In This Issue:

– Gore, Global Warning and RPA

– Madrid Tackles Eurosprawl

– Too Many Governments: A Comparison of Long Island and Virginia

– Calendar

Gore and Global Warming: Both Are Coming on Strong
The return on Wednesday of the almost-president Al Gore to Capitol Hill, where he last was as vice-president in 2000 certifying his own defeat, underscored the passage of time and how things change and what goes around, comes around.

Gore’s reappearance under the dome of the Capitol to testify before two committees represented a ressurection of sorts, sealing his journey from defeated presidential candidate to leader of a movement to tackle man-made greenhouse emissions and the resultant climate change they are causing. It seems fair to say that just as Gore’s personal reputation and fortunes have undergone an evolution in the last seven years, so has the reputation of what is generally called global warming.

In November of 2000, when Gore lost the presidential election by a combination of hanging chads and Supreme Court decisions after winning the popular vote, global warming was a side issue for the American public – a focus for scientists and diplomats but not political pundits. And while there was substantial acceptance of global warming among the scientific community, there was considerable skepticism and doubt among the public and politicians. That is increasingly not the case.

While there are still some like Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma who on Wednesday described Gore’s testimony as essentially false, he is more and more the exception that proves the rule. Even Republican leader Rep. Dennis Hastert, former speaker of the house for the party that has generally resisted accepting and fighting climate change, told Gore on Wednesday that Gore’s analysis was essentially correct.

If global warming is a reality – and I say if, only because on a personal level some tiny corner of my soul still has trouble accepting such a grave and serious diagnosis for the world, even though the arguments in the issue’s favor are intellectually convincing – then it truly is, as Gore says, the issue of our century and our age. We will either successfully tackle global warming, or it will tackle us. The debate in Congress reflected that. It has shifted from whether or not global warming is true to what is the most effective way of dealing with it.

A principal challenge of global warming is that it must be addressed both globally and locally. Globally may mean things like setting up a system of carbon trading markets and rethinking insurance and engineering practices. Locally may mean adopting specific measures to adapt to climate change, as well as taking local steps to reduce emissions and become part of the solution, rather than the problem.

On May 4, RPA will provide a forum for a discussion of all these issues at its 17th annual Regional Assembly that is titled "A Bright and Green Future: Climate Change, Energy and Growth in the Tri-State Metropolitan Region." Information can be had on the front page at www.rpa.org. Or, download a complete registration brochure here, and a PRINTABLE, faxable one here.

- Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region

Madrid Tackles Sprawl
As with most tourists, every trip I’ve made to Europe until recently has been either to historic city centers like Paris or Florence or lovely natural settings like the Swiss Alps. This has contributed to a beautiful if somewhat lopsided view of the continent. It’s either the Eifel Tower or Mont Blanc, the Coliseum or the Tuscan hillside, with nothing in between.

That changed recently when a group of RPA staff took a trip to the sprawling, booming suburbs of Madrid. We were there to participate in the third annual megaregional planning workshop at the Fundacion Metropoli, one of Europe’s leading urban research centers. Along with representatives from Lisbon, Barcelona, Marseilles, Milan, and, of course, Madrid, we worked to better understand how Madrid could handle its booming suburbs, why they occurred in the first place, and what lessons could be learned that would be applicable to European and American megaregions.

The Fundacion is located in a city called Alcobendas, about 12 miles northeast of downtown Madrid. We stayed nearby, at least in a physical sense, in an area called Plaza Castilla, because that’s where the inter-city bus terminal is located. Each day, we endured a bus ride between Plaza Castilla and Alcobendas that ranged anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour and a half. Rush hour was thick and lasted for several hours at each end of the workday. It ran completely contrary to my earlier notions of Europe’s compact centers crisscrossed with modern transit, free from such a transportation mess.

Sitting in traffic on the A-1, which is a European style radial highway linking the region’s four beltways, I spent many hours looking out at the myriad construction cranes and steel frames rising adjacent to the highway and further in the distance. With rush-hour congestion easily as heavy as on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, how could the cities permit so much additional development along this corridor? Even more importantly, why did they build the A-1 and each of the beltways beyond the urban extent, presently linking farmland and other fodder for future sprawl? It is this unnecessarily robust regional highway network that has promoted automobile-centric sprawl, or the Spanish equivalent, that the city and region are now attempting to control.

The saving grace, some Spanish planners point out, is that the development around the beltway is at a much higher density than our American sprawl. And while it’s currently automobile-dependent save limited bus connections, a subway extension is on its way to serve Alcobendas and points in between. Madrid owns several tunnel boring machines, and each is plowing through rock to expand the region’s transit network in an attempt to keep pace with rampant growth and development. A future stop on the number 10 subway line will be located literally feet from the front door of the Fundacion, shedding light on how planners make locational decisions.

I couldn’t help but wonder, though, how much better the built environment of Madrid would be if the subways had been built before the highway infrastructure, or if the beltways had not been built at all. As American cities have discovered, it is very difficult to retrofit a built environment for mass transit. To accommodate the development in Alcobendas and all along the A-1, new roads have been built, highways expanded, surface parking lots paved, and parking decks erected, all necessary to serve the automobiles essential to reach these developments. Residents and employees have developed habits over several years of commuting and living in these developments. Will heavy congestion alone be enough to encourage the utilization of this transit afterthought? And will the built environment be able to reshape itself along more transit-friendly contours?

Our studio at the Fundacion specifically addressed these issues. What we came up with was that Madrid could accommodate future growth through two complementary strategies. The first would focus on infill and redevelopment in brownfields and underutilized industrial and warehouse districts that would be linked to an expanded transit network. The second strategy would focus on newer development in a planned network of satellite centers around existing and planned rail. The policies are similar to what RPA recommends for the Tri-State region, so it shows that Trans-Atlantic education can go both ways.

All big cities are different, even within national borders, so it was good that I got a chance to visit Barcelona during the same trip. This Catalan city presented a better model for its American visitors. I was impressed by the fact that there were five new light rail lines into new development areas. These lines were new enough that they didn’t even appear on my Metro map from the previous year. I had the opportunity to ride two of these new lines. One was in the southeast part of the city and it connected the former Olympic Village and Cuitadella Park with Diagonal Mar and the Forum and provided access to the development frontier of the city.

So far the strategy of promoting development around the rail lines has worked. All along these new transit corridors, construction cranes and building skeletons form a dramatic skyline above an otherwise dilapidated section of Barcelona. Already, the light rail is highly used but not crowded. Good habits have been set for employees and residents in this part of the city, and ridership will undoubtedly grow as new development continues. It will be much easier to shorten headways and add cars to each train to meet this demand than for Madrid to add additional lanes on the A-1, or to entice people to use a transit corridor not yet in place.

– David Kooris, Senior Planner, RPA

Putting a Price Tag on Fragmented Government
Ever since Robert Wood put a number to the problem in his 1961 classic, 1400 Governments: The Political Economy of the New York Metropolitan Region, regionalists have argued with little success that balkanized, overlapping units of government result in the inefficient use of scarce resources, from land to tax revenues and political energy.

Despite the theoretical appeal of such arguments, they were simply never a match for citizens’ attachment to locally controlled schools, fire houses, police departments and parks, or to the fierce resistance from local officials. In fact, in 1996 RPA estimated that the number of governments in the region had grown to over 2000, partly because the region had expanded, but also because municipal divisions, special districts and public authorities had added new layers to the mix.

The issue is getting a new hearing, however, driven by the rumblings of property tax revolt in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. With no easy answers for reducing some of the highest property taxes in the nation, political leaders in states, counties and localities are looking for creative ways to share services. Even taboo topics like fire or school district consolidation are getting some serious attention across the region.

In New Jersey, Governor Corzine and a number of legislative leaders are pushing for stronger incentives for shared services and consolidation as part of the package for property tax reform. On Long Island, both County Executives Tom Suozzi in Nassau and Steve Levy in Suffolk have launched efforts to identify savings from the consolidation of taxing districts and other local efficiencies. This in turn has triggered a vigorous debate for how much savings you can actually extract from economies of scale without sacrificing service quality.

To help resolve this question, two studies released this week by the Long Island Index, an initiative of the Rauch Foundation, provide some tantalizing and compelling evidence. Comparing Nassau and Suffolk to the counties of Fairfax and Loudoun in northern Virginia, a place with similar demographics but very different government structures, the Center for Governmental Research found some striking contrasts.

On a per capita basis, property taxes are 45% higher on Long Island than in northern Virginia, even though incomes and home values are actually higher in the Virginia counties. That difference pales in comparison to the number of governments, however. With 439 units of government, Long Island has 26 times the 17 separate governments in Fairfax and Loudoun, an area with about half the population of Nassau and Suffolk. Largely for historical reasons resulting in different state attitudes toward home rule, county governments in Virginia provide most of the services offered by municipalities and districts in the tri-state area.

It would be simplistic, and incorrect, to ascribe the difference in property taxes primarily to layers of government. As the report documents, a number of factors, from state grants and mandates to salary differences, contribute. But the report goes beyond that with an excellent job of parsing these factors to estimate how much of the difference cannot be attributed to state requirements or salaries.

The punch line – $372 per person – represents 22% of the $1,722 difference in per capita costs. While there are still a number of possible causes for the difference, it does not appear to be due to variances in cost of living or quality of services. In fact, the companion study, a survey conducted by Stony Brook University’s Center for Survey Research, found that residents of Fairfax and Loudoun rate the quality of their local services higher than Long Islanders. (Both reports can be found on www.longislandindex.org.)

The report’s authors concluded that “the most likely explanation is that the majority of the $372 per capita is based on fundamental structural differences associated with the governmental models in the two regions,” with Virginia able to achieve economies of scale by providing services at the county level.

By themselves, these reports are no more likely to change the politics of home rule than the Woods report did in the 1960s. Nor do they answer the tough questions of how government should be reorganized to address questions of equity as well as efficiency. But they do establish both a rationale and a reasonable benchmark for an increasingly active group of citizens and political leaders willing to take on governmental reform.

– Chris Jones, Vice President for Reseach, RPA

Questions or comments on what’s in this issue? Send them to the editor of Spotlight On The Region, Alex Marshall at alex@rpa.org

April 20
Sustainable Long Island will host "Rethink, Rebuild, Renew:
Creating a Sustainable Future for Long Island," at Stony Brook
University. Speakers include County Executives Steve Levy and Thomas Suozzi; Long Island Association president Matthew Crosson; Regional Planning Association's Chris Jones; Newsday's Joye Brown; Renewable Energy Long Island's Gordian Raacke;
Neighborhood Network's Neal Lewis; and Julius Walls, president and CEO of Greyston Bakery. Info and registration here: LINK: www.sustainableli.org or 516-873-0230. Also Caryn Rubenstein at crubenstein@sustainableli.org

Friday, May 4th, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Regional Plan Association’s 17th annual Regional Assembly: A Bright, Green Future: Climate Change, Energy and Growth in the Tri-State Metropolitan Region. More information is available soon at www.rpa.org. Information can be had on the front page at www.rpa.org. Or, download a complete registration brochure here, and a PRINTABLE, faxable one here.

May 23
Our Towns, Our Land, Our Heritage: Sustaining NJ's Legacy: The 2007 Annual NJ Historic Preservation Conference. Drew University, Madison, NJ.
LINK: http://www.nj.gov/dep/hpo/4sustain/Conference2007/postconf2007.htm