News Subscribe  to Our Newsletter Sign  up for Email Updates CGF  In the News Press  Inquiries Past  Articles Calendar			Financial  effects of land use planning: Not a laughing matter by Brian Schmidt A classic episode from the television cartoon show, The Simpsons , has the hapless Homer Simpson accidentally traveling  back in time. Petrified of changing the future, he attempts to do nothing,  but when Homer sneezes on a dinosaur he causes an instantaneous chain  reaction of dinosaur extinctions. "This is gonna cost me," Homer  laments. Even Homer Simpson recognized that intentional and  unintentional changes to the environment may have tremendous costs. With  our state and local budget crises, the public has very timely reasons  to consider what effects current land use planning will have on future  budgets for Bay Area counties and cities. Looking back, we all can ask  whether the right decisions were made in past decades and whether we should  make different ones for the future. Environmentalists argue that "smart growth"  gives the best fiscal results to counties and cities. At first blush,  however, one might expect the wealthy, hillside sprawl that the Committee  for Green Foothills typically opposes would provide plenty of tax revenue  and make little demand on services. This fiscal appearance is deceiving,  though, because residential development rarely pays its own way in taxes.  The tax structure in California de-emphasizes property taxes, placing  much more emphasis on sales and other taxes. For good or ill, Proposition  13 has achieved its desired effect of holding down property taxes. While Prop 13 limits property tax revenue, the costs  of providing services to new residential development have increased. While  rich "McMansion" owners may not be going to county health clinics,  they may have plenty of hired help who are often not paid well and do  need more governmental services (as well as their own places to live).  Even the services that McMansion owners do use are not cheap. It costs  money to send a fire truck with several firefighters out for an hour-long  drive into the hills to check out a false alarm. And while there is often  some attempt to recover the costs of extending utilities out to remote  developments, maintenance and other costs can add to financial burdens.  The bottom line shows up in a "study of studies"  by the American Farmland Trust, called " Cost  of Community Services Studies". Working farm land and open land  brought in more governmental revenue than it caused to be spent, while  residential development did the opposite. Another deceptive issue involves open space as a  loss of revenue. While it may seem that open space does not generate revenue,  people thriving from tourism developed by the "open space" in Yosemite National Park   and elsewhere will stoutly defend the economic value of preservation.  The tourist industry that occurs where open space has been preserved can  be a significant revenue booster for local governments. Taxes on hotel  occupancies and expensive restaurant meals often come from relatively  wealthy travelers and cause little hardship for local residents, so the  tourist industry is especially desirable. The Bay Area, with its strong  attraction for tourists, makes open space preservation an attractive financial  option. Preserving open space necessarily channels development  closer to cities where governmental services are easier to provide. By  making better use of land, utilities and transportation, governments can  decrease costs significantly. Santa Clara County, for example, has expressly  taken itself out of the "development business," telling developers  that they should bring their proposals within city limits instead of targeting  unincorporated county lands. The Committee for Green Foothills has long  supported this decision and works to help hold the County to its word.  There is no doubt that the current Santa Clara County budget crisis would  have been still worse without this decision to restrict development outside  of cities, where governmental expenses are highest. Last but hardly the least in importance is the relationship  between environmental benefits and economic benefits. A recent White House  study found that the benefits of clean air regulation far outweigh its  costs. We see this locally: in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties, preservation  of hillside lands has stopped developments whose increased traffic would  have caused air pollution and asthma, thus slowing the drain on government-provided  health systems. Similarly, stopping sprawl's effects on water quality  through poisoning runoff and inadequate septic systems has direct health  benefits and indirect cost-reduction benefits for governments. Most dramatically,  sprawl worsens flooding, and responding to flooding - or paying to prevent  it - can be very expensive for governments.  We lack Homer Simpson's ability to return in time  to erase past mistakes, but we emphatically possess his ability to dramatically  shape the future. The current fiscal crisis will inevitably pass, leaving  us with the question of how to prevent or reduce fiscal problems in the  future. Open space protection is a necessary component of the right fiscal  policy, and a policy that the Committee for Green Foothills will support  as strongly as it can. Published October 2003 in Green  Footnotes. Page last updated November 6, 2003