Raleigh officials say they are updating the city’s comprehensive plan to better manage growth, but some see dire consequences as a result of the effort.
Some elected officials fear the plan could violate private property rights, inflate taxes and cost-of-living expenses, and drive development and industry away from the region.
“The property owner is the real loser in this,” said Wake County Commissioner Paul Coble, a former Raleigh mayor and city council member. “When they add up revaluation, higher taxes, and fewer property rights, people are not going to be happy campers.”
The city says the plan, which was last updated in 1989, will reduce urban sprawl and achieve environmental sustainability, public records show.
Raleigh’s comprehensive plan is an official policy statement on where public officials hope to take the city by 2030. The new comprehensive plan is designed to provide a framework for city leaders to steer the region’s land use, urban design, transportation structure, and environmental protection.
Regional growth
Raleigh is one of the fastest-growing metro regions in the country. Population estimates released last year by the U.S. Census Bureau ranked Raleigh eighth on a list of the top 10 cities with the highest growth rates from 2000 to 2006.
Raleigh is home to nearly 370,000 residents and is estimated to double in size over the next 20 years, according to city planners. Facing these growth projections, Raleigh’s Department of City Planning issued a request for proposals in January 2007 asking for bids from qualified consultants to assist the city with the creation of a new comprehensive plan.
The proposal request says the selected consultant team “will be responsible for land use and data analysis and the bulk of the plan narrative, including key elements for which the City lacks the necessary capacity and expertise, and/or where new thinking and national best practices are needed.”
Ken Bowers, deputy planning director for the city’s Planning Department, said the age of the current comprehensive plan is one reason why planners saw the need for an update.
“The plan itself has been a good plan, but the city is some 70 percent larger than it was in terms of land area,” Bowers said. “There has been a change in development trends of certainly a lot more refocusing of development in areas that had already been developed, in contrast to the past when development was on greenfield and undeveloped land.”
Planning officials created a 24-month timetable for completion of the revision. The project is split into five phases. The planning department will end phase two (called “define the plan”) in early February. A final draft plan is to be completed by early 2009.
In April, the city council chose HNTB, an infrastructure consulting firm, to help complete the update of the comprehensive plan. The city signed a contract with HNTB Aug. 7, paying the firm $600,000 and making available a reimbursement account for additional services.
According to Mitchell Silver, director of the City Planning Department, the update of the plan is on schedule, and the relationship between the city and HNTB is “working out very well.”
Engaging the public
As the project moves forward, the planning department has scheduled a series of seminars to solicit public feedback on how the plan is revised. The first round of workshops was conducted in mid-November, and two more rounds are scheduled for March, October, and November.
More than 300 residents attended the workshops in November, according to the planning department’s Web site. Participants discussed “the state of the city, whether the vision and themes were on-target and resonant, and what issues should be given particular focus as part of the plan update.”
Regional transit was the No. 1 issue at the workshops, followed closely by affordable housing, Bowers said.
Starting in January, planners began conducting eight “stakeholder meetings,” where the public may attend but not speak. These meetings will focus on the needs of specific interest groups, such as environmentalists or developers.
City planners are trying to be as involved in the community as possible, Bowers said. “There is a standing invitation to any community group — planning staff will come out and give a presentation and answer questions,” he said.
‘Garbage in, garbage out’
Although planners stress community involvement, documents obtained by Carolina Journal through a public records request indicate a different tenor of comments regarding public input among some contributors to the new comprehensive plan.
On Aug. 3, staff from the planning department, including Silver and Bowers, met with public officials and consultants to discuss the project. Minutes taken during the meeting show that at least one consultant, Don Edwards, principal and CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based Justice & Sustainability Associates, LLC, questioned the ease of resident engagement in the planning process.
“Plan to increase citizen participation and better define neighborhoods,” the minutes say. “Don adds that engaging citizens can actually be quite a pain and everyone seems to agree.”
When questioned about the comment in a phone interview with CJ, Edwards first asked who wrote the minutes and then said he could not recall whether he made the comment.
“I didn’t write the minutes,” he said. “I don’t know if I said it or not.”
According to the Justice & Sustainability Associates Web site, the organization’s goal is “the creation of technologically smart, culturally competent, environmentally secure, economically just, moral, humane ‘beloved communities’ across the world.” Edwards is serving on the project as an HNTB adviser.
Participants made several other remarks regarding public feedback during the course of the meeting. At one point, the minute taker wrote, “Before we get citizens’ input, they need to be informed and educated so their input can actually be helpful. We need thoughtful input, not crazy ideas. (Garbage in, garbage out.)” At another point, the question was posed, “How restrictive should this plan be? Are people simply afraid of being told what to do, and should those people not live in Raleigh?”
In response to the remarks, Silver said the meeting was the first time the Planning Department’s core group met with consultants for the project. Participants were free to make comments or ask questions.
“I don’t know who added the embellishment of ‘garbage in, garbage out,’ but we have made it a priority to educate,” he said. “We have heard many knee-jerk or shooting from the hip comments. For example, if people say we shouldn’t grow, we should explain how no growth could hurt an economy.”
Bowers refused to vouch for the accuracy of the notes since the Aug. 3 meeting was informal, with participants taking internal notes that were “cobbled together.”
“These are not official minutes,” Bowers said. “Our intern chose to use phrases that were colorful, but not necessarily how I would have described it.”
He added that Edwards, who facilitated the meeting, “is constantly pushing us to go further with being ever more inclusive with our public outreach.”
“It’s a lot of work to do a community outreach process, so it’s a pain in the sense that owning a house is a pain or other things are a pain that are worthwhile,” Bowers said.
Asked to clarify the section suggesting that Raleigh residents who can’t follow orders should leave, Bowers said he could not recall the remark. “That does not ring a bell with me, and I can’t imagine that someone would have said that,” he said. “The tenor of the meeting was not to express sentiments of that nature, and I don’t know why that was in there.”
Political fallout
Other documents obtained by CJ suggest that city planners have tested the political waters in determining which growth strategy to pursue. Silver sent an email dated Oct. 30 to Jane Dembner, an associate vice president for HNTB, describing the ideological composition of the Raleigh City Council. Silver sent the e-mail shortly after the 2007 municipal elections, in which new council members favorable to stricter development regulations were elected.
“I spoke to a few members [of the City Council] and the agenda will not be slow growth, but most likely sustainable growth or balanced growth,” Silver wrote in the e-mail. “I will try to get a better understanding of what ‘balanced growth’ means…The mayor would most likely want to keep the council balanced as it relates to growth. I am hearing there is some concern about a full progressive agenda whatever that is.”
In response to his statements in the e-mail, Silver said that Dembner was checking in to see what “the mood of the city” was regarding growth. “Initially, the consultants were asking me, ‘Is there a slow growth agenda moving forward?’” Silver said. “From what I have observed, my belief is that we should continue with balanced growth.”
Asked to define what balanced growth looks like, Silver said it could mean “more concentrated and more dense development in areas, lower density in other areas.”
Silver and Bowers agreed the update of Raleigh’s comprehensive plan would not push growth away from the region, but a recent study by the Heritage Foundation found that regulation-heavy areas of the country are losing residents to other states.
Citing data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the study said that domestic migration — defined as the number of residents who move to a state minus the number of current residents who leave that state—is common between states that favor more stringent regulations and those with more flexible regulations.
Between 2000 and 2005, for example, California, New York, and Massachusetts lost hundreds of thousands of residents, while areas with more competitive land-use practices, such as Arizona, Florida, and Nevada, gained population.
Coble said that decisions made by the planning department might push people outside the Raleigh city limits, worsening the very thing that planners hope to avoid — sprawl.
“Government has never been successful at dictating what the free market and economic forces should decide,” Coble said. “They will almost always overstep their bounds.”
Due to Raleigh’s extraterritorial jurisdiction, other areas of Wake County could be affected by the new comprehensive plan, Coble said.
“Will the comprehensive plan really achieve what it’s designed to achieve, or are we just trying to social engineer?” Coble asked. “Is a group of planners and/or elected officials trying to thrust their own personal opinions on lifestyles, transportation, housing decisions? Are they trying to foist that on citizens, sometimes against citizens?”
The Heritage study also found that taxpayers could bear the brunt of local land-use regulations as those residents priced out of the market come to rely on government assistance. In such a situation, taxpayers “across the nation could be forced to offset the costs of counterproductive local land-use policies.”
Raleigh’s updated comprehensive plan will not drive away residents or businesses, nor will it adversely impact landowners, Silver said. Instead, it will open up opportunities to keep the city growing.
“Raleigh is not pursuing no growth,” he said. “That would be counter to what’s best for the city.”
Property concerns
Other elected officials are concerned about private property rights. Philip Isley, a city council member from Raleigh’s northwest district, said the city’s plan needs to be updated but should not be used as a weapon to limit landowner freedom.
“As I listen to people around the table who are trying to determine what can be built where in existing neighborhoods,” Isley said, “it seems very obvious to me that this is another end run on trying to limit what people can do with their own property in a city that many believe has been built out enough.”
Coble said infringement on private property rights is one of his greatest concerns with the comprehensive plan update.
“In the process of social engineering, the city may very well take people’s personal property rights,” he said.
David N. Bass is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.