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 Back to Solutions: Concentrating Growth and Development
Controlling Sewer & Water Line Extensions
More and more communities (and regions) are realizing that one of the driving forces behind a sprawl pattern of development is the availability of public sewer and water service. Too often, these often costly extensions have been made without considering what consequences they will have on growth, and whether they will generate sprawl.
Town planner Kate Lampton in Developing a Sewer Ordinance: One Town's Experience (read excerpts; full article can be ordered & downloaded online), explores how Shelburne, Vermont, recently developed a sewer allocation ordinance -- designed, in part, to direct growth. From the Fall 2001 issue of the Planning Commissioners Journal
The Sierra Club's report, Sprawl Costs Us All: How Your Taxes Fuel Suburban Sprawl includes a section on the public costs of utility line extensions.
The Twin Cities of Minnesota's Metropolitan Council sets out, in its Water Resources Management Policy Plan a series of policies guiding sewer and water line extensions. Among the provisions:
- Wastewater service will be extended only to support development which is part of the Urban Reserve Area, with limited exceptions, and which is recognized in an approved local comprehensive plan.
-- Central wastewater service and other city services will be extended to development clusters in accord with a staging plan in an approved local comprehensive plan.
-- The timing and density of development which is inconsistent with the [Comprehensive Planning] Blueprint and which would affect the cost of providing sewer service, will be viewed as a departure from or having a substantial impact on the metropolitan wastewater system.
-- Metropolitan Council Environmental Services (MCES) will work with communities in the Permanent Rural Area to ensure that on-site and communal wastewater systems are properly designed and managed so there will be no need for central sewer service.
-- MCES will work with growth center communities to ensure that wastewater facilities are able to accommodate the growth forecasted by the Council.
One technique used to direct growth is to require that adequate public facilities be in place before growth can occur -- and to tie the construction of new facilities to growth plans set out in the local comprehensive plan and capital improvement program:
| The following explanation of how "adequate public facilities ordinances" work is excerpted, with permission, from Irving Schiffman's Alternative Techniques for Managing Growth:
An adequate public facilities ordinance is an growth management approach that ties or conditions development approval to the availability and adequacy of public facilities and services, thus ensuring that new development does not take place unless the infrastructure is available to support it. ...
How it Works:
1. The Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance is linked to the locality's Capital Improvement Program, which establishes a schedule of public facility construction over a five or six year period and details how they should be financed.
2. The ordinance identifies the types and levels of service that are needed to permit new development and establishes a policy about when the infrastructure and public services must be in place relative to the impact of development.
3. The developer must demonstrate that the required levels of public facilities and services are, or will be, available to the proposed project.
4. Most Adequate Public Facilities Ordinances deal with only one or two types of facilities, such as roads or sewers that have caused critical problems in the community, while others apply such provisions to the full range of public facilities. ...
Potential Benefits:
1. Allows a community to maintain control over the timing and sequence of new development.
2. Forces the community to link its comprehensive land use plan with its capital improvement program, a principle of good planning that is often ignored.
3. Can encourage contiguous or even infill development because of its proximity to existing urban infrastructure and services. To the extent that land in facility-provided areas is limited, it will encourage developers to build at higher densities.
Limitations:
May increase the complexity of the development process and the cost of processing development proposals.
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