Posted on 11/18/2001 10:38:11 PM PST by 1Peter2:16
As director of public policy for the Defenders of Property Rights, a non-profit legal group based in Washington, D.C., Harrison had heard of many outrageous schemes that would impact the rights of property owners, but what Smith – a business owner and member of DPR – was telling him went far beyond anything he'd heard of to date.
"Quite frankly, I thought he had been taking drugs," Harrison recalled. "But what he was saying and showing me made my hair stand on end."
It was a document Smith claimed was a mechanism for the federalization of land use in the United States, something many states and many Americans have opposed for years.
Titled "Growing Smart Legislative Guidebook," the 2,000-page document is the product of Growing Smart, a seven-year project of the American Planning Association, a non-profit organization of professional land use planners and persons connected to the planning community through a shared interest in the subject. The Guidebook is essentially a collection of model enabling statutes (with commentary) that state legislatures would adopt to authorize planning, land development controls, regulations, procedural processes; everything states and local governments might need for – in the authors' words – "planning and the management of change." The statutes would be new requirements placed on state agencies and local governments to make often-significant changes in their ordinances and policies.
Several chapters have been released, and are already being used and under consideration by some states. Phase III, the finalized version, that includes some important chapters, has not been released, but is on the APA website.
Smith stressed to Harrison that the Guidebook, which had been funded in part by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to the tune of $1.78 million, was expected to be approved by HUD Secretary Martinez no later than Nov. 22 – less than a month away at the time.
According to the APA website, the Growing Smart project was initiated in October 1994, with seed money provided by the Seattle-based Henry W. Jackson Foundation, founded in honor of the late senator from the state of Washington. In addition to funding from HUD (the lead federal agency), money had also come from the Department of Transportation, EPA, FEMA, the Department of Agriculture, the Annie Casey Foundation and the Siemens Corporation.
There were no public hearings, no public notice, and Harrison discovered that few if anyone on Capital Hill were aware of it. This was preposterous. How could something like this be developed without somebody knowing about it, he wondered. How had proponents managed to evade the radar detector of private property rights advocates and government watchdog groups?
"Well, lo and behold, how quickly we have forgotten Hillary Clinton's Health Care Plan," Harrison observed sardonically, referring to the discarded project which like the Guidebook was developed clandestinely. "This is for zoning and land use what Hillary wanted imposed on health care."
Smart growth with a turbo-charger
Attorney Nancy Marzulla, president of Defenders of Property Rights, and the senior staff attorney virtually closeted themselves in a room for a week to go line-by-line through the Guidebook, all of its 15 chapters, with a fine-toothed comb. They emerged only for breaks and to go home in the evenings. They were "absolutely appalled and horrified" by what they discovered, said Harrison.
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