Our nation's metro regions need stronger tools to address transportation and land use issues, where things have broken down badly in most places. I haven't turned to the issue of metropolitan regionalism in a while (last time was in April), but some thoughts by Bill Hudnut inspire me to do so again today. One of Bill's bios lists him, accurately, as a man of many facets: "Former four-term (GOP) mayor of Indianapolis and congressman, author, public speaker, TV commentator, think tank fellow, elected official, and clergyman."
I've had the good fortune of working with Bill occasionally and highly value his experience and judgment. He's right on the money this time as he argues for reform of metro-level transportation planning.
As I have written before, I believe most of the issues of growth, mobility, equity and the environment that we address here are fundamentally regional in character. But our political mechanisms place most of the authority for dealing with them at the smallest levels of local government. This causes all sorts of chaos, since city and suburban municipalities by their nature do not consider matters beyond their limited, frequently artificial borders and too often drain people, jobs and resources from each other while competing for revenues - to cite just one type of dysfunction. This breeds sprawl, which breeds increased traffic and inconcenience, and so on.
While mayor, Bill actually did something about this issue, advancing a form of merged government between the city of Indianapolis and surrounding Marion County. And he believes that we have an existing structure on which to build regional solutions in the metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) mandated by federal transportation law. I agree.
Most of the areas in color are served by MPOs. Map by National Association of Regional Councils.
Now, MPOs in the real world are fraught with problems of inequitable representation and political weakness. In most places, they don't work very well. But the idea of vesting multi-jurisdictional MPOs, each covering a metropolitan area, with defined political responsibilities is a good one.
Here are Bill's six ideas for strengthening MPOs and giving them a mission better-suited for 21st century problems:
Elect the membership. Elected officials and agency staff could be excepted; they would serve ex-officio.
Give MPOs actual authority to zone land, allocate funds, issue bonds, levy taxes, and enforce federal and state regulations regarding clean air and water.
Require MPOs to focus on greenhouse gas emissions as a planning issue, and require that transportation plans comply with results-based goals for climate stability.
Require neighboring regions to link their planning through a uniform approach to presenting information and benchmarking results.
Develop and implement multimodal regional access plans.
"Mandate a "fix it first" strategy for MPOs, which is to say, rebuild the old before building the new.
That would be a heck of a start.
(For readers who want a bit more detail, I have a somewhat longer story on my home base at NRDC, here.)
Kaid Benfield writes occasional "Village Green" commentary on DailyKos and (almost) daily on NRDC's Switchboard site about community, development, and the environment. For daily posts, see my Switchboard blog's home page.
National Association of Regional Councils