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Greater
Denver looks to smart growth to accommodate another million people
by 2020
By
Bill Hornby
for Headwaters News
"Blueprint Denver," a long-range integrated land-use and
transportation plan, was adopted by the Denver City Council in March.
It is the latest chapter in the city's long effort to prepare for
major population growth.
It is apparent from Headwater News reports (May
15, for example) that many Rocky Mountain communities in both
the U.S. and Canada are likewise entangled in the quagmire of growth
management. There may be some observations from this Denver effort
that will be helpful if our interior Western cities can improve their
communication.
Some 132,000 new residents, 60,700 new households, more than 100,000
new jobs and the accompanying traffic congestion are expected to be
added to Denver's current core population of 525,000 by the year 2020.
For the eight-county metropolitan region of which Denver is the economic,
recreational, educational, health-care, and often employment hub,
population will increase from 2.3 million to 3.2 million.
These
estimates are from the Denver Regional Council of Governments. This
group of municipal and county officials provides planning support
and coordination for most of the metropolitan region. After years
of more parochial focus on the problems of the central city, Denver
has adopted the council's regional plan, Metro Vision 2020, as a supplement
to its own comprehensive plan.
The regional council has consistently championed urban growth boundaries,
conservation of water supplies and quality, the protection of open
space, and greater use of mass transit in an attempt to restrain the
urban sprawl evident along the Front Range.
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Growth
and its impacts dominate city agendas across the region
By
Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
June 5, 2002
Growth is doubtless the biggest challenge for the
region's cities, and it pops up in more ways than just the obvious
problems of sprawl, traffic and congestion.
First the obvious, starting in Arizona. The state's population grew
by 40 percent in the past decade and forecasts
call for another 3.1 million people by the year 2020.
In 2000, voters rejected two statewide growth-control propositions,
one seen as too strict, the other too lenient, and both pro- and
anti-control factions agree broad growth-management plans are unlikely,
and any control will have to be local.
So, after more than six
years of attempts, Arizona communities have some authority to
slow leapfrog development and impose impact fees, but no umbrella
plan or vision, and little power of enforcement.
Meanwhile, Maricopa County, the nation's second-fastest growing
county during the 1990s, added nearly 8,000 people a month during
the past two years, to its current population of 3.2 million
In some outlying areas, such as Caldwell, Idaho, near Boise, a classic
struggle is ongoing between farmers
and an influx of suburbanites, who come with an increasing clamor
for restrictions on agricultural operations. A year of compromise
has gone into the area's planning strategy, and into plans for the
cities of Nampa and Caldwell, and all will incorporate a countywide
transportation plan, a nod, at least, toward smart growth principles.
Davis County, Utah, officials are struggling to come up with regulations
that would limit how far up the Wasatch foothills new subdivisions
can climb, an effort to preserve the view from the valleys. And
while most British Columbia cities saw the double-digit growth of
the 1990s slow to a trickle in 2001, the Okanagan Valley and Kamloops
posted notable exceptions.
Residential subdivisions typically don't pay enough in taxes to
cover the cost of the services they demand, and some Colorado
cities found they needed to dramatically increase the fees they
charge developers to keep up with explosive growth. Some communities
doubled their fees, and one assessed $30,500 in charges per $100,000
in construction value in 2000.
And smart growth principles are hardly universally
popular. In
Reno and Sparks, Nev., so many respondents in a recent survey
didn't like plans for smaller houses closer to work, and didn't
want to live in higher-density neighborhoods, that the results threw
the entire regional plan into question.
One unexpected impact of sprawl could be the loss
of an Air Force base near Phoenix and a resulting $2 billion
blow to the local economy. U.S. Sen. John McCain has repeatedly
warned the folks back home that creeping development threatens the
future of Luke Air Force Base: Training flights must be able to
reach the Barry Goldwater Range without flying over houses, and
only one open corridor remains.
McCain said another round of base closures is imminent, and other
bases, backed by nearby communities, are eager to take over Luke's
mission and business.
There are regulatory success stories. Some efforts, such as the
federal Clean Air Act, have helped ease some of the effects of growth.
Denver
made impressive gains against traffic-generated pollution in
the past 15 years, despite record growth during much of the period.
The EPA is ready to certify Denver's air as clean for the first
time since the 1970s, when it rivaled Los Angeles for the nation's
worst.
Colorado leaders in the late 1980s saw the need to change Denver's
historically boom-and-bust economy to something more sustainable,
and poisonous air was a distinct impediment. The state established
the Regional Air Quality Council, an agency that imposed strict
air-quality regulations in a six-county area, which banned wood-burning
fireplaces in new homes, among other measures.
Colorado was the first state with an auto-emissions inspection program
and first to require oxygenated gasoline during the winter months.
Denver was the first city to shift from sanding roads to using a
liquid road de-icer, and the region's power provider switched power
plants from coal to natural gas.
But even if compromise and conciliation fail to produce growth-management
plans, nature may take a more direct approach in much of the West.
Around Boise,
water demand is expected to double or triple by 2025, and spokesmen
for the city's main supplier said it already may be near the limit
of how much it can pump from the aquifer. They said deliveries to
southeast Boise may run short within two years.
Critics note that despite the urbanization of Ada and Canyon counties,
the amount of water set aside for agriculture for the last half
century is still reserved for farms, despite the loss of 30,000
irrigated acres, about 10 percent of the total.
Santa
Fe's reservoirs currently contain less than 30 percent of capacity,
the result of a prolonged drought, and although city officials deferred
stricter limits on water use, observers say it's only a matter of
time before chronic shortages force changes.
Another golf course would not be likely to get approved, they say,
and a luxury hotel would have a tough fight. The city is at a Stage
3 alert, and at Stage 4, it would cease issuing new building permits
entirely.
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