Seed Money For Big Government Utopia
Mecklenburg Commissioner Karen Bentley, a Republican whose district includes suburban north Mecklenburg, voted against pursuing the federal sustainable communities planning grant.
“My concern is around the strings that are attached with these federal grant dollars and how, my fear, is that this is really the Obama Administration coming together with a federal smart-growth policy filtered down to the local level,” Bentley said. “I think if we do a fair assessment of what those three agencies (HUD, EPA and DOT) have been doing and now are doing, I think a fair-minded person would come to the same conclusion.”
Sharp, with the Centralina Council of Governments, the local agency charged with pursuing the grant, conceded that Bentley’s concerns were justified.
“I agree with you,” he said. “I think the challenge for us and the region is not to get sucked in, to do it our way, and to make sure there’s a full participation from all the communities.
“I really think there is a danger,” Sharp said. “But we only do this voluntarily, we can’t be forced into it. We hope to have enough fortitude not to have things dictated to us, but to do our own decision-making on our own date and know that what we get out of it is what we want.”
Precedent, though, proves that might be easier said than done, according to Utt. From his Heritage Foundation backgrounder report on livable communities:
In January 1998, President Bill Clinton’s Environmental Protection Agency threatened to withhold federal transportation funds from the Atlanta region because it did not meet federal air-quality standards and said that it would agree to restore the funding only if the state of Georgia dramatically altered its land-use and transportation policies in ways similar to those characteristic of the Smart Growth polices that discourage single-family detached housing and encourage public transit use and investment. Georgia agreed to do this, at least through the waning days of the Clinton Administration, but soon abandoned the policies when leadership in Washington changed.
Carol Browner headed the EPA when the threat was imposed on Atlanta under Clinton. Today, she is Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change. With the prospect of even worse to come from this new DOT-HUD partnership on sustainable communities, those who are skeptical of the President’s grandiose efforts at social engineering should be on the alert.
Ironically, Mecklenburg Commissioners Chairman Jennifer Roberts, a Democrat, hailed the work being done by Carol Browner to push the sustainable communities planning grants. Roberts told her board colleagues that she was in Washington when the initiative was being discussed with the EPA and Browner. She came away impressed.
“The strength of this grant is it’s going to help give us resources to begin implementing some of this vision,” Roberts said of the COG’s CONNECT regional plan and its focus on creating sustainable communities.
“It was exciting to hear the federal government thinking about the same cross-silo thinking, the same inclusive thinking, trying to be holistic,” Roberts said. “It’s really an opportunity for the Charlotte-region to be highlighted throughout the nation as one of the handful of communities that are looked at as being out in front thinking about that regional collaboration.”
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