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February 7, 2005

Up for review | A USM professor talks about his new book, and how local planning boards can influence sustainable development

By Sean Donahue
With development on the rise across Maine, Rob Sanford hopes to influence the planning boards that have to approve, modify or reject projects. But rather than attempting to sway individual decisions, Sanford wants to make sure that each proposal gets as thorough and thoughtful a review as possible. "I felt that the more people understood the [site plan review] process, the more effective the review could be," says Sanford, an associate professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Southern Maine.

To that end, Sanford and co-author Dana H. Farley recently released Site Plan and Development Review: A Guide for Northern New England (Putney Press, 2004). The book provides an introduction to the concepts behind the site plan review process, then dedicates individual chapters to analyzing key development factors, including air quality, septic systems, water resources, soil erosion, traffic and aesthetics. By including explanations of terms, checklists for reviewers and anecdotes from real planning board members, Sanford's goal was to demystify the often obscure world of engineers, architects and land-use regulators.

It's knowledge he had to gain on the job: His first experience with land-use issues came as an undergraduate archaeology student at the State University of New York's Potsdam campus, when a professor hired him to help review a highway project for potential impact on Native American archeological sites. From there, he continued providing environmental and archeological reviews for municipal governments and private developer before being hired by the state of Vermont as an administrator for the land-use and development law Act 250.

Sanford says his nine years of running development review hearings in Vermont taught him the value of the site plan review process. Though he envisions planning board members as a significant audience for his book, he says he wrote it to be a "neutral" guide for anyone involved in the process, from small-business owners planning a development project to citizens interested in monitoring development in their towns.

Mainebiz spoke to Sanford about his book and the role of the site plan review process in creating long-term, sustainable development. An edited transcript follows.

You said that you first starting thinking about this 10 years ago, but do you see value in having written the book now, given the pace of development we've seen in Maine recently?

[Three years ago] we came out of a mild recession and started to see a slight upswing in development, and a lot of towns realized that if they have clear rules that people understand, then they can guide growth. And many developers I know often say things like, "I don't mind that you have rules, if you tell me about them and how they work. What I don't like is vagueness in the process." So that's when I thought the timing was starting to look good for this. We have nine percent or 10% a year growth in the greater Portland area, with new housing and things like that, so I felt like maybe this is a good time.

And, of course, being a planner you think in the long range. Growth doesn't necessarily mean that raw land gets converted into commercial, industrial and residential development. Growth means economic cycling. If there's a business change in a town, even though the town itself doesn't expand, that's economic growth, and that's changes to the land that require environmental review.

Planning boards usually are made up of citizens analyzing the work of professional developers and engineers ˆ— essentially, as you say in the book, a situation in which the amateurs review the professionals. Was the need to help those amateurs a big motivation for the book?

Absolutely. My philosophy is this: Ultimately, you have to make a yes or no decision on a project, and if we can't reduce information to the extent that average people can make decisions on it, then I think we've failed in our responsibility as planners and developers and consultants.

This is a guide specifically for northern New England. Are there geological, environmental, social or economic conditions here that make the site plan review process different from the process in southern New England, or in other parts of the country?

You can be in Vermont, New Hampshire or Maine, and sure, aside from what people say about the cultural differences of particular states and how the geology of New Hampshire is vastly different from that of Vermont, you still have many things in common. You have steep slopes, shallow soils, a similar climate and similar cultural traditions. You have the value of small towns, the value of autonomy. You have relatively low development, clustered cities in coastal areas, but there are still many areas of land where we have plenty of decisions yet to be made about how to guide growth. And the three northern New England states share many similarities in the way people work in the landscape. We all have working forests, for example. We all have nature tourism and eco-tourism.

I think the situation is different in southern New England states that have had more compact and denser growth for a longer period of time. They have different pressures and they have somewhat different regulatory systems.

In the book's preface, you talk about the need to balance the freedom to develop with the rights of citizens to have a clean environment. How well do you think towns in Maine are striking that balance?

I think people are still facing up to the importance of the question. And just asking that question is an important step. But there are many towns that have to put a lot of their energy into reacting to things that are immediately before them, and it's hard for them to find the resources to do long-term planning. I think long-term planning has got to happen with a comprehensive plan, good zoning that reflects the comprehensive plan and a good process that uses the zoning.

I think the more we ask the question and get people working on this, there are a lot of real positive things that can be done. We can make decisions about guiding growth, but you can go to places like Florida and see where it's a little late for them to make some of those decisions, and they have significant consequences as a result.

I'm sure a lot of Mainers don't want to see their home town look like parts of Florida, but just as many Mainers probably envy Florida's economy. Is there a risk that being too restrictive with land-use policies could create a drag on Maine's economy?

The more short-term your perspective, the more that will be true. But in the case of Florida, the state had external dollars going down into it that drove that economy, so they could expend capital on poor resource management decisions and not deal with the consequences. But that could catch up with them.

I think because we need development, we can afford even less to not pay attention to how we allocate our resources. There are things like aesthetic resources that are important to healthy tourism in Maine. That's a kind of capital ˆ— a natural resource and social capital that we really need to use wisely. Even if we had a whole lot of external dollars being driven into this state, it would still be in our best interest to go for long-term management. The short-term is not necessarily sustainable, and that's just part of a larger vision of how to manage resources.

Most environmental planners will say, "I'm not concerned with how many units you have in your subdivision, I'm concerned with what the environmental impacts are, and if you cluster them over here, you could have more units." And that's why understanding the project directly plays into that. If you realize it's not just that you have 10 houses, it's that those 10 houses fragment a deer yard, or are staggered out along the road so they have 10 different curb cuts, you could rearrange the plan and perhaps have 15 houses with less impact. That's an example of how good resource management can actually promote development, because those 15 houses are five more than the person originally proposed.

Obviously every proposal is different, but is there a particular aspect of the site plan review process that's especially important, or often neglected, here in Maine?

I think [the factors] are such that it's important to take the comprehensive view of how these things all interact, because you can do trade-offs and mitigation by balancing them. So it's really hard to single out one thing.

There are some areas where you can say, "Clearly traffic is the big thing here," or "Aesthetics is the big thing there." The important thing about not picking any one factor is that it allows for homegrown perception and management of these issues. It would be too prescriptive to say traffic is the big thing everywhere.

The benefit of the process is that it allows a local community ˆ— which includes the developers, the environmentalists, the neighbors ˆ— to work together in a collaborative way. I think the benefit is in people recognizing the importance of taking a long-term perspective, of not being prescriptive and saying "You should do this, this and this," of having rules be clear and then having it be collaborative and process oriented. If we manage the process like that, then we can see more things like design charettes, [which] people might have shied away from in the past.

A lot of times, if the process has some negotiation in it all along, I think you can optimize the design ˆ— not just how it socially fits in with a neighborhood, but also how it fits in with natural resources and infrastructure.


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