The Governor’s office kicks off next phase of the Statewide Conversation on Growth, asking citizens to take a survey on preferred growth strategies.  Laura Hanson and her staff, and Envision Utah, have been working hard on this, kudos to them!  Here’s a news story about it, and here’s a link to the survey.

The legislature’s Government Operations Interim Committee meeting this coming Wednesday includes on its agenda a discussion about municipal annexation and incorporation.  I’ve been directing a working group of the land use task force about recodification of the annexation code, and the group has produced a draft recodification and a memo about recommended policy changes on annexation.  Unfortunately, I am out of town on Wednesday and won’t be at the meeting, but the League is on the agenda to present and will hopefully let the committee know what we’ve been up to!  I did a session on this at the APA Utah Spring Conference in Vernal yesterday, so the topic may be gaining some awareness and momentum.

An interesting blog post just came out a few days ago by David Morley, editor of Nation APA’s Zoning Practice, essentially saying the same things about “zoning reform” that I’ve been writing about on this blog.  Titled Should States Shrink Zoning?, Morley writes,

Among policy wonks, “zoning reform” has become a euphemism for state changes to zoning enabling laws that shrink local control in the hopes of expanding housing supply. The basic rationale is that piecemeal reforms to individual local zoning codes simply aren’t enough to make a dent in the housing crisis. But, as planners know, state preemption is often a contentious subject, and in the realm of planning, one that has a complicated history.

So, what are the chances that current calls for zoning preemption, or an outright abolition, will result in a straightforward improvement to land-use regulation (as a policy tool) and a dramatic expansion of housing supply as a downstream outcome? Jacobs contends that neither is likely to happen without first acknowledging that local zoning is not, inherently, the problem.

The real fight is usually over the interests that control zoning (and zoning reform). Jacobs cautions that focusing narrowly on the issue of preempting local control is unlikely to remove the problem of the tool being “captured” by interests that don’t align with those of the planning community. Jacobs suggests the path forward is one that recognizes that planners have an important role to play at the state and local level.

Amen!  States that are going the “top-down” preemption route are generally finding that these efforts don’t produce the results intended because “foot-dragging” and lack of support at the local level makes it nigh-on impossible.  Collaborative state-local efforts seem to fare much better, which is something we have been noted for (at least among policy wonks) in Utah.  Another example of what is being considered a failure just popped up in Colorado, as evinced by this news story headline: The Big Colorado Land Use Bill Has Officially Failed.  The main reason for failure?

The mayors of almost every city in the metro Denver area came out against the bill …  “The governor and proponents are interested … in usurping the rights of property owners to protect the character and meet the land-use needs of their communities,” Colorado Municipal League Executive Director Kevin Bommer told a legislative committee.

“I think they wanted to do something bold and sweeping because we have a problem with affordable housing and I think they wanted to address that. Unfortunately, I think that you need to have all the people at the table if you want the solution to actually work,” (State Sen. Rachel Zenzinger) said.

Montana was more successful, with a major bill written by the Montana League passing, but so did a couple other bills that local officials were less supportive of.  These states are getting all the attention.  And us here in li’l ol’ Utah?  We’re passing stuff, it’s not as dramatic, and it gets no attention nationally, except that Cam Diehl, the Utah League’s Executive Director, tells me he’s getting calls from all around the country asking how it happened here.  Shhhh!  It’s a secret!