Everyone knows that “Obamacare” was modeled on Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health-care law. But did you know that a key Obama “smart growth” initiative — the
Partnership for Sustainable Communities — was also created in the mold of a Romney program? Tea Partiers
rallied to quash funding for this Obama partnership last fall. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), conservative darling,
criticized the idea for the partnership when it first arose and accused the Obama administration of trying to impose “an urban-utopian fantasy through an unprecedented intrusion of the Federal Government into the shaping of local communities.” The Republican National Committee recently
warned that smart growth is part of a U.N. conspiracy (green helicopters, anyone?). This is yet another issue on which the party’s presumptive presidential nominee looks to be seriously out of sync with the GOP base. As governor of Massachusetts, Romney actively fought sprawl and promoted density. He ran on a smart-growth platform: “Sprawl is the most important quality-of-life issue facing Massachusetts,”
he said in 2002. After winning, Romney swiftly set about remaking state government to encourage smarter land use. He created a powerful new Office for Commonwealth Development, and appointed an aggressive environmental activist to run it — Douglas Foy, who for 25 years had headed the Conservation Law Foundation, a litigious regional environmental group. The state’s business community was
appalled. The Office for Commonwealth Development served as a “super-secretariat” or umbrella office for state agencies dealing with transportation, housing, energy, and the environment. It made sure the agencies were all pulling in the same direction toward smart-growth goals — concentrating development in town centers, constructing housing near transit stations, fixing existing roads instead of building new ones. “I think [Romney] views sprawl as inefficient land use, and he’s all about efficiency. From a business perspective, he thinks smart growth makes a lot of sense,” says Anthony Flint, who served as a policy advisor in the Office for Commonwealth Development under Romney, and is now a fellow at the
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think tank in Cambridge, Mass.
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