Abstract
In Governing the Fragmented Metropolis: Planning for Regional Sustainability, Christina Rosan provides an excellent comparative study of regional planning arrangements in the Boston, Massachusetts, Denver, Colorado, and Portland, Oregon, metropolitan areas. She selected these regions to provide a comparative spectrum in terms of the strength of authority provided to metropolitan planning institutions for transportation and land use, with the Boston area’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) representing the weakest arrangement, the Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG) providing a middle-range example, and the regionally elected Portland Metro agency being the strongest regional authority. Her objective is to evaluate, across these regions, whether stronger regulatory authority for regional planning institutions creates a more effective basis for influencing local government decisions in furtherance of joint goals and objectives.
Metropolitan regional planning arrangements for transportation and land use in the United States have received fairly limited attention from planning scholars, probably because they tend to be fairly weak. For example, although federal policy has, since the 1960s, mandated the establishment of Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) for transportation planning purposes in urban areas with populations of fifty thousand or more, these agencies have mainly performed an interface function, coordinating projects generated and funded at the federal, state, and local levels. In general, MPOs lack autonomous revenue-raising authority, and with governing boards composed of representatives from sending jurisdictions (localities, transit agencies, state agencies, and the like), MPOs lack independent and autonomous power. Another common form of regional planning entity, called a Council of Governments (COG), is constituted as forum of local governments. Nationally, about half of MPOs are coincident with COGs.
The lack of scholarly attention paid to MPOs and COGs is unfortunate because, since the 1990s, many have been taking on more ambitious goals to promote compact development, energy-efficient transport, and other sustainable development objectives. Some state-directed sustainability policies prescribe a significant role for MPOs; for example, California’s Senate Bill 375, adopted in 2008, requires that MPOs help achieve the state’s climate policy goals by developing transportation plans to achieve state-imposed greenhouse gas reduction targets, linked to regionally coordinated land use plans (Barbour 2016).
Some recent research has recognized the growing role of many MPOs and COGs in sustainability planning (see, e.g., Seltzer 2011; Bartholomew and Ewing 2009). However, very few in-depth comparative studies of MPO and COG practices exist, and Rosan’s book is a welcome contribution. While her number of case study regions is small, her evaluation is rich in detail, based on extensive study of planning documents and more than 90 participant interviews. Her research addresses an important and understudied question, namely, how MPO and COG institutional arrangements influence inter-local planning cooperation and achievement of sustainability goals and objectives, especially for land use.
Rosan begins by describing problematic consequences of the institutional structure of land use decision making in the United States, where land use is a prerogative of local governments who generally make decisions in an uncoordinated way, without needing to consider spillover effects on neighboring jurisdictions or the region as a whole. She argues that individualized decision making contributes to sprawl development, as localities seek to maximize fiscal benefits of land use, such as through low-density zoning, without taking heed of cumulative consequences. She points to research indicating negative effects of sprawl for the environment and infrastructure costs, to underpin her case that regional coordination of land use is needed for sustainable development. While her argument is generally persuasive, some more consideration would have been warranted about why localities prefer development patterns entailing higher long-run infrastructure costs, which they must then “scramble” to cover. More evaluation of barriers to infill development, and of trade-offs in financing infrastructure costs of new development through exactions imposed on developers, compared to public costs of maintaining the infrastructure over the long run, would have been helpful.
Rosan also reviews academic literature on regionalism, noting that many scholars advocate a voluntary and collaborative approach to regional planning coordination as more politically feasible than assertive efforts to impose top–down regional regulatory authority over local land use decisions. The Portland area’s choice to establish an elected governing body for its MPO, with power to ensure consistency between local land use decisions and its regional plan, makes the region a “poster child” for strong regionalism, but also one considered to be an anomaly not replicable elsewhere. Rosan’s study is intended to probe the question whether Portland’s more top–down approach creates intractable regional–local conflicts and local resentment of regional authority, as compared to the more voluntary, collaborative structures operating in the other two regions.
Boston’s MAPC agency is characterized as having weak institutional ability to gain local government buy-in, even for attendance at MAPC meetings by local officials and planners. MAPC is the region’s COG, operating separately from the MPO. As such, it operates as a forum for local governments on issues of mutual concern, but does not allocate transportation funds. For MAPC to achieve influence has required leadership capable of leveraging state-level support. In 2007, MAPC adopted a regional plan based on a “visioning” process, which calls for more compact, infill growth, and energy-efficient transport than the status quo. MAPC has an official role in developing the population, employment, and land use projections that the regional MPO uses as an input for modeling its long-range transportation plan, and MAPC was able to convince the state’s Department of Transportation to encourage the MPO to adopt MAPC’s compact growth-oriented plan as the official set of projections. MAPC has also worked to enhance its value as a resource for localities in addressing new state mandates and incentives for affordable housing. While this capacity-building approach has increased MAPC’s relevance, localities still do not make land use choices with much regard to the regional plan.
One shortcoming in the narrative on MAPC is in the explanation of the role of MAPC’s plan for MPO modeling purposes. As an officially adopted set of population and employment projections for the region’s MPO, MAPC’s plan must meet federal and possibly state requirements regarding the plausibility of planning assumptions. For the plan to be feasible, MAPC’s member local governments must be committed to its implementation. In turn, feasibility also depends on state-level policies to help overcome barriers to infill development. Rosan could have gone further in exploring and explaining this recursive set of factors.
Rosan assesses Denver’s regional arrangements in light of the aligned MPO and COG functions under DRCOG auspices. She investigates whether DRCOG’s ability to influence local land use choices is greater than MAPC’s because of the MPO function, which should theoretically mean that local governments have a greater incentive to pay attention to DRCOG decisions. DRCOG has developed a number of regional smart growth policies, such as the Mile High Compact among jurisdictions to adhere to voluntarily established urban growth boundaries. However, Rosan notes that while local governments engage extensively in DRCOG decision making, their decisions reflect consensus choices and localities still determine land use on a voluntary basis. The integrated COG and MPO functions of DRCOG may serve to elicit more engaged participation by localities than in Boston’s MAPC, but this stronger institutional structure does not result in binding decisions imposed on reluctant localities.
Rosan’s assessment of Portland Metro indicates that its land use authority enhances its effectiveness considerably. But Rosan does not attribute this outcome to Metro’s ability to impose mandates unilaterally upon reluctant localities. Instead, Metro’s land use authority, which derives from state-imposed requirements for regional–local plan consistency determination, ensures that joint decision-making is taken seriously. Furthermore, through its MPO function, Portland Metro directs resources for joint land use-transport projects and programs, such as transit-oriented development tied to new transit provision.
Rosan finds that, notwithstanding its land use authority, Portland Metro still must mobilize effective strategies linking regional and local goals and priorities. The absence of revenue-sharing in the region means that local development choices still often aim to maximize local rather than regional benefits. Portland Metro is able to be more effective than the Denver and Boston regional agencies not through mandates imposed from above, but rather through leveraging its authority to promote a more deliberative, engaged planning process that mobilizes resources to integrate and achieve local and regional interests and priorities simultaneously. In other words, Metro’s authority enables but does not guarantee more effective planning outcomes.
These lessons are useful at a time when other states, such as California, are experimenting with new policy approaches to strengthen regional planning while preserving local home rule control of land use. Rosan makes a convincing case that old debates that pit collaborative, voluntary means of regional coordination against more assertive top–down regulatory approaches are somewhat misplaced. MPO and COG authority and capacity derive from a complex interplay of federal, state, regional, and local policies and processes. Many more state regulations and incentives condition local land use choices than only explicit COG or MPO authority provisions. Furthermore, state policies that support regional plan goals and connect regional and local plans can benefit localities, not just regions as a whole.
Rosan’s book provides an excellent in-depth case study of MPO and COG governing capacity. Future work should expand upon her investigation and address remaining gaps in knowledge. Rosan’s small number of case studies did not allow for exploring variation within the three tiers of decision-making structures she investigated, namely, COG-only, COG-plus-MPO, and COG-MPO-plus-land use authority. She does not address certain factors that surely influence MPO dynamics, such as numbers of local governments within regions (for her case studies, the number ranges from 101 in the Boston region, to about half that number in the Denver region, and only about one-quarter in the Portland region). Also, she could have investigated and compared more thoroughly the effect of federal and state mandates and incentives affecting regional planning outcomes, from air quality responsibilities and public participation and environmental review requirements for MPO plans, to fiscal constraints and powers, such as tax increment financing authority, afforded to localities, and other state policies influencing local land use choices, such as affordable housing incentives and mandates, which vary across US states.