Top 10 State and Local Environmental Solutions

5. Invest in existing communities and infrastructure. State and local leaders can devote resources to strengthening existing communities, whether through targeting infrastructure spending to these places, or through changing laws to speed redevelopment. These actions will also advance traditional environmental goals, such as preserving open space and wildlife habitat, and lessening water pollution.

Why reinvestment is a federalism issue:
Significance:
Infrastructure and community revitalization decisions are also environmental policies, with powerful local effects. When state and local officials direct growth to areas that already have infrastructure or a sensible plan for accommodating additional growth, they reduce the development pressure on open space, wildlife habitat, and wetlands. By not building new roads and parking lots that will collect toxic chemicals on their surface, officials are keeping polluted runoff out of streams and rivers. By preserving existing communities, which tend to be compactly developed and transit-accessible, lawmakers are reducing the smog-forming and greenhouse gas emissions from cars.

State and local role:
Unlike many other environmental policies, in which the federal government takes the lead and states are junior partners, state and local governments "set the rules of the development game." These rules are the cornerstone of state and local environmental law.  Currently, many state and local funding decisions and laws facilitate the creation of entirely new communities on open spaces or farmland, rather than the maintenance and improvement of established areas where people already live.

But some state and local governments are changing their rules to favor reinvestment and revitalization instead. For example, some states have modified their building codes to make it easier and less expensive to rehabilitate existing structures. In an excellent example of a state innovation influencing national standards, the federal government's Department of Housing and Urban Development used New Jersey's 1997 building rehabilitation guidelines as a national model. Salt Lake City also has adopted a pro-rehabilitation code, available from the Gaining Ground Information Database.

State governments are also adopting "fix-it-first" approaches to infrastructure spending. Building entirely new roads, schools, and sewer systems costs state and local governments significantly more than modernizing and upgrading existing infrastructure. Other states, such as New Jersey and Maryland, have laws or policies that give certain, already developed places first priority for infrastructure funding, to send state dollars to places where people already live, rather than subsidizing new development. New Jersey's state plan is an especially good example of how states can make deliberate, community-supported decisions to grow in a fiscally and environmentally responsible way. The plan's executive summary describes in clear, even stirring, language how the plan works and what it hopes to accomplish.

Pennsylvania voters recently passed a $625 million bond initiative known as Growing Greener II that explicitly connects revival of existing communities to environmental goals such as preserving open space and cleaning up contaminated sites. The state law authorizing the bond initiative is available in PDF format here.

Critical resources:
The National Governor's Association has found several kinds of state policies that focus on getting the most out of existing assets before heedlessly making new, costly investments and on coordinating planning and spending decisions so that state money is spent wisely and efficiently, rather than on programs that are at cross-purposes.

The Land Use Law Center at Pace University Law School, and the school's Gaining Ground Information Database are excellent sources for existing state and local laws concerning investment, revitalization and growth generally.

The Center for Policy Alternatives has model legislation for a new, rehabilitation friendly building code, based on New Jersey's successful code. The State Environmental Resource Center has policy information and model legislation on a variety of community revitalization techniques. Both the Brookings Institution's Metro Program and the Progressive Policy Institute have focused particularly on reinvestment strategies for older or "first-tier" suburbs. The Brookings report is here and PPI's is here.

Another popular program for revitalizing urban areas is through the clean up and reuse of brownfields, which are lightly polluted former industrial sites. Information on state brownfields programs is available from The National Governor's Association, the EPA, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Environmental Law Institute (scroll down to the model legislation in pdf format) and the Northeast-Midwest Institute (which has two excellent reports: one here, and one here).

For a somewhat broader perspective on vacant or underused land in urban areas, see the National Vacant Properties Campaign, and this list of reports from the Brookings Institution Metro Program.

Investing in existing infrastructure and supporting existing communities are elements of a larger family of policies known as "smart growth." The Smart Growth Network, and Smart Growth America have information about smart growth policies and the range of groups that are working to implement them.

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If you know of other state and local governments pursuing similar policies, or different policies to reach the same goal, please let us know by sending an email to redefiningfederalism@communityrights.org.

To read about how federalism concerns are playing out in the debate about policy responses to global warming, please visit our blog, www.warminglaw.com

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