalty.

After educating people about the cost of sprawl the state should be looking much more often to incentives to lure regions into compliance. Bumping them up the school-construction list, sending road money sooner, increasing their portion of municipal revenue sharing are some simple ways to do this.

It’s too late, probably, to get that Windsor couple back to Augusta, but there are plenty of ways to help people make informed choices about where they will live, helping both communities – and hundreds of others statewide – plan better so that they thrive in the future.