Stimulus plan: feeding at the trough or investing in our future

Neal Peirce wrote a column about this, "American recovery and reinvestment will be Obama's huge challenge," (from the Seattle Times, why is it that the Washington Post syndicates the Peirce column, but doesn't run it in the paper?) focusing on the controversy on the stimulus proposal over most of the projects being more of the same kind of spending rather than substantive improvements. From the article:

An economic-stimulus plan is one thing. And unless one is mired in a Herbert Hoover-type mindset, it's tough to question the need for strong, immediate fiscal measures to reverse the course of the deepening recession we're now witnessing.

But how about a full-scale "American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan" with the power to both fight recession and start building a truly competitive, world-class 21st-century economy? ...

Yet there's an immediate problem. The stimulus projects congressional committees are considering, as part of an overall package of close to $800 billion that Obama hopes to sign after taking office, seem heavily weighted to very large but relatively unimaginative expenditures.

On an e-list someone wrote this in response:

I’d go further–cut back federal funding for states that fail to fund high quality, energy-saving, non-sprawl projects from the get-go. The same should apply to funds flowing directly to local governments, and to metropolitan planning organizations.

This is a great suggestion. The problem is that there are no checks/balances, accountability mechanisms with regard to these concerns, in how funding is delivered.

That's why I like what the Office of Commonwealth Development process did under Gov. Romney in Massachusetts. It provided incentives (funding) to communities to do the right thing with regard to smart growth issues.

(In 2006, this program was recognized by the EPA for its achievements as best practice in Smart Growth policy and development. Read the case study here: Overall Excellence in Smart Growth. I think the program was dismantled once Deval Patrick was elected. One of the problems with creating quality planning policies is that they are often seen as political by the "other side." For example, most of Gov. Glendenning's high quality initiatives were dumped by his Republican successor in Maryland. Sadly, this happened in Massachusetts. And could happen to the one good thing that Pres. Bush did for historic preservation, the Preserve America program.)

Where the Obama Administration could move things forward would be by repositioning HUD towards a Dept. of Cities, Regions, and Sustainability (I'd rather have this than an "Office of Urban Policy) and similarly with the Dept. of Agriculture being reformed into a Dept. of Agriculture and Rural Sustainability (development too).

This would require that certain pieces in certain agencies be amalgamated into these newly constituted agencies.

But then the US DCRS and the US DARS should produce "Policy Planning Statements" to work towards coordinated land use and transportation planning.

In the UK, Policy Planning Statements are summations of preferred and best practices, and guide local planning. They are much more proscriptive than what could be done by the federal government here, because of the different types of government (in the UK system, all power is reserved by the national government, whereas in the U.S., with federalism, states have much more authority on local issues).

Decades ago, the US Department of Commerce created model land use statutes for use by local governments beginning to implement comprehensive land use planning in the 1920s. It's time to revisit this. I suppose the Metropolitan Planning Organizations created to coordinate transportation "planning" sort of do this, but they don't in actuality. Without the ability to create enforceable regional plans, you can't do regional planning.