Sprawl fight gathers steam

By Anne Wallace Allen
Associated Press Writer
March 9, 1998
Rutland Town, Vt. (AP)

Even the people who study sprawl for a living can have a hard time defining it. But the old Rutland Mall speaks for itself.

"This mall is basically dead," said Dean Pierce, a planner for the Rutland Regional Planning Commission, on a recent stroll past the mall's dark windows and boarded-up doors.

The Rutland Mall, a low one-story cluster of large square storefronts around a parking lot, contains about 160,000 square feet. Only a few of the spaces are still rented. The big Montgomery Ward and Ames department stores have moved out, and much of the inside is dark and closed off.

"I think of this as one of the better indicators of the ramifications of sprawl -- what happens when uses move out of an existing area," Pierce said. "This mall ... is the typical mall developed from anywhere, U.S.A., that was plopped down in Rutland. Aesthetically it's not an asset."

It's also a sight that's becoming more and more common in Vermont: a development that doesn't fit into the state's traditional pattern of small villages and open farmland. Planners and policymakers call it sprawl -- a concept that's hard to define, but easy to point out on the landscape.

So what happened in Rutland Town to make this investment go down the drain? And what's happening in the other sprawl hot beds around Vermont?

A combination of economics, human behavior, population patterns, and public policy, said Pierce, who has high hopes that planners and politicians can do something about sprawl.

Sprawl comes in many forms in Vermont, as it does elsewhere. Its best-known manifestations are the strip developments seen on Route 7 around Burlington and Rutland and the big-box retail development around Colchester and Williston.

But it's sprouting up in other places, too. To some planners, it's single-family housing built on 10-acre lots that is eating up good farmland and forcing towns to put down miles of new roads and utilities.

To others, it's high-speed roadways that discourage foot traffic and promote automobile travel and more strip development.

The planners who work to control it agree it's an aesthetic, an environmental, and a social problem.

"It's inefficient by its very nature," said Bob Wagner, the director of field programs for the Washington, D.C.-based American Farmland Trust. "It tends to use more land and more resources for each of the land uses it supports, whether that's residential, commercial, or industrial."

The Rutland Mall fell victim at least in part to economics, when a developer built the 445,000-square-foot Diamond Run Mall across town. The Diamond Run Mall is about 90 percent occupied.

"I can't say for sure why this mall is empty -- but it's hard not to think about influences like the location of the new mall," Pierce said. "If the market is limited, then something's got to give."

Public policy can solve some of the problems that cause businesses to leave city centers and spread out in the countryside.

"If you are making it more difficult and therefore less attractive for developers to go back into cities and rehabilitate old apartment buildings and commercial and industrial sites, then you're just pushing them, maybe unwittingly, out into the countryside," Wagner said. "You're basically transferring environmental concerns and degradation into the countryside."

Rutland Town doesn't have any zoning, Pierce pointed out. If people knew how much sprawl development was costing them financially in extra services, he said, they might work harder to come up with alternatives.

"The studies of sprawl generally agree that sprawl has more costs," he said. "People have not associated the cost."

Aided in part by its groundbreaking Act 250 development control law, Vermont has been a leader in controlling and limiting suburban development for years. The results are clear in its small, compact villages and open countryside.

But nonetheless, some areas of the state have become cluttered with shopping developments, strip malls, clogged roads, and big-box retail stores.

Since 1995, Wal-Mart has succeeded in putting three stores in Vermont.

Likewise, efforts to control sprawl in Vermont are gathering steam. This year, Gov. Howard Dean emphasized limiting sprawl and promoting the growth of downtowns in his State of the State address to the Legislature. In his proposed 1999 state budget, he put money behind the pledge, with $500,000 for efforts to preserve open land and create affordable housing, and $200,000 for town planning.

In December, the Orton Family Foundation announced that the outgoing chairman of the Vermont Environmental Board, John Ewing, would lead a new, private campaign to stop sprawl in the state. The organization will study the causes and effects of sprawl over the next two years.

And in the Legislature, there are several attempts in various areas to chip away at sprawl or the conditions that promote it.

One is a bill on promoting downtown areas; another is a recently passed transportation spending bill that includes strict design standards for state bridges.

Another is the on-site sewage bill, said Ewing. It's important because it would close a loophole now in Vermont law that encourages developers to build houses on lots larger than 10 acres to avoid regulations on disposing of their waste.

"There is an awful lot of 10.0 acre lots out there," Ewing said. "It's consumptive of valuable farmland."

It's not only hard to define sprawl, but it's hard to persuade people that they don't want to contribute to it. Many people move to the 10-acre lot in the countryside because they want to live on 10 acres. That's not going to change.

"One person's sprawl is another person's open space," Wagner said.

But so far, he said, Vermont's problems are localized.

"If you're from Manhattan or Long Island, you go to Vermont and any traffic you were caught in in Burlington would seem like nothing," Wagner said.