The price of having it all

Planning for the region people want

Growth is good, people told us. But traffic is bad. A resilient, expansive economy is what we want, you said. But also the tourist magnet of historic land and homes.

Those are values colliding with each other. A bigger one's coming — possibly a momentous collision. Everybody talks about the wonderful quality of life — islands, beaches, the soft breezes and easy winters, the global panache of the Spoleto festival, wonderful food, stately old homes, abundant waterways and forests.

People are optimistic: We can have it all — quality of life and an economy that's finally humming.

Meanwhile, amid all this happiness and pride, a compound environmental disaster might be brewing — one capable of undermining the region's reputation and poking a large hole in its economy.

Just consider:

--Interstate 26 is clogged already beyond its design limits across most of the region. Trucks, already nearly half the traffic, are slated to virtually take over the road in coming years, as the planned port access road delivers thousands more heavily laden trucks to the interstate highway each day. Imagine the impact on air quality. Already, people are taking to alternative routes, spreading the congestion. Is the planned widening of I-26 a sufficient remedy?

--The region is exceptionally slow to build a serious transit system that would give people more choices. Why has Charlotte moved ahead on this front and Charleston lagged behind?

--Particulates in the air caused by engine emissions and blowing coal dust already exceed prudent health limits. Even if they're more fiercely monitored and every mitigation measure known is employed, increased volumes of activity mean they'll get worse.

--Kinder Morgan plans to triple current coal shipments. That means more coal stacks dockside, more and longer coal trains snaking through the Neck headed to power plants. Santee Cooper hopes to build a major coal-fired plant just north of the region, even though there's growing nationwide sentiment for a total moratorium on new coal-fired plants, lead generators of greenhouse gases on the planet. Duke Power, pushed by the North Carolina Utilities Commission, has taken a different course, adopting an aggressive energy conservation program and cutting its expansion plans in half.

--Residential and retail developments near the headwaters of streams and rivers have already produced a noxious cocktail of oil and trace metals from tires, combined with fertilizer and pesticide residues. The result: salinity to support the propagation of fish, shrimp and crabs is declining, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Charleston-based Hollings Marine Laboratory. Copper, cadmium, lead, zinc and mercury don't make good food for marine life. Officials fear the day is coming when beaches won't be safe, flooding will increase, and tourism and property values will take a terrible hit.

These dangers aren't to be dismissed lightly. Within a decade, this three-county treasure of a region could find that by placing its bets mostly on the economy and by relying on engineering to restore mobility and then on science to repair the environment, it's lost both — its quality of life and its economy.

Tourists from around the world, retirees, Americans in search of a great place to live, could well be repelled by the region's industrial and environmental downsides. Local residents would see their quality of life seriously diminished. Footloose new-generation corporations like Google would no longer be attracted. Unequipped to sparkle as a center of the creative 21st century economy, Charleston could return to the slump it endured from Reconstruction straight through to the last generation.

The harsh truth is this: Unless the three counties can forge clear agreement on what kind of region they want to be in this century, and then adopt a clear and compelling regional strategy: how they will develop and protect their land, how they'll work together to move people and goods, how they'll protect the priceless Lowcountry environment they have inherited — a backward slide seems almost inevitable.

Produce a real regional plan

Two realities should be obvious by now: First, conducting land-use and transportation policies separately and by stumbling from crisis to crisis and pretending each county exists in its own, separate world, this won't cut it. And second, everybody has to been in on the act, be a part of the solution. Without broader participation — from local and county elected officials and interested citizens (we found plenty of them completely energized by these issues), without the State Ports Authority, state agencies and others sitting at the table for the debates, there can be no consensus. And without a consensus, politics remain paralyzed.

Here's how we think the region could break loose and get serious, thinking and acting like a modern region.

--Make the Berkeley-Charleston-Dorchester Council of Governments into the key platform for building consensus. It's the best mechanism in the region. Its chair currently is Charleston Mayor Joseph Riley, who to us sounded more than up to the challenge. The COG is commissioning a major regional land-use planning project, getting expert outside help. The COG's own planning staff is among the best-prepared in the country; they know what to do if political leaders will embrace the product.

Another asset is the rising talk of what's called "concurrency," the notion that roads, schools, water and sewer should be in place before or concurrent with development — focus of the current Dorchester County growth debate. People understand now what happens when a few thousand homes erupt on the scene with little infrastructure to support them. Traffic tie-ups on once-country roads and suddenly overcrowded schools tell the story pretty well.

At least one adjacent county, Jasper, peering over the county line at what's happened to its neighbors, sees trouble and wants to avoid making the same mistakes. Jasper's agreed to proposals by the towns of Hardeeville and Ridgeland that specify a five-mile radius for growth. Landowners farther out in the county would have to petition to be annexed; assuming they did, they'd have to agree in advance to pay a $6,200 per-unit impact fee for the installation of sewers, water and roads.

The Jasper result has been called a "pay to play" environment in which "cheap" land doesn't seem so cheap anymore. The agreements encourage mixed-used development and saving land for such amenities as parks. One result: "Build and fly" developers are discouraged; quality developers, who care as much about preserving old live oaks and irreplaceable wetlands as building new houses come because now they are appreciated.

--Take on the region's central planning challenge. No strategy across the three counties will work unless there's a new clarity about where growth should go and where it should not go. This seems like an utterly simple proposition. And it is, until the discussion gets specific and begins to affect real property owners.

But that's why it needs to both be a technical analysis (which should be under way soon) and a public process in which citizens play a critical role.

For the public to weigh in, people need information usually hovered over only by professionals and politicians. They need to know what the population capacity would be, for example, in areas like the new Neck, now being reborn. Conversely, how limited should growth be to preserve the character of the sea islands and not overtax their fragile environments? Where are the best prospects for more greenbelts to ensure the sanctity of areas such as the Francis Marion National Forest?

What are the best strategies for compensating landowners for development rights? The region's already a national leader on conservation; the knowledge of what works best is likely in the heads of citizens right here. What would it cost not to build where development should never go?

And since transportation drives development just as much as changes in land use call for transportation changes, the public needs to know what the options are for handling the logistics of the new port — how much can rail handle instead of trucks? What is the best estimate of the effect of adding lanes to I-26? How long will those effects last, under various population growth scenarios? Is $350 million to extend the Mark Clark a prudent investment; what is the dividend from that investment and are there foreseeable adverse consequences?

How much does a reputedly over-regulated housing-construction market drive up costs, straining the prospects for getting some housing at more affordable prices? How different from jurisdiction to jurisdiction? Even if the drainage permits from the Army Corps of Engineers is always necessary, why continue to have other expensive differences from place to place? We talked to a group of developers, who recalled seeing one city undertake a review of its housing-construction regulations? "They filled a whole wall, and were full of all sorts of convoluted statements. But when it was over, the approval process still took six months." So, what might a regionwide regulatory standard and decision calendar look like?

And when large-scale developments are proposed, what is it about today's planning and zoning laws that makes it so hard to create places that function like actual communities? What does it take to make it easy to create more I'Ons, Daniel Islands, Magnolias, Mixsons and the new Central Mount Pleasant project?

As "green" fast becomes the color of the nation's conscience on everything from energy to buildings, citizens need practical information about how construction can be energy- and environment- saving. Trident Home Builders Association director Philip Ford, for example, is enthusiastic about a new "EarthCraft" house-construction standard, fashioned by the Atlanta-based Southface Energy Institute, in which modestly higher construction costs, assuring higher energy efficiency in new homes, are offset by reduced utility bills later on. How about three-county-wide house permit standards to require as much?

Reality Check

An event this autumn could advance the region's collective leadership. Later this fall, the South Carolina chapter of the highly respected nationwide Urban Land Institute will undertake a "Reality Check" for the Charleston region. This is a model already tested in six other U.S. regions, including Tampa, Fla.; Los Angeles; and Baltimore, throwing light on major growth choices and opportunities in each case.

The method's this: A large cross- section of leaders and citizens convenes — among them mayors and county officials, planners, engineers, architects, business leaders, environmentalists, land and housing trust groups, and minority group representatives.

During the daylong session, they're confronted with a mega-map of the region. They receive chips — red for anticipated future residences, yellow for jobs — that they have to mix and match and locate specifically on the map. Natural features, existing or new transportation routes, school locations and more all have to be taken into account. Tough choices become obvious; routes to consensus take form.

Up to now, the Charleston region has made most of its critical development decisions in unconnected silos. The Reality Check might present a golden opportunity to trigger true regional thinking, engaging both the elected leaders and many of the brightest, most concerned professionals and business leaders in the three counties.

One can even imagine the big state-mandated players — the port and transportation departments of South Carolina — invited to observe and learn of this region's needs, ideas, aspirations. And who knows? They might even listen.

And what of the region's own citizens? In addition to active participation, shouldn't the broader population be polled on some of the critical issues in advance of the Reality Check? Wouldn't the results provide leaders with vital information and help to set the Charleston region's path for the critical decades ahead? The stakes are too high not to try.