True cost of sprawl

A new Brookings Institution report confirms what anyone who’s driven around southern Maine lately has had plenty of time to ponder while idling in traffic jams – the Greater Portland area has one of the worst cases of urban sprawl in the nation. Ninth worst, according to Brookings, much worse than many of those booming Sun Belt cities usually tagged as the prime culprits in uncontrolled development.

The population of metropolitan Portland increased by 17 percent between 1982 and 1997, the period considered in the report, while the amount of farmland and forest consumed by new homes, businesses and roads increased by 108 percent. That’s the eye-popping number that gives Greater Portland the distinction of gobbling up more land per person than any other city in the Northeast and exceeding by far such sprawl icons as Atlanta and Phoenix.

Statewide, the difference between Maine and Georgia or Arizona is that those other states are growing significantly in population but this one is not. Maine’s 3.8 percent growth during the last decade was fifth lowest in the nation; the 47,000-person increase counted by Census 2000 would be a rounding error in the South and West.

Maine’s two southernmost counties – York and Cumberland – grew by 11 percent during the ’90s, while its four northernmost – Aroostook, Penobscot, Piscataquis and Washington – lost 6 percent. Maine isn’t growing; it’s just shifting.

It’s an expensive shift. Back in 1997, when sprawl was entering its second decade as an urgent problem requiring immediate attention, the State Planning Office estimated that Maine taxpayers had paid some $338 million during a period roughly coinciding with the Brookings report to build “redundant” schools – that is, schools to accommodate shift without growth – and that the annual cost of this construction and of the resulting additional busing costs were between $30 million and $40 million. Add in the cost of re-creating police and fire protection, roads and utilities in places that formerly were open land and, as was observed at a sprawl conference held in Bangor early this year, it’s easy to see why hiring economists and planners to worry about sprawl may be Maine’s leading growth industry.

An industry with a serious quality-control problem – the Portland metropolitan area is the only one in the sprawl Top 20 that’s not in the Sun Belt. The Bangor area, which lost 5 percent of its people in the last Census, had a 28.3 percent density decline during the Brookings study period. Lewiston-Auburn had a drop of 26.4 percent, with Androscoggin County having 1,466 fewer people than it had a decade ago.

In its 1997 report, the State Planning Office noted that state and local government spending in Maine on just three services – education, roads and police – increased by $637 million during the 1980s, more than $1,300 per household, with much of the increase due to unrestrained spreading out. Yet, despite Maine’s relentless pursuit of having the nation’s highest tax burden, a long succession of Legislatures has rejected substantive proposals to restrain sprawl by making growth at least start to pay for itself, as if one person’s right to live where he or she wants always trumps the right of others not to pay for the extra cost.

Local initiatives run into the same roadblock; the ire of property taxpayers is forgotten when developers beckon. Suggestions that neighboring communities stop competing for development and adopt regional approaches to planning suffer the same fate as suggestions that local-option sales taxes could help stop the flight from service-center city to low-tax suburb.

One solution would be for the Legislature to forget about controlling growth and concentrate on controlling spending. Portland, for example, seems unable or unwilling to choose between being a city with all the amenities (cruise ship terminal, tourist trains, even a park just for dogs in need of exercise) and a rural community with most homes on two-acre lots. The spending that results from this civic schizophrenia has resulted in borrowing to such an extent that a drop in the city’s credit rating is threatened, leading some city officials to suggest that the state help pay some bills. The state could make it clear it won’t, but since the population shift carries with it a shift in legislative clout, that would be a long shot.

Another solution would be for the state to address the issues that set the shift in motion. The deficiencies northern Maine faces in transportation, utilities infrastructure and, especially important in the digital economy, telecommunications are the cause first of economic decline and then of inevitable relocation. Making the investments within established but shrinking communities to correct those deficiencies in the north is dismissed as too expensive, yet, paradoxically, they are made unblinkingly in the sprawling south when the shift demands.

Calculating the true cost of sprawl – not just the cost of re-creating services and building redundant schools, but also the cost of propping up dying towns – would be a big job, but it would give all those economists and planners something to do besides just worry.