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A flurry of integrated land and water activity occurred after passage of the Colorado Water Plan in 2015, but the work actually had begun years before. Beginning in 2010, leaders from the Colorado Water Conservation Board and the state Department of Local Affairs, the Lincoln Institute, the Sonoran Institute, Pace University Land Use Law Center, and the Keystone Policy Center came together for the Colorado Water and Growth Dialogue. They developed a stakeholder group that also includes city and county planners, water specialists, and public officials, the Denver Regional Council of Governments, the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute, Western Resource Advocates, water utilities, universities, environmental organizations, and others. A core group of stakeholders has evolved as the Colorado Land and Water Planning Alliance to continue the Dialogue’s research and training in land and water planning. The Lincoln Institute, through their Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy, is providing both financial and technical assistance for Alliance efforts.
In 2016, the Keystone Policy Center, with support from the Lincoln Institute and the Sonoran Institute, hosted a scenario-planning program for Front Range stakeholders focused on integrating land and water planning. The goal was to develop strategies to reduce water demand and close Colorado’s water gap. The key question: How can changes in urban form and landscaping practices assist in meeting future urban water demand along the Front Range?
Ray Quay of Arizona State University’s Decision Center for a Desert City, who is a former assistant planning director and assistant water services director in Phoenix, presented his Denver-area study of water use across densities, building types, and landscaping practices as part of the program. The study found that the maximum reduction in water use achievable by increasing density was in the range of 20 percent, with a 10 percent reduction achievable by modest density increases; and it found that local governments could achieve the same levels of reduction through outdoor water restrictions, landscape codes, and irrigation practices, with much greater certainty.
The upshot for integrated land and water planning, says Quay: “Water supplies are limited, and . . . with growth you’re going to need more water. You can’t support growth on the conservation of water.” Communities need to focus on what type of growth and economy they want, he says, and how to allocate water supplies for the growth they expect. And fundamentally, he concludes, “they need to do that before they need water.”
The work of all the partners involved in these conversations has “moved the needle” and helped create a consensus on the need for integrated land and water planning statewide, says Matt Mulica, policy facilitator for the Keystone Policy Center. He says the Dialogue’s exploratory scenario planning and a Keystone report on the process have helped communities with strategies such as planning for higher density, developing new metrics on water and land use, and offering incentives for compact development and low-water landscapes. The Pace Land Use Law Center’s Land Use Leadership Alliance, the Colorado chapter of the American Planning Association, and the Boulder-based environmental nonprofit Western Resource Advocates also have offered training on issues such as comprehensive plans that designate priority areas for growth and conservation, water-efficient land-use development patterns, cluster and infill development, and urban growth boundaries.
This content is excerpted from the article “Grow with the Flow,” published November 27, 2018.
Kathleen McCormick, principal of Fountainhead Communications in Boulder, Colorado, writes frequently about healthy, sustainable, and resilient communities.
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When Bradley Hill arrived in Flagstaff, Arizona, to become its first water manager in 2007, the high-desert city had spent decades working to ensure a sustainable water supply for its growing population. But Hill immediately noticed a missing link: “The planning group and water group didn’t talk to each other,” says Hill, now water services director. “The planners were planning subdivisions without talking to the water supply guys.”
In his prior post as water manager in Peoria, a major suburb of Phoenix, Hill had introduced a pioneering approach to integrated water conservation and land planning. Seeking to connect the dots between growth and water in Flagstaff, Hill secured support to introduce a similarly collaborative approach—one that has helped the city plan to meet its water needs into the next century.
Across the arid and rapidly urbanizing Southwestern United States, planning for the future availability of water has taken on a new urgency in the face of multiyear drought, trends toward higher temperatures, and the uncertainty of climate-related changes. As recognition of the relationship between water demand and the built environment increases, collaboration between urban planners and water resources specialists is on the rise. The evidence is mounting that tools such as dedicated water master plans, new zoning approaches, and comprehensive plans embedded with policies that address a wide range of water-use issues can help communities plan better.
The Benefits of Integrated Land and Water Planning
Communities that integrate land use and water planning report multiple benefits, according to the Coordinated Planning Guide: A How-To Resource for Integrating Alternative Water Supply and Land Use Planning. These include:
But there’s still a long way to go. “With water and land-use planning, we’re where we were years ago with early transit-oriented and mixed-use development,” says Peter Pollock, former manager of Western Programs at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and former planning director in Boulder, Colorado. “[We’re] trying to guess what it will be like and what our water needs will be.”
In 2017, the Lincoln Institute’s Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy conducted a review of more than 150 comprehensive plans from communities in Arizona and Colorado to assess how—or whether—they address water in the course of land planning. Both states require all local jurisdictions to complete comprehensive plans; Arizona requires those plans to integrate water-related issues. Still, when it came down to it, the Babbitt Center team detected a certain scarcity.
“Very few comprehensive plans actually have links between water and land,” says Babbitt Center research fellow Erin Rugland, who conducted the analysis (Babbitt Center, forthcoming). “A lot of water planning is very cursory and general within comprehensive plans. Even communities with an integrated water resource plan may not link land and water in their comprehensive plan.”
Some communities, however, are modeling different approaches. Flagstaff “hit every review criteria” in her study, says Rugland, noting the city excels in its conservation programs, water-demand projections, and regional collaborations. And in Westminster, Colorado, planners are crunching numbers in new ways to glean better insights into future needs: “Westminster has excelled at incorporating water into its zoning and development processes,” says Rugland. Here’s a closer look at the innovations afoot in two small cities facing considerable pressures from growth.
Flagstaff, Arizona
Situated at an elevation of 7,000 feet on the Colorado Plateau in Northern Arizona, Flagstaff is essentially a high-desert urban island surrounded by thousands of acres of national forests, monuments, and other public land. This booming city is home to 73,000, a population that surged 25 percent between 2000 and 2010; that number could grow to 90,000 by 2040, according to state projections. The city’s 64 square miles offer no access to Colorado River water or any running rivers, and the extended drought in the region has limited average annual precipitation to a mere 22 inches. On top of all that, the city is the primary water provider within the region, also serving unincorporated areas of Coconino County. As a result, Flagstaff has “one of the most challenging water situations in the state,” says Brad Hill.
That’s a meaningful claim in a state that is intensely aware of its vulnerabilities regarding water.
Arizona saw trouble coming decades ago. In 1980, the state legislature passed the groundbreaking Groundwater Management Act in an effort to carefully allocate Arizona’s limited groundwater resources. The legislation created four “active management areas” (AMAs), later expanded to five, which include metro areas such as Phoenix and Tucson. As Jeff Tannler of the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR) explains, “Before recording plats or selling parcels within an AMA, developers must demonstrate an assured 100-year water supply. Outside of AMAs, a developer must disclose to potential first purchasers of subdivided lots whether the water supply is adequate.”
While the latter is advisory in nature—land outside an AMA can still be subdivided and sold without an adequate water supply as long as the buyer is notified—Tannler says both programs “consider current and committed demand as well as growth projections, and both incorporate long-term water supply planning.” Subsequent legislation made it possible for cities and towns—or counties by a unanimous vote of their governing body—to adopt an ordinance making the adequacy rules mandatory within their jurisdiction. Two counties and two towns in Arizona have adopted such an ordinance.
A more recent piece of statewide legislation, the Growing Smarter Plus Act of 2000, requires every local jurisdiction to develop a comprehensive plan that describes a physical supply of available water, projects water demand based on predicted population growth, and explains how future water demand will affect the water supply. This legislation “strengthened how water is talked about in the comprehensive plans for big cities like Phoenix and its metro area,” says Rugland. However, she notes a caveat: The defunding of the Arizona Commerce Department office that reviewed comprehensive plans has meant little oversight in smaller cities and towns regarding good planning for linking land and water.
Among the water-wise practices local jurisdictions are incorporating into their comprehensive plans: Tucson limits thirsty turf grass, allows greywater reuse on landscapes, and requires high-efficiency water fixtures in new developments; Chandler requires nonresidential developments that exceed municipal water allotments to apply for an exemption to the city council or purchase their own water; and Peoria established an economic valuation per gallon of water to help assess the impact of new development.
Against this backdrop, Flagstaff has been finding its own solutions. The city drilled its first well outside the city limits in 1954, and in the late 1990s it began drilling wells inside the city. Wells are a difficult and costly groundwater source: Boring through 2,000 feet of the same sandstone, shale, and limestone layers that form the Grand Canyon costs about $3 million for each well, says Hill. But the wells help reduce the city’s reliance on surface water such as snowmelt, which is unreliable in drought conditions. Groundwater now accounts for about 60 percent of the city’s water.
In 2005, the city made a major investment in securing a sustainable water supply by purchasing Red Gap Ranch, an 8,500-acre property located 40 miles to the east. The ranch, which borders Navajo Nation land, has high groundwater yields that could meet projected water demands for Flagstaff, with minimal impact to the aquifer. The city has drilled 11 wells at Red Gap Ranch, but the idea of building a 40-mile pipeline to transport the resulting water is ambitious, costly, and controversial.
With feasibility studies on the Red Gap pipeline continuing, Flagstaff completed a study in 2012 that quantified its total water supply to provide baseline data for growth. In 2013, ADWR designated Flagstaff as having an adequate water supply for 100 years, including Red Gap Ranch. The following year, the voters approved Flagstaff Regional Plan 2030, a comprehensive plan for the city and county that contains a chapter on water resources with goals and policies related to low-water development strategies, green infrastructure, and water infrastructure financing, as well as information such as water use per capita and per sector (City of Flagstaff 2014). The vision is that by 2030, the water supply will be maintained through conservation, reuse, innovative treatment technologies, and smart development choices.
“One of the things Flagstaff has done well is we didn’t wait for a crisis to begin planning for water,” says Sara Dechter, comprehensive planning manager. “We can develop for the next 100 years—not 20 years like most comprehensive plans.”
Every administrative site plan review or zoning request includes an impact analysis to determine whether water can be delivered to the site through existing infrastructure or a new well is needed, and how the project will work within the city’s water budget. Among its forward-looking policies, the city has identified higher-density, mixed-use infill projects as a way to plan within its water budget, says Daniel Folke, acting community development director. Such projects “are more energy and water efficient than single-family subdivisions,” he says. “The reality is that way of housing people is more water efficient, due to efficiencies of scale” and other factors, he says.
Flagstaff’s best practices also include the following:
Stormwater management: Flagstaff requires stormwater “low impact development” (LID) practices for all new subdivisions, commercial and industrial developments, redevelopment of nonconforming sites, and developments larger than one-quarter acre to control increasing runoff volumes from impervious areas that had required the city’s storm drain systems to be up-sized.
Rainwater harvesting: Adoption of a rainwater harvesting ordinance in 2012 was precedent-setting in Arizona and led to revisions of its low-impact development and stormwater manuals. Flagstaff encourages harvesting measures such as rain barrels and cisterns.
Landscaping: Flagstaff modified its land development code to promote sustainable development practices and Smart Growth principles to ensure protection of resources and open space and to allow for more compact development. This revision included changes to its landscaping code to foster the creation of sustainable landscapes by using native plants, zone-planting according to water needs, and irrigating with greywater, reclaimed water, or rainwater rather than potable water.
Knowing that the city has an adequate water supply offers only a measure of confidence in the age of climate change, says Hill, and creativity is increasingly called for. In early 2018, the state of Arizona—facing a population increase from 7.1 million to 9.7 million people by 2040, according to state projections—opened a new door for some communities, updating its regulations to allow reclaimed water from wastewater treatment plants to undergo advanced treatment for use as drinking water.
“We know [the Red Gap pipeline] could cost an estimated $250 million, and that supply would provide 100 percent of demands into the future,” says Hill. Or the city could spend over $100 million to build a recycled-water advanced treatment facility to meet a portion of its future water needs, he says. “We don’t have to do any of these things tomorrow, though it takes a long time to set up the financial and legal frameworks for such infrastructure.”
For now, Hill says, the city has enough water from existing supplies for 100 years for as many as 106,000 residents. If the city grows beyond that size, it would need a new supply of water. “Because of the city’s policies, we can think today about how to have a sustainable water supply for the future,” he says. “We need to be planning ahead.”
Westminster, Colorado
Nearly 700 miles northeast of Flagstaff, midway between Denver and Boulder on the busy US 36 transportation corridor, sits Westminster, Colorado. Located at an elevation of 5,384 feet, with only 16 inches of annual rain and snowfall, the city of 114,000 is positioning itself as the next urban hub for the metro area. A 10-million-square-foot mixed-use district known as Downtown Westminster, rising on the site of a dead shopping mall, could house as many as 12,000 new residents in a few years. Four other urban growth zones in the 34-square-mile city could accommodate density for build-out, with a projected population of 157,000 by 2040, according to the Denver Regional Council of Governments. The city’s goal is to have 33,000 acre-feet of water per year available long-term. Current supplies will not meet these projected demands; the city is analyzing population targets and the potential gap amount, and it is focusing on how to predict future needs with greater accuracy.
Westminster knows what’s it like to need water. In the early 1960s, awaiting completion of a reservoir and strained by a long, hot summer after a decade of rapid growth, the city resorted to using ditchwater as a source of drinking water. This prompted the Mothers’ March on City Hall, which saw local women protest for safe drinking water for their children. Their action spurred Westminster’s efforts to improve the quantity as well as the quality of its water, says City Council Member Anita Seitz.
Since then, Westminster has become a leader in water planning among communities on the Front Range—a region on the east face of the Rocky Mountains that is home to more than 80 percent of the state’s residents and is defined by a north-south urban corridor that includes Fort Collins, Boulder, Denver, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo. The city is modeling the integration of land and water planning through its comprehensive plan’s policies, codes, and regulations, zoning and development practices, landscaping, and capital improvement plans.
Westminster’s location puts it in the heart of a region that is grappling with drought, rising temperatures, and rapid urban growth. By 2040, Colorado’s population is projected to double to 10 million people, greatly increasing the demand for water. Most of those people will live on the Front Range, and most of their water will be piped to them through the Rockies, from the other side of the Continental Divide. Although it is a headwaters state, Colorado could face an annual gap between water supply and water demand of over 500,000 acre-feet by 2050, according to analysis conducted for the Colorado Water Plan, adopted by the state in 2015. Given this gap scenario, the Colorado Water Plan calls for training local governments to encourage best management practices in land use planning and water management, efficiency, and conservation. Among its goals: By 2025, 75 percent of Coloradans would live in communities that had incorporated water-saving actions into land-use planning.
“That legislation really galvanized communities and provided leadership for making change,” says Kevin Reidy, water conservation technical specialist for the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB), the state agency that is managing a series of grant-funded workshops and webinars on water and planning for municipal leaders.
Westminster updated its comprehensive land use plan in 2004 to improve alignment between resources and land development. The plan included a revised tap fee structure to reflect water usage, revised landscape requirements for low-water using materials, linkage of water use and land parcels through geographic information systems (GIS) data, and more reporting to city council on water supply and demand projections. The city’s Comprehensive Plan 2013, currently being updated, focused on strategic growth and density in five urban zones, including the new downtown (City of Westminster 2013). The 2014 Water Supply Plan used the comprehensive plan to model projected development and growth.
“Most cities project future water use per capita, per person,” by taking all water and dividing by the population, says Drew Beckwith, water specialist for the city’s public works and utilities. “It’s a very linear calculation. The problem with that is it matters what new development looks like.” Westminster is one of the first cities in Colorado to link water use to development in its comprehensive plan, he says. “The city has calculated the water impacts of all building types based on existing data. We know that office space uses 1.6 acre-feet of water per year, a golf course uses 2.5 acre-feet per year, and a multi-story, mixed-use downtown building uses 5.4 acre-feet. Once the comprehensive plan is set and adopted by the city council, it’s very straightforward. Zoning and the availability and cost of water is front and center in planning and development decisions.”
Water is also integrated into day-to-day planning activities, says Beckwith. The public works and utilities department meets weekly with community development, building, fire, engineering, transportation, economic development, and other departments to discuss development proposals and technical issues. They review policy issues monthly, and meet annually with the city council to assess water needed for new growth.
Other best practices in Westminster include:
Tap fees: Westminster charges tap fees by estimates by the type of business and the square footage to accurately account for the impact of that business on water supplies. The tap fee structure is based on water use from a plumbing fixture data sheet, so there’s an incentive to have water-conserving fixtures.
Pre-application development meetings: Developers are encouraged to attend a free pre-application meeting with staff from public utilities and water services, community planning, and other departments to discuss code issues and how their building and site design would benefit from high-efficiency plumbing fixtures and water-wise landscaping to reduce fees based on the projected water demands. Water supply impacts are taken into account with every project approval.
Landscaping regulations: Westminster has a post-occupancy inspection program to ensure that water-efficient landscaping from the development plan has been installed. Alterations are treated as a code violation, and can result in misdemeanor charges and fines.
“Integration of water and land use makes us much more conscious of the impact of development on our water resource portfolio,” says Beckwith. “Most Front Range cities have a certain amount of water, and they’re not keen to get more because it is a pain to obtain and very expensive. That’s where conservation comes in.” In 2012, Westminster analyzed the impact of its conservation efforts from 1980 to 2010, a period when its population doubled from approximately 53,000 to 106,000 people. The volume of daily water used per person declined by 17 percent, a reduction that was critical in helping Westminster avoid the need—and millions of dollars in costs—to build new facilities and purchase additional water supplies.
The city is using computer modeling to determine how much water the system can produce today and the probability of the city being able to supply that amount in a given year, says Sarah Borgers, water resources and quality manager for the city’s public works and utilities department. “We’ve run these questions through thousands of iterations prior to launching [our] comprehensive plan update process, as a framework so we can start allocating water to certain parts of the city that will need it.” The city also commissioned a paleohydrological study of 500-year-old tree rings from the Front Range to understand past cycles and future possibilities for drought.
“We’ve incorporated water supply into land planning through the last two comprehensive plans in 2004 and 2013, but we need to make sure we’re planning for growth,” says Andrew Spurgin, Westminster’s principal long-range planner. Echoing many others in the Colorado River Basin, Spurgin says climate change adds another layer of uncertainty. “One question with climate change is: ‘What level of risk do we need to plan for?’” he says. Westminster has participated in the Keystone Water and Growth Dialogue, and has been doing scenario planning with experts and collaboratively with key city departments. The city also participated in the Growing Water Smart program held by the Lincoln Institute and Sonoran Institute at the Keystone Policy Center in 2017.
It’s all part of an effort, says City Council Member Seitz, “to make sure the decisions we make today allow our community to continue to offer a high quality of life.” Seitz, who has participated in the Keystone scenario planning and in workshops led by the Land Use Leadership Alliance, says integrating land use and water planning is time consuming, but worth it. “We believe it helps resource planning, long-term planning, fiscal budgeting, and final land use,” she says. “We get better development and it builds our resilience as a city.”
Keystone Water and Growth Dialogue
A flurry of integrated land and water activity occurred after passage of the Colorado Water Plan in 2015, but the work actually had begun years before. Beginning in 2010, leaders from the Colorado Water Conservation Board and the state Department of Local Affairs, the Lincoln Institute, the Sonoran Institute, Pace University Land Use Law Center, and the Keystone Policy Center came together for the Colorado Water and Growth Dialogue. They developed a stakeholder group that also includes city and county planners, water specialists, and public officials, the Denver Regional Council of Governments, the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute, Western Resource Advocates, water utilities, universities, environmental organizations, and others. A core group of stakeholders has evolved as the Colorado Land and Water Planning Alliance to continue the Dialogue’s research and training in land and water planning. The Lincoln Institute, through their Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy, is providing both financial and technical assistance for Alliance efforts.
In 2016, the Keystone Policy Center, with support from the Lincoln Institute and the Sonoran Institute, hosted a scenario-planning program for Front Range stakeholders focused on integrating land and water planning. The goal was to develop strategies to reduce water demand and close Colorado’s water gap. The key question: How can changes in urban form and landscaping practices assist in meeting future urban water demand along the Front Range?
Ray Quay of Arizona State University’s Decision Center for a Desert City, who is a former assistant planning director and assistant water services director in Phoenix, presented his Denver-area study of water use across densities, building types, and landscaping practices as part of the program. The study found that the maximum reduction in water use achievable by increasing density was in the range of 20 percent, with a 10 percent reduction achievable by modest density increases; and it found that local governments could achieve the same levels of reduction through outdoor water restrictions, landscape codes, and irrigation practices, with much greater certainty.
The upshot for integrated land and water planning, says Quay: “Water supplies are limited, and . . . with growth you’re going to need more water. You can’t support growth on the conservation of water.” Communities need to focus on what type of growth and economy they want, he says, and how to allocate water supplies for the growth they expect. And fundamentally, he concludes, “they need to do that before they need water.”
The work of all the partners involved in these conversations has “moved the needle” and helped create a consensus on the need for integrated land and water planning statewide, says Matt Mulica, policy facilitator for the Keystone Policy Center. He says the Dialogue’s exploratory scenario planning and a Keystone report on the process have helped communities with strategies such as planning for higher density, developing new metrics on water and land use, and offering incentives for compact development and low-water landscapes. The Pace Land Use Law Center’s Land Use Leadership Alliance, the Colorado chapter of the American Planning Association, and the Boulder-based environmental nonprofit Western Resource Advocates also have offered training on issues such as comprehensive plans that designate priority areas for growth and conservation, water-efficient land-use development patterns, cluster and infill development, and urban growth boundaries.
Kathleen McCormick, principal of Fountainhead Communications in Boulder, Colorado, writes frequently about healthy, sustainable, and resilient communities.
Photograph: Planners in fast-growing cities like Westminster, Colorado, where a new “downtown” is taking shape on the site of a former shopping mall, are increasingly integrating water usage into their work. Credit: City of Westminster.
References
Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy. Forthcoming. “Incorporating Water into Comprehensive Plans in Colorado Communities.” Phoenix, Arizona: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
City of Flagstaff, Arizona. 2014. “Regional Plan 2030.” Amended 2018. https://www.flagstaff.az.gov/2945/The-Plan.
City of Westminster, Colorado. 2013. “Comprehensive Plan.” Amended 2015; update pending 2018. https://www.cityofwestminster.us/Portals/1/Documents/Government%20-%20Documents/Departments/Community%20Development/Planning/COMPLETE%20Comp%20Plan_2015%20Update_WEB.pdf.
Colorado Department of Natural Resources. n.d. “Drought Planning Toolbox.” Colorado Water Conservation Board (website). http://cwcb.state.co.us/technical-resources/drought-planning-toolbox/Pages/main.aspx.
Fedak, Rebecca, Drew Beckwith, Derek Hannon, Amelia Nuding, Russ Sands, Shelby Sommer, and Linda Stitzer. 2018a. Coordinated Planning Guide: A How-To Resource for Integrating Alternative Water Supply and Land Use Planning. Denver, Colorado: Water Research Foundation. http://www.waterrf.org/PublicReportLibrary/4623B.pdf.
———. 2018b. Integrating Land Use and Water Resources: Planning to Support Water Supply Diversification. Denver, Colorado: Water Research Foundation. http://www.waterrf.org/PublicReportLibrary/4623A.pdf.
Friends of the Verde River. 2017. “Local Land Use Planning Toolbox.” https://verderiver.org/local-land-use-planning-toolbox/.
Keystone Policy Center. 2018. “Colorado Water and Growth Dialogue Final Report.” (September). http://www.keystone.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/CO-Water-and-Growth-Dialogue-Final-Report_September-2018.pdf.
State of Colorado. 2015. Colorado’s Water Plan. (November). https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/cowaterplan/plan.
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Las Vegas residents receive $3 for every square foot of grass they replace with drought-tolerant landscaping. In Morro Bay, California, developers must retrofit existing housing stock to save twice the water demanded by new development. Chandler, Arizona, offers awards and incentives to developments that meet green building standards.
These are just a few of the programs profiled in a new manual released by Pace University’s Land Use Law Center and Western Resource Advocates (WRA), with support from the Lincoln Institute’s Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy. Intended for local land use planners facing water scarcity and related environmental challenges in the Intermountain West, the 300-page guide calls for the assimilation of water efficiency and conservation techniques into community development and land use planning. Integrating Water Efficiency into Land Use Planning in the Interior West: A Guidebook for Local Planners builds on years of research and community discussions and aims to build collaboration between land use planners and water planners, who have historically operated within their own silos.
“If you can really think about water throughout all parts of development, you can actually become much more efficient with your water resources and you often don’t even need new supplies,” explained John Berggren, water policy analyst at WRA.
For the past decade, as the Intermountain West has seen significant population growth, WRA and other local organizations have been working with municipal staff and elected officials to shift the region toward “water smart” development practices. In 2015, for example, Colorado published its first water plan, which includes a goal that 75 percent of the state’s municipalities will incorporate water-saving actions into land-use planning by 2025.
The new manual, written specifically for local land use planners, is the first comprehensive document of its kind, said Erin Rugland, research fellow at the Babbitt Center. “This manual is foundational in forming our efforts and advancing the state of practice and literature of water and land use integration,” Rugland said.
“You not only get the technical information like specific zoning codes, but you can also see examples from communities around the country to learn what they did, how they did it, and how it turned out,” Berggren added.
The focus of the guide’s chapters range from how to draft a water element for a comprehensive plan, to how to structure a sustainability plan to address water, to how to create water-efficient density by permitting accessory dwelling units. Within each chapter, subsections drill down to detailed instructions—for example, how to promote cluster development, or adopt requirements for water-saving measures such as stormwater capture that equal the water demands of new development. Throughout, guidelines are supplemented by case studies, including sample language that municipalities have used in their planning documents.
The Babbitt Center’s involvement with the new manual is an important launching point for the center’s growing work and presence in the Intermountain West. Established in 2017, the Babbitt Center is currently producing informational materials for the State of Colorado on integrating water into comprehensive plans and providing guidance on integrating land use within water efficiency plans filed by Colorado water providers. “In the next year, we will expand our review of comprehensive plans throughout Colorado River Basin communities to better gauge the state of practice in the region,” said Rugland.
Photograph Credit: Flickr/U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
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The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning are launching a competition to promote innovative curricula and case studies focused on land policy. Winning projects will receive financial support and become part of the Lincoln Institute’s digital case library—a platform for sharing effective land policy as practiced in different cities, regions, and countries.
The competition includes two awards. The Curriculum Innovation Award will recognize three courses that help future planners use land value capture, the property tax, and other land-based tools to reduce urban poverty and informality, adapt to climate change, and strengthen municipal fiscal health. Three winners will each receive a prize of $7,000 for creating innovative, accessible, engaging, and effective learning experiences for students. The deadline for proposals is February 11, 2019 at 6:00 pm (EST).
The Case Study Award will offer $2,000 to 10 authors of engaging and instructive case studies for the Lincoln Institute’s digital case library. The case studies must focus on the same thematic areas as the Curriculum Innovation Awards and follow one of two templates:
Award recipients will write a case study and receive guidance and support from the Lincoln Institute. The deadline to submit a proposal is December 21, 2018 at 6:00 pm (EST).
Both awards advance the Lincoln Institute’s initiative to build a digital library of free learning resources available to anyone. The library will include teaching methods, case studies, and other materials that can help spread innovative land policy among students, researchers, policy makers, and practitioners.
For more detailed information on the awards and how to apply, visit the competition web page.
Photograph Credit: Aleksejs Bergmanis/Pexels
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A native of Warsaw, Poland, Mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz has made her mark on this city of 1.7 million people. She was elected its first female mayor in 2006 and is currently serving an unprecedented third term. Prior to assuming her post—where she has faced controversial issues including the restitution of properties seized under Nazi and Communist rule—Gronkiewicz-Waltz had been president of the National Bank of Poland, vice president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, a member of the Polish Parliament, and chairperson of the State Treasury Commission. In November 2012, she was elected for a two-year term as president of Eurocities, a network of major European cities. Gronkiewicz-Waltz, a professor of law and economics at the University of Warsaw, has authored over 40 academic publications. She spoke with Lincoln Institute Senior Fellow Anthony Flint for this issue of Land Lines.
Anthony Flint: Last year, the national government proposed expanding Warsaw by bringing more than 30 outlying districts within its boundaries, an idea you opposed. In your view, what are the merits of a more regional approach to metropolitan governance?
Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz: The target [of that proposal] was purely political, as one party saw the opportunity to get power in Warsaw through votes from around the region. They wanted to enlarge the municipality [in an effort] to get people from the countryside and the smaller towns to vote for the next mayor of Warsaw. We protested, and in various local referendums the people said no. They preferred remaining independent, with their own local governments and their own mayors.
People understand that our metropolitan policies have been successful. We collaborate as a region through contracts and agreements, and we rely on revenue sharing among the 30 municipalities [that make up our metropolitan area]. Funding is organized through the Integrated Territorial Investments, an EU program, for these municipalities, with investment in everything from administration capacity to bike paths. That is the way to trust each other. And it works. There is an efficient public transportation scheme in place, under which the capital city’s fleet serves the whole metropolitan area. Metropolitan governance should always respect the needs of all its members.
AF: What are the critical elements in your effort to maintain good municipal fiscal health? What has been your experience on the revenue side?
HGW: On the revenue side, we have a property tax, but it’s not very high, though some people complain. We also have a lease tax, which is adjusted to the value of the property. A typical apartment tax bill in the city center is about $400 per year. There is also the commercial property tax and a tax on civil law transactions. However, these are only a few percent of the total budget. The biggest revenue source is the city’s share in personal and corporate income tax, which flows directly from the central government. There are many needs for revenue; for example, we contribute to teachers’ salaries and we have to maintain our infrastructure.
AF: Speaking of infrastructure: How is climate change going to have an impact on Warsaw, and what is the city doing with respect to mitigation and adaptation?
HGW: The main fuel for so long was coal. Step by step, we have to move away from this, changing to natural gas and renewables. First we focused on transportation—new buses, new trams, and a second Metro line. We are changing our rolling stock, replacing diesel buses with electric and natural-gas models. The network is very well used: Seventy percent of our citizens use public transport. The modernization of our district heating network, which serves 80 percent of the city’s residents, is also very important. Ten thousand additional homes have been connected to the system in the past 10 years. Warsaw’s heat is produced in two combined heat and power plants. We are planning to switch one of the plants from coal to gas, which will bring a significant carbon dioxide emission reduction. Also, individuals can apply for subsidies to install photovoltaics, solar panels, and heat pumps, and thus replace old-fashioned stoves. This has been a very popular program, inspiring hundreds of applications. We are active internationally as well; for example, we are part of the EU Covenant of Mayors, [which is committed to implementing climate and energy initiatives].
AF: What successes have you seen flowing from the expansion of public transit? Are you seeing success in terms of ridership and reduced traffic congestion?
HGW: In terms of being car-free, people know one day it will come, though it may have to come from my successors. The way it was done in London—starting with a pilot for one year—was very good. People [there] decided they preferred the congestion fee and supported the money going to transit. Public transport is costly. We have [been able to do] so much because 85 percent of the investment was covered by EU funds. For users, it is important for it to be quite cheap. Thirty dollars per month is the approximate price for users in Warsaw, and our seniors pay $20 for the whole year. Last year, we began offering free transportation for students up to 15 years old; it is important for families to teach the young that it’s OK to go by bus. We have dedicated bus lanes, 500 kilometers of bicycle lanes, and bike sharing. Even with all of that, there is still congestion, though it is not as bad as before.
AF: As Warsaw joins the array of economic powerhouses, how are you addressing gentrification, providing affordable housing, and fostering a more inclusive economy?
HGW: We had to start from scratch. There was no private ownership [under Soviet control]. Beginning in the 1970s, there was a policy that let you buy your home for 10 percent of its value. I was the first mayor who stopped [that kind of] sale of municipal apartments. At the same time, we started to build more housing: 3,500 new apartments over the last 10 years. We use the city’s land and keep the construction costs down, so people’s rent is not so high. I lived in Knightsbridge [in London] for a few years, and I saw how investments by foreign developers made the price of apartments skyrocket. We don’t have that in Warsaw—housing prices are rising gradually, but at an affordable pace. Another problem is that many apartments have not been maintained. That is why the city is directing finances toward revitalization, especially in the most neglected neighborhoods.
AF: What have been the effects of rising nationalism and anti-immigration sentiment on the city’s economy, taxation, and social spending?
HGW: The national government decided to withdraw from Poland’s agreement to accept, under the EU’s quota system, a proportional number of refugees. This was not helpful, as we have abandoned our European allies in the midst of the refugee crisis. Generally, [anti-immigration sentiment] can discourage investment in the medium and long term. It’s a very bad thing when someone with a different ethnic background is attacked on the bus, and it can also prevent others from coming to Poland, including businesspeople. On the other hand, Warsaw does have many foreigners who come as economic migrants, and the majority of them are from Ukraine. Some are teachers, some are doctors; they are nannies or they work in the shops. We also have a significant number of Vietnamese immigrants, as well as people from Somalia, Ethiopia, and Chechnya.
To meet the growing need for integration, the city has created a multicultural center, which offers free language and cultural courses. It is important for the economy [to welcome and train immigrants], because it helps our new residents better integrate into our society. As a consequence, the economy and the labor market are better off. Unemployment is 1.7 percent in Warsaw. The local economy is booming, which can be witnessed through the city’s many construction sites, which have to compete for workers. Economically, we are certainly benefiting from migration.
Photograph: City of Warsaw/Ewelina Lach
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Has anyone ever tried to motivate you to act on a pressing problem by presenting a “nightmare scenario”? By extending current trends into the medium or distant future, these scenarios are intended to illustrate outcomes deemed inescapable unless radical behavior changes occur. Whether the issue at hand is peak oil or crumbling infrastructure, well-meaning interlocutors often use this well-worn device to try to awaken people to desperate futures.
But this approach has flaws. Nightmare scenarios are depressing, and depression immobilizes those one hopes to mobilize.
The remedies required to avert disaster usually seem intractable. And the supposed inevitability of disaster can actually generate a bizarre logic that exonerates non-response, with horrible implications.
For all of these reasons, a different type of scenario planning is called for, one the Lincoln Institute is embracing. Before I explain, let me illustrate the pitfalls of relying on nightmare scenarios with two examples—one from the history books, and one more current.
Thomas Malthus provided one of the earliest rhetorical uses of a nightmare scenario in his 1798 “Principle of Population” essay. In the essay, Malthus contrived a theoretical argument that reverberates today in economics and other social sciences (it was one reason economics was nicknamed the dismal science). Malthus postulated that population grew geometrically (following a 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 . . . pattern), while food production grew arithmetically (following a 2,4, 6, 8, 10 . . . pattern).
In Malthus’s view, population growth is fueled by the seemingly unlimited human proclivity to reproduce and, importantly, increases when the poor become better off. Food production, to the contrary, is limited by the fixed supply of land and the law of diminishing returns. The relation between the two could only end in disaster. “Positive checks” like famine, plague, or war would lead to the premature death of a large share of the population and restore temporary balance. Malthus suggested that “preventive checks” like later marriage or celibacy, which would produce fewer children, might forestall disaster, but he doubted that humans would voluntarily exercise this kind of moral restraint. (An Anglican minister, Malthus advocated against contraception.)
Any mathematician knows that a geometric series, no matter where it starts, will eventually overtake an arithmetic series. This made Malthus’s proposition compelling—but the real world proved him wrong on all counts. Fueled by the Industrial and Agricultural revolutions, food production increased faster than population, even in the developing world, beginning in the 19th century. Population growth, for its part, began to abate in the 20th century as a result of the demographic transition driven by urbanization and rising education levels and employment opportunities for women. Across the world, as poverty levels fell, fertility fell commensurately.
Sadly, elements of Malthus’s theory remain with us—both in simple-minded efforts to predict future population-oriented cataclysms (see, for example, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb [1968], the Club of Rome, or Cristina Luiggi’s 2010 essay “Still Ticking” in The Scientist) and in the muddled thinking of those who adopt and adhere to the logical extensions of his work.
The logical implications of Malthus’ theory are terrifying and persistent. They orbit ideas like laissez-faire, divine intervention, and moral hazard, but invariably blame the victim. Malthus opposed assisting the poor based on his assertion that making the poor better off would increase fertility and end in famine once food stocks ran out. Others espoused this view more fervently. Some 50 years after the publication of Malthus’ essay, Nassau Senior, a classical economist and member of the Chancery, wrote that the Great Irish Potato Famine of 1845 “would not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good.” Charles Trevelyan, assistant secretary of the British Treasury and the colonial administrator responsible for organizing famine relief, described the famine as an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population” as well as “the judgement of God.” But no divinity shaped these ends. Throughout the famines of the 1840s, plenty of food was sent from Ireland to England—exports of meats, grains, and butter actually increased during the famine years. The food supply hadn’t failed; only a single crop, the potato—the staple allowed to families of tenant farmers—had succumbed to blight. It was agricultural, social, and trade policy that failed.
During the 20th century, contemporary accounts of multiple famines, including those that caused the deaths of more than two million people in India in 1943 and an estimated 1.5 million people in Bangladesh in 1974, always invoked Malthus. Somehow, the thinking went, the local population had grown beyond its means and famine was the inevitable result. But these and other “Malthusian nightmares” had nothing to do with overpopulation or food shortages. They were the product of policy failures and ineffective responses. They illustrated a shrugging indifference predicated on the theoretical existence of Malthusian nightmares—a grudging admission that sometimes there’s just not enough to go around.
As much as it pains me to admit it, I adopted a nightmare scenario to drive my own policy advice. Over the last couple of years, I’ve frequently cited estimates for the global infrastructure investment that will be required to serve the additional 2.5 billion people who will be added to the world’s cities over the next 20 years. I even play a game with the audience, asking them to guess whether the needed $91 trillion investment is larger than global gross domestic product—the total GDP of all of the countries of the world. It is.
Do I motivate audiences or depress them? I’m wondering whether I should address this challenge more affirmatively.
We need better ways to peer into the future, inform our thinking, and guide our actions. Luckily, we have at least one. The Institute recently launched the Consortium for Scenario Planning, an expert network of scholars and practitioners that is developing more disciplined and defensible methods to help those in urban and rural areas consider alternative future scenarios and find ways to bring desired scenarios to fruition. Scenario planning identifies alternative futures based on current reality, trends, and rigorous empirical analysis of driving forces of change. It accounts for the interconnectivity or interdependency of various systems, anticipates unintended consequences, and evaluates tradeoffs between actions and outcomes.
Scenario planning is first and foremost a process, a way of thinking and structuring decision-making that leverages the skills and wisdom of a large group of people. The consortium is developing software tools to overcome the challenges of working with many participants, managing large amounts of information, and leveraging data and new analytic techniques to quantify specific elements of a plan. Scenario planning engages numerous disciplines, each bringing different approaches and insights to inform and enrich the process. As environments become increasingly complex, constraints become more limiting, and the future remains uncertain, scenario planning can help groups of decision makers better navigate challenging terrain on issues ranging from affordable housing preservation to climate change adaptation to healthier and more equitable communities.
Interestingly, the field of scenario planning originated in the boardrooms of global petrochemical corporations—the very people who coined the term “peak oil.” Instead of being immobilized by the realization that the commodity on which they depended would run out, the corporations chose to consider various future scenarios, find the one that suited them best, and figure out how to get there.
How might I have broached future urban infrastructure challenges as a novice scenario planner? Rather than contextualizing the challenge as an impossible investment that exceeds global GDP, I might have asked: based on reasonable projections of GDP growth, what will it take to come up with $91 trillion over the next two decades? Global GDP in 2017 was around $79 trillion, far less than needed infrastructure investment. In 2037, GDP is expected to be $192 trillion, more than twice the investment needed. What will it take to make a cumulative investment of $91 trillion in infrastructure? About 3.33 percent of global GDP annually. How do we prepare the cities of the world to receive and provide services to 2.5 billion new residents? By building the political will to get national governments to devote one-thirtieth of their respective GDPs to infrastructure investment. Somehow that doesn’t seem as hopeless a task as coming up with more than 100 percent of current global GDP.
My decision to overwhelm audiences with a killer fact was a product of faulty logic and laziness. I wanted to awaken others to urban challenges and mobilize them around the urgency of acting now. But by contextualizing the challenge as virtually impossible, I risked immobilizing them. And I risked building a foundation for future lazy thinkers to accept a reality in which millions of urban residents are left unserved by infrastructure—no water delivered to their residences, no sanitation, no reliable transport to get them to their jobs—a scenario that will come to fruition if we don’t invest. I fear the policy response then will be a familiar refrain: there’s just not enough infrastructure to go around, so some will have to go without.
We can be better than that. And with the help of efforts like the Consortium for Scenario Planning, we will be.
Photograph: Jon Nicholls/Flickr CC BY 2.0.
