Community Influence on Bay Area Growth
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Community Influence on Bay Area Growth |
Greenbelt Alliance * The Newswire
Volume 1, October 2002
After spending three years and more than $1.5 million, Bay Area elected officials unveiled a smart growth vision for the region in mid-October. The broadly worded vision sets out smart growth goals, but stops short of adopting tangible plans for reaching them.
The new Smart Growth Vision is the result of a joint project led by the Association of Bay Area Governments, Metropolitan Transportation Commission, Bay Area Air Quality Management District, Bay Conservation and Development Commission, and Regional Water Quality Control Board. Project leaders originally set out to develop a detailed series of maps and a specific set of projections for achieving smart growth in the Bay Area. More than 2,000 Bay Area residents participated in a series of public workshops around the region to craft a detailed vision that directed growth toward existing cities and towns and away from the greenbelt.
Sadly, responding to last minute objections from some local elected officials and business interests, the project leaders chose not to go with the detailed vision emerging from the public workshops. Instead, they drafted a broad narrative vision document containing laudable smart growth goals, but few of the specifics spelled out by the public. While the emerging narrative vision supports moving forward with smart growth, the project overall fell far short of its potential for setting the region on a more sustainable path.
To see the Final Report on the Regional Smart Growth
Vision click on:
http://www.abag.org/planning/smartgrowth/publications.html