What are the best practice counties? (Is Montgomery County, Maryland one of them?)

My friend-colleague Casey Anderson is the chair of the Planning Board in Montgomery County, Maryland.  He has an article in "The Third Place," the planning department blog, "Montgomery County Is (Literally) Well-Positioned for the Future – But Will We Take Advantage of the Opportunity?," about Montgomery County's place in the metropolitan economic landscape.

I happened to write about this a couple weeks ago, "Economic dynamism: Northern Virginia ascendant, while DC and Suburban Maryland lag," because of some Washington Post articles.

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My response:

I don't know, I am pretty down on governments being able to be visionary*. I suppose it's like what someone said being a secretary of the army or something, "it's like herding cats."

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* I am in the process of writing a piece about DC and the cancellation of the "Georgetown" streetcar program.
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Priming actions to spur transformational change.  I am big on priming actions, and that's the source of my thinking and writing on what I now call "transformational projects action planning" and for MoCo (and PGC) in particular, I think their priming action opportunities are around transportation.

That's why I wrote the huge series on the PL, which hands down is amongst my best writing-thinking ever, including the sub section on how to make Silver Spring "an innovation district."

-- "Revisiting the Purple Line series"

I know the people in Montgomery County's Planning Department are great planners, but they are pretty much inside the box thinkers.

Another priming action could be "corridor management" in the I-270 corridor which I think of as extending into DC (Beach Drive, Connecticut Avenue, Georgia Avenue).

 It sounds crazy but my idea of an RER "under the freeway" MARC line could be equally transformational (one branch could go to Bethesda-Georgetown-Arlington, another over the American Legion Bridge to Tysons.

Speaking of great planners, this is where Montgomery County had the opportunity to lay out a vision different from Governor Hogan and HOT lanes ("Beltway toll lanes pit Prince George's, Montgomery against Governor," Washington Business Journal).

They said what they were against, but didn't provide an alternative vision of what they were for.

Especially in the context of climate change, continuing to focus on automobile-based transportation and land use is the wrong way to go.

What are the most innovative county governments in the US?  (Note: I don't know.)  Speaking of vision, when I worked in Baltimore County -- which is one of the top 50 counties in the US in terms of population -- I said their problem was that they needed a different set of "reference group counties" against which to compare themselves. Their problem was that they pretty much only compared themselves to Baltimore City, and on that metric, they always are going to succeed/look good/be better.

(I keep suggesting that the way for Baltimore City and Baltimore County to transform would be to merge.  Now, with Amazon HQ2, I think the same is the case for Alexandria City and Arlington County--they need to merge to have countervailing capacity vis a vis Amazon and the real estate development and appreciation forces that have been unleashed.)

The White Flint program is national best practice. But like how DC pretty much hasn't updated its streetscape aspirations from the c. 2000 stuff that Dan Tangherlini did, more is needed now.  The White Flint program was best practice 5 years ago, but now that's not enough.  BRT too, it was best practice maybe 5 years ago.  Now it's not enough.

I don't know how much MoCo thinks about this in terms of best functioning peer group counties. Obviously, every county is different, different spatial patterns and opportunities.

A couple years ago I came across a fascinating paper about the Hennepin County Community Works program.

-- "A County and Its Cities: the Impact of Hennepin Community Works," Journal of Urban Affairs; 30:3, 2008).

In the 1980s the County realized they were going to sink economically if Minneapolis continued to decline with a precipitous fall off in property valuations and tax revenues. Their response was to invest in parks and other projects, including in later stages, light rail, to staunch the outflow of population and businesses.  They were doing "transformational projects action planning" long before I was even cognizant about this stuff.

Obviously, MoCo's situation is nothing like that. But still, like what Casey wrote, it's not about how the county is doing today, relative to Maryland, it's about the future, relative to the DMV and to the US.

Hennepin County and their MPO, King County, Indianapolis-Marion County, the Denver area, I really like the Philadelphia-NJ MPO but the area counties aren't leaders. Cook County's programmatic innovation in the face of a complete unwillingness to raise taxes. Oakland County's massive program of advantaging themselves vis a vis Detroit.

Who else?  Maricopa?  Hamilton County, Ohio?  Salt Lake County?  All do some interesting stuff but are they across the board best practice?  Probably not.

What are the best practice counties that we should be paying attention to in terms of benchmarking best practice?