Babbit's Land Use Solution

Ex-Interior Secretary Says Feds Can Control Western Sprawl

By Mitzi Rapkin, 5-15-06

Bruce Babbit, former U.S. Secretary of the Interior from 1993-2001 told a group of Westerners gathered in Aspen that the Bush Administration is in an unprecedented binge for energy development that is putting BLM land at risk. "Beneath the smiling face of consensus, they are doing their best to dismantle public lands," he said.

He made his comments Sunday in a closing speech at the Sopris Foundation’s annual conference entitled “Innovative Ideas for a New West, Best Practices for Growing Communities of the Intermountain West."
Over a hundred elected and government officials, private citizens and non-profit representatives gathered from places like Missoula, MT; Taos, NM; Sun Valley, ID; and Durango, CO to name a few, to talk about a vision for the West. Experts in planning, the former CEO of the Swiss Rail, the former Ambassador to Denmark and the founder of the Sonoran Institute were some of the speakers sharing their ideas over the course of three days.

At the heart of the discussion was the love people have for the West and maintaining that feeling while facing the challenges of growth, the high price of energy, transportation conundrums, the scarcity of affordable housing, the sale of public lands, willy-nilly land use and dying agriculture.

Despite Babbit’s view of the current leadership, his basic message was the federal government is the entity most poised to institute land use change on the local level in the West. Babbit compared the problems and the solutions to the scale of the landscape.

“It can’t be put into a box of one level of political institution. We have to look at multiple scales of landscapes and institutions. The West in its basic form is a federal creation if you look at the maps of the past. It’s an extraordinary matrix of resources and space that make up the West.”

Babbit said what is lacking in planning today is a sincere effort on the state and local level to keep up the heritage of land use planning from the settlement days of the West. But he noted it is also up to these entities and community leaders to whip the feds into shape. There can be a counterwave of reform he said.

“There has been a dismal failure on the state level in the West on the balance between agricultural land, the suburbs and urban centers,” he said. He suggested that the federal government could and should be the solution to instituting balanced land use planning in the West.

“I’m willing to say land use planning is a federal concern,” he said. “We should acknowledge that the federal government has always had a land use policy since George Washington. It began with the building of the railroad, the canals and the highways. We all know that road building is spearheading sprawling land use.” He used the $315 billion dollar appropriation for roads as an example of how local governments can leverage federal power.

“I would suggest we need to think of a policy I call ‘conditionality.’ How could federal development money be conditioned on states having land use plans? The federal government is the agent of inappropriate development and until we match it up to conditionality, it’s failing.”

For instance, he said if the federal government is poised to give $10 million to the state for highway building, it must tell the state it needs a balanced land use policy in order to get the funds. In essence the state has to do a major chore before getting its allowance from dad.

The proof for such a notion will be in the pudding of the rebuilding of Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. In the coming year, he noted, all will be revealed as to whether careful planning in such a disaster sensitive zone is cognizant of doing it right or making the same mistakes again.

He praised the capabilities of local leaders for their vision, tenacity and hard work. “Reform will either come from here it won’t come at all. It won’t come in politicians in a campaign. Politicians never have new ideas,” he said. “It’s not a good way to get elected, ideas have to gestate and take shape in political culture before they can be taken up in political campaigns.”

His message: the time for revolution is now! “I read land use as having a cyclical context. There was this starburst in the beginning of the 20th Century with Roosevelt and Pinchot, preceded by robber barons which gave way to the New Deal and then the conservation ethic faded after World War II and came up again in the 1960s and 1970s with landmark environmental laws passing. We’re living in one of these, in case you didn’t notice, down cycles but change is truly coming and my final offer of evidence is that when robber barons take over, change comes from the local level.”

And with that, he encouraged everyone in attendance to get outside and let the work begin.

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